December 15, 2021 • 53 mins
Today, most people associate asbestos with health risks, expensive removal operations and specific forms of cancer. However, for much of human history this substance was thought to be miraculous -- a perfect, fire-resistant additive to everything from cement to household products and toys. In today's episode, Ben, Matt and Noel dive into the tragic, multigenerational story of a sweeping cover-up -- one with consequences that still affect us in the modern day.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of My Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Nol. They called
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer
Paul Mission controlled decade. Most importantly, you are you, You
are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't
want you to know. Folks, Thank you as always for
tuning in. Today's episode heads Up is going to be
(00:46):
a bit of a bummer. Breathe deep and explore it
with us. This is an important story. If you'd like
to hear something a little less heavy, we totally understand.
Check out our recent crypt It episodes. Particularly like to
recommend the mystery of the Thunderbird. Uh. But today we're
talking about a genuine conspiracy, not a conspiracy theory, and
(01:10):
it's a very old conspiracy. It's multigenerational, it ranges across
the planet. It doesn't really know any borders at this point.
It is a conspiracy that has likely directly affected you
in some way already, and it may well affect you
in the future. None of this can be taken for
medical advice. But we've talked about this off air and
(01:31):
agree it is a story that needs to be told.
Welcome to Asbestos. Here the facts. First off, we've all
heard the phrase, but what what is asbestos exactly? It's
something that I think a lot of people. UM, we
don't know the specifics about it. We're gonna do as
best as we can though, to describe it to you. Sorry,
(01:52):
I still that joke from d News. Um, but it's true.
Asbestos is a I mean, there was a time where
it was considered a wonder. It's cereal. Um. It is
a kind of fibrous silicate material that is naturally occurring.
Interestingly enough, um, and it occurs in six different types,
and it's very very old. We have evidence of it
dating far back in history and we'll get into that.
(02:14):
But for most of human history, asbestos was known for
its high heat resistance. It's also waterproof and largely indestructible. UM.
You can find multiple examples of the stuff in the
ancient world. Uh. There were stories of these quote unquote
napkins that could be cleaned by literally setting them on fire. Um.
(02:34):
And you are tossing them into an open fire. Yeah. Yeah,
it's a it's a silicate mineral specifically, so you'll hear
in advertisements of years gone by, you'll hear being called
a miracle rock or uh something like that, and it's
somewhere between. You know, it's it's natural forms can be
(02:57):
adapted and revised, so it can funct and as a powder,
it can function as like it will look like a
bunch of string. You may associate it with the way
that insulation looks because it's used in insulation. I love
your that you're bringing up the napkin story because there
are multiple examples in the ancient world of like there
was this flex that wealthy people in Persia were known
(03:19):
to do. You know, you'd eat a meal with a
guest and then you would be like, hold my beer,
watch this, and you would take your dirty napkin, you
throw it in the fireplace, and when when the fire
is out, you take it out and you're like, oh,
like it might clean napkin. This is what being rich is, Like,
what are you the king of France so you can
just set your napkins on fire? Um No, it's true.
(03:40):
It's neat too, because you can have it as like
a solid and then you can apply heat to it
and literally stretch it out and it becomes this almost
like I don't know, it makes me think of floam
or something or one of those like what is that
stuff you bleck? You know, where it goes from one
state to another depending on the conditions. Um so something
that you can actually kind of almost do like a
(04:02):
little magic trick with to impress your guests. It's similar
in that way to like a non Newtonian fluid, the
stuff that doesn't obey the usual rules of viscosity. You've
probably had an experiment with that, or maybe your kids
have had an experiment with that in school, folks. It's true.
People knew about the stuff for thousands of years, and
(04:23):
everybody for thousands of years, everybody was basically like the
excited person on an infomercial going, oh my god, I
can't believe it's that easy. You know, now fire is
no longer our enemy. Charlemagne had a tablecloth made of
his bestness. Marco Polo even claims, well historians believe he
(04:44):
ran into an asbestos mine. He called it Salamander, which
is a way cooler name based on you know, the
old idea of salamanders being animals that were immune to fire.
We mentioned the heat resistance, we mentioned the water resistance.
It's a poor conductor of a electricity, which you know
didn't matter at the beginning of human history, but became
progressively more important as technology evolved. But the big question
(05:08):
is what what does it do? Like it would be
rare to go to a store, even even back at
the height of asbestos popularity, and just by straight up
asbestos as by itself, you know, so like um, we
we need to understand what the public liked about it
(05:29):
and how it became so common. And that's the thing
I mean. Asbestos was largely used as an additive to
strengthen things and make them more fireproof. Um. The large
scale asbestos industry started around the mid nineteenth century and
it became hugely popular by the end of the nineteenth century.
It was used in everything. I think I saw a
(05:52):
stat that said there were thousands of products that that
had asbestos in them, everything from concrete and bricks to
cement and hype insulation, drywall and roofing, anything that you
wanted to make stronger and more resilient to the elements
and again, fireproofing that was asbestos was was your guy,
and it made clear sense to do this because people
(06:13):
generally don't like buildings on fire. And there the list.
Actually I cut the list down because it was in
so very many things, things that were often uh invisible
to the average person. You wouldn't walk into a building
and automatically be able to tell something had uh that
(06:34):
you were walking on concrete that had asbestos as a filler,
or that asbestos had been sprayed maybe on the walls.
It was able to, you know, it was able to
provide all the benefits that had as a natural substance.
And people were not wrong when they called it a miracle.
It's not hyperbole, is what I'm saying to say that
(06:56):
this stuff was everywhere. Like Wizard of Oz, for example,
one of you could call asbestos. One of the supporting
actors in Wizard of Oz all that fake snow pure asbestos.
The witches Broom also is best this the Scarecrow's entire costume,
his whole fit. If you guess as bestest fellow conspiracy
realist and ding Ding, you are three for three. Was
(07:18):
that to help fire proof it when they set him
on fire? When the Witch and the way exactly the
witches broom caught on fire, the scarecrow catches on fire.
It was like a very low tech kind of you know.
Back then they also didn't have very much safety precautions
on film sets. So there it is. It's fine to
spray with as best, doesn't mean catch him on fire
and it will be a cool bit. Yeah, And the
Wizard of Oz is its own carries with it its
(07:41):
own bevy of conspiracy back from the what was the
makeup on the Tin Man was apparently had a luminium
minute or something, And there's Atlas Obscura article just about
the asbestos aspects that uses the Wizard of Oz's name check.
But the story goes much deeper than that. And the
Floyd thing is true, super cool. Yeah, it is. Whether
(08:03):
it was intentional or not, it is a thing. It
is a phenomenon to behold. I highly recommend anyone that's
in the Pink Floyd try do in the sinking up
of the Dark Side of the Moon with the Wizard
of Oz. You won't be sorry. And as we're going through,
we're talking about in a movie, so we're talking about
kind of the origins of it. But at the height.
This stuff was in absolutely every building constructed, at least
within the United States and in many other countries if
(08:26):
it was built essentially from the nineteen fifties onwards, some
let's say, until the nineteen seventies, when it was like
fully phased out as a construction or a part of construction.
But we're talking about ubiquitous everything from the roof to
the ground. There was asbestos in your stuff. And it
was even being pitched like two consumers, like to two
(08:48):
individual folks who maybe wanted to do a building project
or you know, do some upgrades on their house. There's
this really fantastic ad uh that we found in a
Vice News documentary. It's clearly like you know, public domain.
If we could play a couple of seconds of that
and it will give you a sense of like how
much a part of the Zeitgeids at the time asbestos was.
(09:08):
Asbestos is a remarkable mineral, actually stone. It is made
up of tiny but extremely strong and flexible fibers. It
was absolutely fire safe and water couldn't harm it. We
suggest you consider this material for your home, designed to
last a lifetime, a trouble free lifetime. I gotta be honest,
(09:33):
I love the way people speak in those ads. That's great. Yeah,
sometimes they're selling terrible things, but there's there's just something
about the pep in there. You know. It's quite a
bit of pep, quite a bit of pep. I just
have to say, living in a house that was built
like right now where I am, this was built in
(09:53):
the nineteen fifties, so we didn't know whether or not
our house was built with asbestos or lead paint or
any of those things. And we I guess we got
some documentation, but it just said we don't know. Isn't
there a lead paid disclosure clause that has to be
in like any lease or you know, homesale. Um, it's
like it you have to disclose asbestos as well, I believe, well, yes,
(10:17):
but there is a place to sign. Yeah, we're unsure,
further testing needed and this uh, and this is legal
that that's a legal situation where now, UM, I don't
know if it's fair, but that's that's the law of
the land, and that happens. Uh. You know what, Actually,
(10:38):
if you depend on where you live, folks, you have
probably run into this. And it's something that's easy for
a lot of people to miss in their lease paperwork
or there. You know, when you're signing a contract for
a house, because you have to sign so many things
on so many pages, just read the fine print carefully.
(10:58):
By the time that like in this era, this post
World War Two era, fifties through the seventies, like Matt
you had just said, it got to a point where
it would be highly unusual for you to walk into
a large building that did not have some form of asbestos.
It would be like finding a vegan restaurant in eastern Europe.
(11:20):
There there, but you have to you have to look
pretty pretty carefully. Um. So far, it sounds like we're
talking about something you would hear on a podcast version
of This Old House? Right, how do I restore my
manister with asbestos? Um? But this is a show about
(11:40):
critical thinking applied to conspiracies. We said there was a
real multigenerational conspiracy of foot here. Why are we talking
about today? It turns out that asbestos has a dark
side to its miraculous nature. It may be great at
preventing fires, but it's also great at something else, killing
human beings. We're gonna pause for word from our sponsor,
(12:02):
and then we're diving into the dark waters of a
miracle substance. Here's where it gets crazy. There's a huge
as best discover up. It's enormous. Think of the biggest
cover up you can imagine. This is bigger. This just
mopped at p VP. You may have already heard about this,
(12:25):
but you probably do not know how deep it goes. Yeah,
it's like the big brother and the kind of progenitor
to the teflon you know, p F a cover up
featuring DuPont that we've covered in previous episodes. I mean,
this is like the o g um toxic cover up material.
Oh yeah, agreed. I mean I was surprised to find.
(12:48):
We know that there are a lot of modern complaints
and lawsuits and laws and controversies about asbestos today, but
the first complaints and concerns, like provable health concerns about
his best this date back to the eighteen hundreds. Like
eight there was a guy named h. Montague Murray who
explicitly noted the deleterious health effects of this substance. Shout
(13:13):
out to our friends on Facebook. I did pay attention.
You are right, and thank you, uh said the uh
you'll see this other you'll see this claim that people
in the days of ancient Rome may have also had
concerns about as bestus and its health effects, but there's
not really a primary source to back that up. That's
just one of those that's the definition of a factoid, right,
(13:35):
Like it sounds like it would be true, it sounds factual,
but it's not. It's really the late eighteen hundreds when
we see the um what I would consider the first
modern let's call them actionable reports of danger. Here, Ben,
thank you for schooling me. I've been using factoid incorrectly
for years and I just thought it was like a
cute little fact nugget. But it turns out that it
is inherently faults right. That's yeah. But that's the thing,
(13:59):
man Um with this language, how ultimately we're all kind
of crowdsourcing, right, we're all voting. So if enough people
use a word one way, if we all act like
Alice Wonderland's Humpty dumpty, then it just means what we want.
That's how you end up with the beautiful things in English,
where you have words like perus, which are their own antonyms. Right,
(14:22):
Perus means both to just sort of flip through something
and then it means also to scrutinize every word and
read carefully. So I think a fact that it can
be both things. And if we can convince our fellow
conspiracy realists to agree, then uh, we may have just
started the biggest, most unnecessary conspiracy of our careers. I
love it this. Weve been working towards this whole time. Guys,
(14:43):
it's all time. So, the first clearly documented death due
to asbestos occurred in nineteen o six, um, but again
based on how far back we know the stuff was
being used widely, Surely there were many many more that
preceded it, But we're talking about the nineteenth century here
was a long, long time ago. Um, what exactly makes
(15:06):
asbestos bad for human beings? And more importantly, why were
people not told of these risks if we had that
level of like history. Yeah, the first question is unfortunately
pretty easy to answer. Asbestos can cause a number of
(15:27):
medical conditions provable and a number of certain cancers. And
it's not as if it's necessarily always just a contributing factor.
In a couple of cases, we'll see that these conditions
are almost exclusively caused by asbestos, you know what I mean? Like,
(15:47):
it's it's like the Riddler or the Joker leaving a
trademark piece of swag at the scene of a crime.
You can cause it's I mean, I'm not trying to
be glib, but that is like if you're a doctor,
you can tell there's some conditions that just means someone
ran into asbestos. I'm sorry I laugh because I don't
(16:07):
know if you guys have seen the new trailer for
the The Batman movie that's coming out, but the Riddler
is a character and the first thing you see in
the trailer is like a spooky like pushing at a
diner to a latte that has a question mark in it,
and like that's like, that's the creepy thing he left
behind was latte art. I couldn't. I thought that was
a really odd choice. I'm interested to see where they
(16:28):
go with the Riddler because they're trying to more of
a um less of a camp be vibe. And I
like Paul Dano a lot, Like, you know, he's a
excellent actor, and this movie apparently is gonna have a
lot more you know, gritty kind of like serial killer vibes.
So I'm definitely on board. But I didn't think it
was a little bit of an odd thing to lead with. Yeah, agreed, agreed,
(16:49):
But but if you imagine, you know your you're a doctor,
and again we're not giving medical advice. If you see
someone that has a condition known as sothelioma, then you know,
asbest as was involved, it was the hand behind the trigger.
I mean, signs of this condition, this insidious and enormously unjust.
(17:11):
Signs of this condition might not appear until thirty or
forty years after exposure, which means that somebody could be
exposed as a kid, or they could have grown up
in a mining town. There were hundreds of those in
the US, and then not until later in life, maybe
thirty five, forty five years old, all of a sudden
they get these kinds of conditions. So we're also talking
(17:32):
cancer of the stomach, colorectum, fair nix, and so on.
With mesothelioma in particular, too, you might not see the
signs of it for thirty or forty years. But then
it's also the kind of thing that takes a very
long time to kill you, and it's very brutal and slow,
and you know, you have to be on oxygen and
you just like you know, short of breath all the time.
I think it actually creates um fluid in the lungs.
(17:55):
So when you when you see people that have it,
they're breathing is just the most painful, labored thing you
could possibly imagine. It is absolutely heartbreaking. Uh. There's a
mining town in um Montana, Libby, Montana that has been
looked at as like a great example of what long
term asbestos exposure does, and there's several documentaries about it.
(18:16):
You can find that where they interview residents and many
of them that they talked to for the documentaries are
doing just that. And it's very hard to watch, but
I think an important to watch. And that's not the
only problem with breathing that asbestos exposure can cause. There's
also this thing where it can scar your lungs. It
can physically scar your lungs by breathing in those fibers
(18:37):
and the parts that you may not even notice. It's
it's like stuff that's just in the air and you
would just be breathing it, especially if you're working near it.
But even if you're living near a place where let's
say explosions occur in a mind that are trying to
get asbestos out it's called a spistosis, and it is
(18:57):
another one of those horrible things where you're just going
to be dealing with it because that's what your your
life is now. You have scarred lungs and it's way
harder for you to breathe, and you can't unscar the
lungs exactly. One of the things that makes us best
to such a you know, resilient building material is the
idea that it's very hard to destroy. That's also true
(19:17):
once it gets into your body, you know. Yeah. Yeah.
And these fibers on an individual level, are microscopic. They
are invisible to the unaided eye, which means that if
you are walking through an area contaminated with this, you
are not going to notice. You are just going to
be breathing as normal until you're not. There's another non
(19:40):
cancerous lung condition and causes called plural disease, which involves
damage to the membrane known as the plura that surrounds
the lung and chest cavities. Uh. And this is what
we're listing here, folks. This is not a list of
just potential problems. Even today, right now, asbestos exposure is
(20:02):
believed to be the number one cause of work related
deaths in the world, and I haven't seen a dangerous
jobs about that on Discovery, but like, approximately nine thousand
people are going to die from an asbestos related disease
this year, and right now an estimated hundred and twenty
(20:24):
five million people remain at risk of regular occupational exposure
to asbestos. These are not these are estimates, but these
are not necessarily estimates that are up for debate. People
have done the homework, you know, the subreddit for this
would be like they did the math or something like that. Uh,
(20:47):
asbestos is still such a dangerous thing because it was
embedded in so much of the world's construction for such
a long time, but also because the nature of the
damage it does means that people will live with it
for a long time without knowing that damage has occurred.
(21:07):
And a lot of people were involved in the industry
as best as mining was huge, you know, we said
there were more. There were like hundreds of mining towns.
There were more than a hundred operating mines in the
US alone, from like the sixties in the early seventies
when it reached its height, it was the industry was
this is weird. The industry was growing as awareness of
(21:30):
the dangers were growing, they were happening at the same time,
which is kind of unusual. Uh well, it makes sense
why there would be a cover up if yeah, oh yeah, yeah.
I mean it's profitable and it was easy to get
right out of the ground, you know, in these mining towns,
and you ended up with situations where the one town
(21:50):
like Libby for example, was built around this industry. And
even if as the people there maybe you're starting to
worry or be concerned, they also don't want to lose
their lively it. I mean, we know how some of
these smaller kind of rural towns, if an industry goes
belly up, so does the town. So it's it's a
weird kind of double edged sword where they're like, oh,
maybe this is really bad for us, but also we
(22:12):
don't really want to lose our one industry, so maybe
we'll keep our mouth shut about this condition that we
might have developed. Yeah, and that goes to the local, state,
local level and state level officials. That also, you know,
if anybody's lived in a one industry town, you know
that every job ultimately relies upon that industry. Even if
(22:35):
you're you know, like you're the you're the h family
that runs the local diner. You've never been in a
coal mine, But if the coal mine closes, then the
diner isn't isn't far off from closing as well. And
that you set us up earlier when you talked about
open pit mining, which was the primary technique for for
(23:00):
mining asbestos in the US and also across the planet. Um,
let's maybe talk a little bit about this. What was
open pit mining? What makes it different from other types
of mining. You've probably seen pictures of a mine like
this before. It almost looks like tiered like roads that
(23:20):
go around almost in an invertiment inverted pyramid style, right, Um,
they kind of go down towards the towards the lowest
level like that. The way to get the asbestos out
in a mining situation like this is to plant explosives
in one section. That would if you imagine a going
all across a very long section and then you'd explode
(23:43):
what exists there. Then you'd gather all of that up,
all of that rock and you know, dirt and everything
that's in there, and you you basically get the asbestos
and the usable substances and minerals out from that stuff.
You explode it out from the major rock structure. Yeah,
and as you can tell when those explosions occur, this
(24:05):
also fractures or you know, splinters the asbestos, and you
have tiny microscopic pieces of contaminant that are in the
air and unavoidable without protection. This isn't something where you
can just hold your breath, you know what I mean.
Not only that, I mean it's similar to the way
radioactive materials are carried, you know, fallout zones, et cetera.
(24:27):
I mean, it's not exactly the same, but this material,
being so durable, it just kind of goes to the
surrounding areas on the wind and then ends up in
the water supply. And I'll manner of other ways that
people can absorb it the clothing of the miners, say,
for example, even like you know, children or family members,
even if they're not directly breathing the stuff in from
(24:47):
the explosion, they might be subjected to it when their
family member comes home and the stuff is all over
their clothes. Yeah. It's important to note that when it
becomes aerosolized like that, it really does get everywhere, including
the sand and stones and rocks on beaches, and you know,
around waterfronts, on the water itself, on the plant life,
(25:09):
on the animals, on I mean, it's just it gets
everywhere because it's traveling through the air like this unseen
misst it's just permeating everything. Yeah, forget communism, there's another
invisible enemy in America. At this time, right, Uh, people
were also beginning to understand that asbestos may not be
(25:31):
quite the miracle manufacturers would telling them it was. By
the nineteen twenties, medical journals in this country had already
published articles linking asbestos to asbestosis, which, again, if a
disease or condition is named after a substances thing, yeah,
it's kind of hard to say, oh no, we didn't know,
(25:53):
you know, there are only too many letters in the
alphabet whatever. We'll get to it later too. But another
place that is named after the thing as a mining
town in Russia called asbest because they're really proud of
their asbestos mining industry. That is, unfortunately, I believe, still
going on today. Yeah, with a huge monument actually carved
(26:16):
u asbestos and everything. Yeah, as bestos is is uh
this fatal lung condition, like you guys were saying, where
it's scars the human breathing mechanism. Doctors again back in
the twenties. In the nineteen thirties, they were saying, you know,
probably the best way to prevent this condition, the scarring
of the lungs, is to you know, limit people's exposure
(26:39):
to asbestos. That seems pretty conclusive. Nobody was disagreeing. This
wasn't a matter of serious debate amid those in the
medical community. But it would still take decades and decades
before this stuff was regulated in the US, and decades
before workers were ever told that they're jobs were giving
(27:00):
them cancer. So this leads us to another question. Why
why the gap in information? Why was it still used
so widely? And why is it even being used today?
These are questions will tackle after word from our sponsors.
(27:25):
We've returned. So how about that second question. We've answered,
why and how asbestos is bad for humans? Why wasn't
the public aware of these risks? There's no way around this, folks.
Scientists had clearly linked asbestus to cancer right around the
nineteen thirties. Right around the same time, doctors made real
(27:49):
progress in understanding meslothy leoma, and some of the progress
they made was figuring out, oh hey, this is pretty
much only caused by his bestness. Like the vast major
already of these cases are from people who have been
exposed to this one substance. And at the same time
this evidence began to grow, the influence a very powerful
(28:09):
asbestos companies grew as well. Like make no mistake, you
don't maybe hear about them too often in the news,
but mining companies are a big deal. They have a
lot of political clout in various countries, and they have
a lot of financial power because people are hooked on
what they provide from the earth or what they take
(28:31):
from the earth, um literally pulling money out of the ground.
Hashtag Black Monday murders. Over over the course of four decades. Uh,
if you look at the period from the forties, ninet
forties to the nineteen eighties, this group, I don't want
to call him a cabal, but this group of manufacturers
(28:54):
in the asbestos industry, they grew their business into a
multibillion dollar enterprise. They employed hundreds of thousands of people,
and they knew, they knew good and damn well that
their success depended upon keeping the problems with asbestos a
secret for as long as possible. Not a conspiracy theory,
(29:17):
actual conspiracy. They conspired, they did it. You could see
a solid timeline for this on asbestos dot com. Um,
there is one problem though they're not problem. But there's
a thing you should know about asbestos dot com. It
is a for profit entity. It is there to help
you file legal claims for asbestos related conditions. Still looking
(29:41):
into their research and what they've gathered, even though of
course you know they would be a biased source. Uh.
Their their research is sound. They know what they're talking about. Um,
they go there. If you look at their timeline, which
is available for free online, it starts around eighty eight
with the founding of John's Manville man an asbestos manufacturer
(30:03):
that will go on to become the top dog in
the world in this in this thing, and therefore they
were on the front lines of the cover up. Yeah,
it really is devastating to actually look at the entire
time timeline that they've got there at asbestos dot Com.
I would say it's very strange to me that within
(30:23):
their timeline they jumped from nineteen forty nine to nineteen
sixty two and there's nothing in the nineteen fifties. And
one of the main reasons it's because the nineteen fifties
was boom time for putting asbestos in things. It was like,
let's go, boys, get that asbestos in there as quick
as we can. I guess nobody was worried about, you know,
(30:46):
anything else. Well, let's not forget too Ben. You mentioned
that the town of Asbest in Russia has a sculpture
made out of asbestos. So this really was a super
versatile material. Like if you look at some of these
documentaries we're talking about, you'll see people showing you little
artifacts and little drinkets made of asbestos and handling them
like it's no big deal. Yeah, exactly, kind of the
(31:07):
same way people would drink out a leaded glass with
no worries, you know what I mean. Uh, we we
see that this this timeline, as you as you guys mentioned,
is it's uneven. It has some gaps, but it does
generally map out in detail actions by various leaders of
industry to suppress the information, to keep it from the public.
(31:31):
And they were at this for a very long time.
And back in a group of as best as manufacturers
contacted a guy named Dr Anthony Lanza, who was a
medical director at Metropolitan Life Insurance, which we'll get to
in a second, asked them to investigate disease among as
(31:51):
best as factory workers. And he came back and he said, hey,
you know, these guys all show incredibly high rates of
asbestos related to diseases. And they were like cool, thanks
for playing doc. And then they buried his results. They
suppressed it. They probably had him signed something agreeing that
he wouldn't talk about this. Metropolitan Life Insurance would go
(32:12):
on to actively participate in the cover up, to help
swindle employees out of medical care, to deny their claims
and so on. Uh. They also manipulated studies to downplay
the seriousness of some conditions. Over across the pond in
the UK, manufacturer called Turner and Newell convinced cough Cough,
(32:35):
bribed cough Cough British officials to like limit regulations and
dial back any safety inspections. It wasn't until like nineteen
sixty four so that the tide started turning. And that
is sadly because a lot of people saw someone they
knew die or be afflicted with some mysterious lung condition
(32:59):
and work on the street. Everybody in a given region
new if you live near this mine, if you live
in this town, you have a much higher likelihood of
not just getting a cancer or a kind of cancer,
but a short list of very specific ones. And so
this is when his best those manufacturers did what Corporate
America calls a pivot. They got out in public and
(33:21):
they said, we were as surprised as you we we
had we had no idea. And some people believe them,
and maybe they were convincing. But later internal memos from
these companies talking with themselves, like multiple companies conspiring, and
court paperwork depositions, they all proved this was a lie.
(33:41):
There's one Bendix Corporation employee from nineteen six who wrote,
you know, if you've enjoyed a good life while working
with asbestos products, why not die from it. I'm sorry,
I didn't mean to laugh. This terrible. It's like it's
it's brilliant copyrighting is what it is, um. But it's
(34:04):
also inherently nihilistic and missing the point kind of you know. Um.
One of the experts in one of the documentaries I watched,
I think it was the Vice one, said, how at
this scale, if a company knows what they're putting out
in the world, is going to kill you, then they
are committing mass murder. They may not know who it's
gonna kill or when it's going to kill them, but
(34:26):
if they're you know, maintaining that level of negligence, uh,
you know, in favor of profit over you know, human rights,
than they are in fact mass murderers. Well, let's talk
about the Bendix concept really quickly, the one that you
just mentioned. There have been um with regards to all
of us. Imagine that you are working for a company
(34:47):
and you've been working there for a long time. You've
been making pretty good money, you've been supporting let's say
your family, right, and you're continuing to make pretty good money.
You find out that by working there, by exposure to
whatever chemical you're dealing of, you are likely going to
die at some point from a disease it's going to
cause inside of you, you know, And if you're informed
with that information, you can make the decision to continue
(35:10):
working there, to continue to support your family until you
do eventually die. Um. And that's that is one thing
for me, that's one decision. Right, What if you find
out that you're not the only one that's going to
die in your family because you're doing that that maybe
everybody in your family is going to be exposed to
the same stuff because they're using the products. It's not
(35:30):
just the manufacturing process, it's also the use of the product.
Like that to me is a whole different it's just
a different Yes. But wasn't it not until like the
two thousands even that like the World Health Organization actually
made a stand on this or that it was you know,
(35:50):
really kind of considered verboting because I have distinct memory
of going to this high school I've mentioned this before,
um where it was an old building and you got
a new school, brand new shining school, and everyone you know,
moved to the new school. But the old school was
known to be an asbestos hazard and there was all
of this like efforts to do this asbestos removal. So
(36:11):
this wouldn't have been in the two thousand. This is
probably in like the mid nineties. So when did the
public consciousness really shift in like cancel asbestos in the
United States been UH in the United States. The first
lawsuits date back to nineteen seventy one, which is still
was a century after those concerns for first raise UH,
(36:33):
and court evidence has gone on to show that multiple
companies contributed knowingly to this. Uh. Some had, like we said,
buried research. Others had kept information from their employees, like
to the point where you'd have to see the company doctor,
and the company doctor wouldn't show you your X rays
(36:55):
and you would just be They would just have you
continue working as normal until you died or were physically unable,
you know, to breathe well enough to work the mind. Okay,
So it was nineteen seventy eight when the United States
officially banned asbestos. But because it had been used for
so long, that means that all of these homes were
(37:17):
just chock full of asbestos, like my high school. And
so then asbestos removal became a whole industry, and I
think off my or off air. Then you were mentioning
how it's like one of the least regulated, like you know, oh, anybody,
any schmuck can like be an asbestos removal technician. And
I mentioned that in the Sopranos there was a subplot
(37:37):
where they were running a racket for asbestos removal, because
you know, the idea would be, yeah, remove it from
the place, but then you gotta do something with it
so it's not further contaminating you know, other people's water
supplies or whatever. It needs to be dealt with in
some sort of you know, particular way, But in the
show they just dumped it into into like the East River. Um.
Isn't it interesting though? How like you know, science kind
(37:59):
of creates a thing that is then used and then
science has to create a solution. Um. And it's also
wrapped up in industry and just money making and so
corners get cut and we're probably still dealing with the
fallout from asbestos today. Absolutely. Yeah, if we if we
look back at this timeline, we know that once John's
(38:22):
Manville became the number one manufacturer of this substance. Uh.
We we can actually do someday I usually don't like
to do, which is to put a face on a
nefarious corporate activity. But we'll give you a single person
to think about. His name is Lewis H. Brown. Um.
(38:43):
The scientific term for him would be a real piece
of sue. In nine four, there was this deposition where
these different these different attorneys and officials were describing a
eating that had occurred between Louis H. Brown. Uh, an
(39:04):
attorney for John's Manville called Van Diver Brown no relation
I believe, and officials from another firm making as best
as called un Arco. And this guy, Charles Romer was
talking this deposition and he recalls uh interchange Lewis Brown
had about his employees health, and he says, quote, I'll
(39:27):
never forget. I turned to Mr Brown. One of the
Browns made this crack that Unarcho managers were a bunch
of fools for notifying employees who had as bestoses. And
I said, Mr Brown, do you mean to tell me
that you would let them work until they dropped dead?
He said, yeah, we save a lot of money that way.
Who just straight upset? You know in a deposition? No, no,
(39:52):
them is saying this in a deposition. Brown's not there now.
I don't think he had quite that level of Hutzpah. Okay,
I don't. I'm not even gonna take it back because
I was confused, because the level of this guy had
almost would would be the kind of thing where he'd
be like, yeah, I did it. Of course, you know
what else are I gonna do? We gotta make money? Um,
(40:15):
what am I going to be? Poor? Poor? I swear
if I have to go from being super rich just rich,
I'm gonna kill myself. He's like, your honor, I dismissed
this case, and the judges like, that's not how courts work.
You don't get that luxury. So this is really just
kind of like you know, been to your point, kind
of like a little bit of a snapshot of how
(40:37):
callous some of the people at the top were. Uh
they knew people were dying, they absolutely didn't care. When
the public outcry led to all of these lawsuits, the
government finally did take action and impose regulations. And like
I said, in nineteen seventy, the stuff was outright banned. Um.
And now when we think of asbestos, what do we
think of We think of the bad stuff we think
(40:58):
of it's the stuff this I Gacy stuff that was
in everything and now is like a boondoggle on our
you know, public health. Um, I'm you know, asbestos removal
continues to this day. Oh yeah, it is still because
there's so many buildings. I think, you know, it's we
can't really understand how ubiquitous this stuff was. It's like
if all of a sudden, a toilet became a toxic thing.
(41:21):
Just the concept of the toilet. I was in New
York recently on vacation. I was like, for some reason,
because I do dumb things like this, I was like,
I wonder how many toilets there are in New York City.
It's a lot, It's gonna be a lot. And with asbestos,
it's not even only in one product, It's in all
of these building materials. So the idea of asbestos removal
(41:41):
is a generational concept, you know. I mean, they're gonna
keep doing it. Wouldn't be funny if John's Man'sville was
the number one worldwide asbestos removal corporation in that's a
Now that's a pivot. Ye, Now that's a serious. Yeah.
Let's just like as of we we we like, we
infected everyone, we exposed everyone to asbestos, and now we
(42:04):
see the air of our ways. And also it happened
to aligne with a real good money making scheme of
removing the asbestos that we put into the world. I mean, well,
good advertising is always about creating a need instead of
identifying it. Um and we do want to point out,
you know, like just for example, when I said at
the top, the people you you were probably personally infected
(42:25):
by this in some way, just for an example from
our own lives, the building in which our office is based,
pont City Market had to get a deep clean to
remove lead based paint and asbestos. And I do want
to say that people who are working in the asbestos
(42:46):
removal industry right now are doing a good thing. And
it's not easy, and it is dangerous, and there's not
it's not really a an operation with an end in
sight because there's so much there in a very away.
The current generations are are paying for the mistakes of
generations past, and other companies definitely helped with this. There
(43:09):
are still lawsuits continuing. If we look at his best
as today right now, like in this year, his bestness
will kill twelve thousand and fifteen thousand people in the
US alone. People in John's Man'sville, by the way, pulled
a sackler. They didn't go to jail. You don't go
to jail. And and and just to answer a question
(43:31):
that I asked a while ago, like when you do
dispose of asbestos, it's not like it's disappearing. The whole
point of this stuff was like mike plastics and microplastics
or whatever, it doesn't really decay, it doesn't biodegrade, So
they really just have to like seal it in containers
sort of like nuclear waste, and then put it in
an asbestos disposal site um which essentially, I guess at
(43:54):
that point becomes a super fund site or it's like
a toxic hazardous waste disposal thing like yuck a mountain
or something, you know, mm hmmm. So make no mistake.
This is a genuine, multi generational conspiracy of the most
common and disappointing sort. There's nothing occult going on here.
There's no weird spiritual thing. It's just people who had
(44:15):
money and wanted more money and didn't care about who
died as a result. This is the quintessential like conspiracy.
Like that, there's the outcomes razor of conspiracies. We don't
need there to be some spooky ulterior motive, you know,
it just makes sense. Oh there's a thing that people
want to buy that we can sell for a long time.
Oh it kills them a little bit. It's fine, they
(44:38):
won't figure that out for a while. Let's just keep
draining them of their cash for as long as possible.
And then when we you know, when the public outcry
becomes like large enough, will pivot and then be like oops, sorry,
and then We're fine, We're We're as surprised as you are.
And this, by the way, this is not ancient history.
As we have mentioned before. While there are no active
(45:01):
Asbestis minds here in the US where we record this show,
there are plenty of his best dis minds around the
world now, especially as we foreshadowed in Russia. No, no,
you and Matt and I watched that Vice documentary who
mentioned several times, Um, you can also see some pretty
harrowing studies about what's going on there. But asbestos manufacturing,
(45:25):
open pit mining of asbestos is alive and well with
our with our neighbors in Russia. Well, I mean I
mentioned that, like they are so proud of it. Like again,
there's a term I learned in that Vice documentary. It's
called a mono town, which we have these in the
United States as well. Like I mean, when the housing
market collapsed, a lot of places in the Midwest and
(45:46):
even here in the South that exclusively existed to do
say carpet manufacturing or like certain things that were specifically
for you know, housing or like construction, they just absolutely
they're they're unemployment rates were you know near um and
in Russia it is the same, but it's not even regulated.
(46:06):
I mean, none of this stuff is regulated because it's
all the behest of putin. They really don't care about
human rights or like you know, um, public health exactly
in the same way. I mean, maybe there's like a
calculus they do to make sure that like their whole
population doesn't die out. It reminds me a lot of
what happened with Chernobyl, where I mean there was this
absolute public health catastrophe that took place, but they didn't
(46:28):
announce it for a long time, a very long time.
The amount of time that led to a huge amount
of people getting exposed to radioactive fallout. And if you've
seen the Chernobyl you know, mini series on HBO or
read much about it, you understand that it becomes this
almost like kind of mentality where it's like, we don't
(46:48):
make mistakes, so if something went wrong, it it didn't
really go wrong, you know what I mean, right right,
like it would be uh you know. There there's a
really good look at this in when we see Stalin
era stories where um, oh gosh. I recently watched the
film that was kind of a critical bomb, but it
(47:11):
had Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman in it, and it's
about attempting to find a serial killer in the USSR.
And the whole problem is that Stalin has decreed murder
as a capitalist crime, so they can't they're not allowed
to investigate homicides because because they don't happen to this
(47:33):
exactly exactly, and this is very, very dangerous. Yeah, and
we we know that people have been, uh, people have
been trying to get as best as out to get
the message out, and industries have been also in their defense.
They have been working to limit his best disuse and
you know, as best as removal. As you said, as
(47:55):
an industry, it's all its own. But I found this
really interesting quote from a guy named Jacque McCullough, and
he said the following. The industry survival has been largely
due to its success and keeping alive the fiction that
asbestos can be used safely. Arguably, it's most potent weapons
have been the suppression of evidence about the hazards of
asbestos and even the corruption of science aimed to promote
(48:17):
doubt about the mineral's toxicity. This interview is not from
the nineteen sixties, Matt Noll. This interview is from two
thousand and six. The problem is real, The problem is huge.
It is still here. And at this point, you know,
we said this episode was going to be a bummer.
Here's why. First, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people
(48:39):
have died, more will die this year and the year
after that. But secondly, there's not really a clear, easy solution.
There's not a way to undo the consequences of this conspiracy. Um.
You know, no, I would even say at this point
we passed the torch to our fellow conspiracy realists. We
want to hear what you think. I would not be
(49:00):
surprised if we have friends in the audience today who
themselves work in some branch of the abestis removal industry. Right,
what do you think? Yeah, I don't know anybody personally,
but um, it absolutely is a thing that continues to
be one of those dirty jobs they talk about. But
this is probably not one that they really have done
an episode on, um because it is so heavy. Uh,
(49:23):
And it is an example of like, oh no one
else will do this job, Well I'll do it. It
probably pays a decent hourly wage, but um, at what costs?
At least here? I mean when when in that documentary
on Vice when they're in the town of Asbest. Um
they talk to people that work at the minds and
they don't wear any protective gear. They borderline don't even
acknowledge the dangers of the stuff. Um. And then there's
(49:46):
a few scientists that they interviewed, you know, from Russia
who are like the most telling one was there's a
scientist um who is actually contracted by the World Health
Organization to do research on asbestos um acts in the
town of asbest And the vice journalists point blank just said,
so there's people in this town that live near an
(50:06):
open pit mine, and open asbestos pit mine is asbestos
dangerous And this like super cool, calculated like company man
Russian scientists says, well, life is dangerous. I mean that's
about as dismissive as you can get. Yeah, it's definitely
an answer to a different question. Russia is by far
the world's largest producer of asbestos today. Uh In like
(50:31):
any way you look at it, the second place would
be Kazakhstan. Uh they make Russia makes seven hundred ninety
thousand metric tons. Kazakhstan makes two hundred and ten thousand
metric tons. At least that's what they did last year,
and the numbers don't seem set to uh to go
down anytime soon because industry still use this stuff. So
(50:52):
at this point, folks, we've laid out the case. We
want to hear from you. What is to be done,
what should be done? What it's your take? And then
are there stories of other substances like asbestos that have
been the subject of multigenerational conspiracies, corruption and cover ups.
Let us know. We try to be easy to find online.
(51:12):
Oh the Internet, We're on it. You can find us
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find us on YouTube, most importantly under the handle conspiracy Stuff.
Check out the YouTube channel we do pulls of every
one of these episodes that we do. UM usually a
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want to listen to the whole episode, check that out,
but usually it'll make you want to listen to the
whole episode. UM. You can also find us on Instagram,
(51:35):
where we are the handle at Conspiracy Stuff Show. You
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You can you can get a look backstage at the
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(51:57):
uh good pal Matt has become a conscientious objector to
social media. Fully support him. I fully support him in this. Yeah,
so out of respect for him, uh, we'll we'll leave
it to him to uh maybe share his social media
at a later date. For now. If you don't particularly
(52:17):
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(52:38):
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(53:10):
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(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Nol. They called
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer
Paul Mission controlled decade. Most importantly, you are you, You
are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't
want you to know. Folks, Thank you as always for
tuning in. Today's episode heads Up is going to be
(00:46):
a bit of a bummer. Breathe deep and explore it
with us. This is an important story. If you'd like
to hear something a little less heavy, we totally understand.
Check out our recent crypt It episodes. Particularly like to
recommend the mystery of the Thunderbird. Uh. But today we're
talking about a genuine conspiracy, not a conspiracy theory, and
(01:10):
it's a very old conspiracy. It's multigenerational, it ranges across
the planet. It doesn't really know any borders at this point.
It is a conspiracy that has likely directly affected you
in some way already, and it may well affect you
in the future. None of this can be taken for
medical advice. But we've talked about this off air and
(01:31):
agree it is a story that needs to be told.
Welcome to Asbestos. Here the facts. First off, we've all
heard the phrase, but what what is asbestos exactly? It's
something that I think a lot of people. UM, we
don't know the specifics about it. We're gonna do as
best as we can though, to describe it to you. Sorry,
(01:52):
I still that joke from d News. Um, but it's true.
Asbestos is a I mean, there was a time where
it was considered a wonder. It's cereal. Um. It is
a kind of fibrous silicate material that is naturally occurring.
Interestingly enough, um, and it occurs in six different types,
and it's very very old. We have evidence of it
dating far back in history and we'll get into that.
(02:14):
But for most of human history, asbestos was known for
its high heat resistance. It's also waterproof and largely indestructible. UM.
You can find multiple examples of the stuff in the
ancient world. Uh. There were stories of these quote unquote
napkins that could be cleaned by literally setting them on fire. Um.
(02:34):
And you are tossing them into an open fire. Yeah. Yeah,
it's a it's a silicate mineral specifically, so you'll hear
in advertisements of years gone by, you'll hear being called
a miracle rock or uh something like that, and it's
somewhere between. You know, it's it's natural forms can be
(02:57):
adapted and revised, so it can funct and as a powder,
it can function as like it will look like a
bunch of string. You may associate it with the way
that insulation looks because it's used in insulation. I love
your that you're bringing up the napkin story because there
are multiple examples in the ancient world of like there
was this flex that wealthy people in Persia were known
(03:19):
to do. You know, you'd eat a meal with a
guest and then you would be like, hold my beer,
watch this, and you would take your dirty napkin, you
throw it in the fireplace, and when when the fire
is out, you take it out and you're like, oh,
like it might clean napkin. This is what being rich is, Like,
what are you the king of France so you can
just set your napkins on fire? Um No, it's true.
(03:40):
It's neat too, because you can have it as like
a solid and then you can apply heat to it
and literally stretch it out and it becomes this almost
like I don't know, it makes me think of floam
or something or one of those like what is that
stuff you bleck? You know, where it goes from one
state to another depending on the conditions. Um so something
that you can actually kind of almost do like a
(04:02):
little magic trick with to impress your guests. It's similar
in that way to like a non Newtonian fluid, the
stuff that doesn't obey the usual rules of viscosity. You've
probably had an experiment with that, or maybe your kids
have had an experiment with that in school, folks. It's true.
People knew about the stuff for thousands of years, and
(04:23):
everybody for thousands of years, everybody was basically like the
excited person on an infomercial going, oh my god, I
can't believe it's that easy. You know, now fire is
no longer our enemy. Charlemagne had a tablecloth made of
his bestness. Marco Polo even claims, well historians believe he
(04:44):
ran into an asbestos mine. He called it Salamander, which
is a way cooler name based on you know, the
old idea of salamanders being animals that were immune to fire.
We mentioned the heat resistance, we mentioned the water resistance.
It's a poor conductor of a electricity, which you know
didn't matter at the beginning of human history, but became
progressively more important as technology evolved. But the big question
(05:08):
is what what does it do? Like it would be
rare to go to a store, even even back at
the height of asbestos popularity, and just by straight up
asbestos as by itself, you know, so like um, we
we need to understand what the public liked about it
(05:29):
and how it became so common. And that's the thing
I mean. Asbestos was largely used as an additive to
strengthen things and make them more fireproof. Um. The large
scale asbestos industry started around the mid nineteenth century and
it became hugely popular by the end of the nineteenth century.
It was used in everything. I think I saw a
(05:52):
stat that said there were thousands of products that that
had asbestos in them, everything from concrete and bricks to
cement and hype insulation, drywall and roofing, anything that you
wanted to make stronger and more resilient to the elements
and again, fireproofing that was asbestos was was your guy,
and it made clear sense to do this because people
(06:13):
generally don't like buildings on fire. And there the list.
Actually I cut the list down because it was in
so very many things, things that were often uh invisible
to the average person. You wouldn't walk into a building
and automatically be able to tell something had uh that
(06:34):
you were walking on concrete that had asbestos as a filler,
or that asbestos had been sprayed maybe on the walls.
It was able to, you know, it was able to
provide all the benefits that had as a natural substance.
And people were not wrong when they called it a miracle.
It's not hyperbole, is what I'm saying to say that
(06:56):
this stuff was everywhere. Like Wizard of Oz, for example,
one of you could call asbestos. One of the supporting
actors in Wizard of Oz all that fake snow pure asbestos.
The witches Broom also is best this the Scarecrow's entire costume,
his whole fit. If you guess as bestest fellow conspiracy
realist and ding Ding, you are three for three. Was
(07:18):
that to help fire proof it when they set him
on fire? When the Witch and the way exactly the
witches broom caught on fire, the scarecrow catches on fire.
It was like a very low tech kind of you know.
Back then they also didn't have very much safety precautions
on film sets. So there it is. It's fine to
spray with as best, doesn't mean catch him on fire
and it will be a cool bit. Yeah, And the
Wizard of Oz is its own carries with it its
(07:41):
own bevy of conspiracy back from the what was the
makeup on the Tin Man was apparently had a luminium
minute or something, And there's Atlas Obscura article just about
the asbestos aspects that uses the Wizard of Oz's name check.
But the story goes much deeper than that. And the
Floyd thing is true, super cool. Yeah, it is. Whether
(08:03):
it was intentional or not, it is a thing. It
is a phenomenon to behold. I highly recommend anyone that's
in the Pink Floyd try do in the sinking up
of the Dark Side of the Moon with the Wizard
of Oz. You won't be sorry. And as we're going through,
we're talking about in a movie, so we're talking about
kind of the origins of it. But at the height.
This stuff was in absolutely every building constructed, at least
within the United States and in many other countries if
(08:26):
it was built essentially from the nineteen fifties onwards, some
let's say, until the nineteen seventies, when it was like
fully phased out as a construction or a part of construction.
But we're talking about ubiquitous everything from the roof to
the ground. There was asbestos in your stuff. And it
was even being pitched like two consumers, like to two
(08:48):
individual folks who maybe wanted to do a building project
or you know, do some upgrades on their house. There's
this really fantastic ad uh that we found in a
Vice News documentary. It's clearly like you know, public domain.
If we could play a couple of seconds of that
and it will give you a sense of like how
much a part of the Zeitgeids at the time asbestos was.
(09:08):
Asbestos is a remarkable mineral, actually stone. It is made
up of tiny but extremely strong and flexible fibers. It
was absolutely fire safe and water couldn't harm it. We
suggest you consider this material for your home, designed to
last a lifetime, a trouble free lifetime. I gotta be honest,
(09:33):
I love the way people speak in those ads. That's great. Yeah,
sometimes they're selling terrible things, but there's there's just something
about the pep in there. You know. It's quite a
bit of pep, quite a bit of pep. I just
have to say, living in a house that was built
like right now where I am, this was built in
(09:53):
the nineteen fifties, so we didn't know whether or not
our house was built with asbestos or lead paint or
any of those things. And we I guess we got
some documentation, but it just said we don't know. Isn't
there a lead paid disclosure clause that has to be
in like any lease or you know, homesale. Um, it's
like it you have to disclose asbestos as well, I believe, well, yes,
(10:17):
but there is a place to sign. Yeah, we're unsure,
further testing needed and this uh, and this is legal
that that's a legal situation where now, UM, I don't
know if it's fair, but that's that's the law of
the land, and that happens. Uh. You know what, Actually,
(10:38):
if you depend on where you live, folks, you have
probably run into this. And it's something that's easy for
a lot of people to miss in their lease paperwork
or there. You know, when you're signing a contract for
a house, because you have to sign so many things
on so many pages, just read the fine print carefully.
(10:58):
By the time that like in this era, this post
World War Two era, fifties through the seventies, like Matt
you had just said, it got to a point where
it would be highly unusual for you to walk into
a large building that did not have some form of asbestos.
It would be like finding a vegan restaurant in eastern Europe.
(11:20):
There there, but you have to you have to look
pretty pretty carefully. Um. So far, it sounds like we're
talking about something you would hear on a podcast version
of This Old House? Right, how do I restore my
manister with asbestos? Um? But this is a show about
(11:40):
critical thinking applied to conspiracies. We said there was a
real multigenerational conspiracy of foot here. Why are we talking
about today? It turns out that asbestos has a dark
side to its miraculous nature. It may be great at
preventing fires, but it's also great at something else, killing
human beings. We're gonna pause for word from our sponsor,
(12:02):
and then we're diving into the dark waters of a
miracle substance. Here's where it gets crazy. There's a huge
as best discover up. It's enormous. Think of the biggest
cover up you can imagine. This is bigger. This just
mopped at p VP. You may have already heard about this,
(12:25):
but you probably do not know how deep it goes. Yeah,
it's like the big brother and the kind of progenitor
to the teflon you know, p F a cover up
featuring DuPont that we've covered in previous episodes. I mean,
this is like the o g um toxic cover up material.
Oh yeah, agreed. I mean I was surprised to find.
(12:48):
We know that there are a lot of modern complaints
and lawsuits and laws and controversies about asbestos today, but
the first complaints and concerns, like provable health concerns about
his best this date back to the eighteen hundreds. Like
eight there was a guy named h. Montague Murray who
explicitly noted the deleterious health effects of this substance. Shout
(13:13):
out to our friends on Facebook. I did pay attention.
You are right, and thank you, uh said the uh
you'll see this other you'll see this claim that people
in the days of ancient Rome may have also had
concerns about as bestus and its health effects, but there's
not really a primary source to back that up. That's
just one of those that's the definition of a factoid, right,
(13:35):
Like it sounds like it would be true, it sounds factual,
but it's not. It's really the late eighteen hundreds when
we see the um what I would consider the first
modern let's call them actionable reports of danger. Here, Ben,
thank you for schooling me. I've been using factoid incorrectly
for years and I just thought it was like a
cute little fact nugget. But it turns out that it
is inherently faults right. That's yeah. But that's the thing,
(13:59):
man Um with this language, how ultimately we're all kind
of crowdsourcing, right, we're all voting. So if enough people
use a word one way, if we all act like
Alice Wonderland's Humpty dumpty, then it just means what we want.
That's how you end up with the beautiful things in English,
where you have words like perus, which are their own antonyms. Right,
(14:22):
Perus means both to just sort of flip through something
and then it means also to scrutinize every word and
read carefully. So I think a fact that it can
be both things. And if we can convince our fellow
conspiracy realists to agree, then uh, we may have just
started the biggest, most unnecessary conspiracy of our careers. I
love it this. Weve been working towards this whole time. Guys,
(14:43):
it's all time. So, the first clearly documented death due
to asbestos occurred in nineteen o six, um, but again
based on how far back we know the stuff was
being used widely, Surely there were many many more that
preceded it, But we're talking about the nineteenth century here
was a long, long time ago. Um, what exactly makes
(15:06):
asbestos bad for human beings? And more importantly, why were
people not told of these risks if we had that
level of like history. Yeah, the first question is unfortunately
pretty easy to answer. Asbestos can cause a number of
(15:27):
medical conditions provable and a number of certain cancers. And
it's not as if it's necessarily always just a contributing factor.
In a couple of cases, we'll see that these conditions
are almost exclusively caused by asbestos, you know what I mean? Like,
(15:47):
it's it's like the Riddler or the Joker leaving a
trademark piece of swag at the scene of a crime.
You can cause it's I mean, I'm not trying to
be glib, but that is like if you're a doctor,
you can tell there's some conditions that just means someone
ran into asbestos. I'm sorry I laugh because I don't
(16:07):
know if you guys have seen the new trailer for
the The Batman movie that's coming out, but the Riddler
is a character and the first thing you see in
the trailer is like a spooky like pushing at a
diner to a latte that has a question mark in it,
and like that's like, that's the creepy thing he left
behind was latte art. I couldn't. I thought that was
a really odd choice. I'm interested to see where they
(16:28):
go with the Riddler because they're trying to more of
a um less of a camp be vibe. And I
like Paul Dano a lot, Like, you know, he's a
excellent actor, and this movie apparently is gonna have a
lot more you know, gritty kind of like serial killer vibes.
So I'm definitely on board. But I didn't think it
was a little bit of an odd thing to lead with. Yeah, agreed, agreed,
(16:49):
But but if you imagine, you know your you're a doctor,
and again we're not giving medical advice. If you see
someone that has a condition known as sothelioma, then you know,
asbest as was involved, it was the hand behind the trigger.
I mean, signs of this condition, this insidious and enormously unjust.
(17:11):
Signs of this condition might not appear until thirty or
forty years after exposure, which means that somebody could be
exposed as a kid, or they could have grown up
in a mining town. There were hundreds of those in
the US, and then not until later in life, maybe
thirty five, forty five years old, all of a sudden
they get these kinds of conditions. So we're also talking
(17:32):
cancer of the stomach, colorectum, fair nix, and so on.
With mesothelioma in particular, too, you might not see the
signs of it for thirty or forty years. But then
it's also the kind of thing that takes a very
long time to kill you, and it's very brutal and slow,
and you know, you have to be on oxygen and
you just like you know, short of breath all the time.
I think it actually creates um fluid in the lungs.
(17:55):
So when you when you see people that have it,
they're breathing is just the most painful, labored thing you
could possibly imagine. It is absolutely heartbreaking. Uh. There's a
mining town in um Montana, Libby, Montana that has been
looked at as like a great example of what long
term asbestos exposure does, and there's several documentaries about it.
(18:16):
You can find that where they interview residents and many
of them that they talked to for the documentaries are
doing just that. And it's very hard to watch, but
I think an important to watch. And that's not the
only problem with breathing that asbestos exposure can cause. There's
also this thing where it can scar your lungs. It
can physically scar your lungs by breathing in those fibers
(18:37):
and the parts that you may not even notice. It's
it's like stuff that's just in the air and you
would just be breathing it, especially if you're working near it.
But even if you're living near a place where let's
say explosions occur in a mind that are trying to
get asbestos out it's called a spistosis, and it is
(18:57):
another one of those horrible things where you're just going
to be dealing with it because that's what your your
life is now. You have scarred lungs and it's way
harder for you to breathe, and you can't unscar the
lungs exactly. One of the things that makes us best
to such a you know, resilient building material is the
idea that it's very hard to destroy. That's also true
(19:17):
once it gets into your body, you know. Yeah. Yeah.
And these fibers on an individual level, are microscopic. They
are invisible to the unaided eye, which means that if
you are walking through an area contaminated with this, you
are not going to notice. You are just going to
be breathing as normal until you're not. There's another non
(19:40):
cancerous lung condition and causes called plural disease, which involves
damage to the membrane known as the plura that surrounds
the lung and chest cavities. Uh. And this is what
we're listing here, folks. This is not a list of
just potential problems. Even today, right now, asbestos exposure is
(20:02):
believed to be the number one cause of work related
deaths in the world, and I haven't seen a dangerous
jobs about that on Discovery, but like, approximately nine thousand
people are going to die from an asbestos related disease
this year, and right now an estimated hundred and twenty
(20:24):
five million people remain at risk of regular occupational exposure
to asbestos. These are not these are estimates, but these
are not necessarily estimates that are up for debate. People
have done the homework, you know, the subreddit for this
would be like they did the math or something like that. Uh,
(20:47):
asbestos is still such a dangerous thing because it was
embedded in so much of the world's construction for such
a long time, but also because the nature of the
damage it does means that people will live with it
for a long time without knowing that damage has occurred.
(21:07):
And a lot of people were involved in the industry
as best as mining was huge, you know, we said
there were more. There were like hundreds of mining towns.
There were more than a hundred operating mines in the
US alone, from like the sixties in the early seventies
when it reached its height, it was the industry was
this is weird. The industry was growing as awareness of
(21:30):
the dangers were growing, they were happening at the same time,
which is kind of unusual. Uh well, it makes sense
why there would be a cover up if yeah, oh yeah, yeah.
I mean it's profitable and it was easy to get
right out of the ground, you know, in these mining towns,
and you ended up with situations where the one town
(21:50):
like Libby for example, was built around this industry. And
even if as the people there maybe you're starting to
worry or be concerned, they also don't want to lose
their lively it. I mean, we know how some of
these smaller kind of rural towns, if an industry goes
belly up, so does the town. So it's it's a
weird kind of double edged sword where they're like, oh,
maybe this is really bad for us, but also we
(22:12):
don't really want to lose our one industry, so maybe
we'll keep our mouth shut about this condition that we
might have developed. Yeah, and that goes to the local, state,
local level and state level officials. That also, you know,
if anybody's lived in a one industry town, you know
that every job ultimately relies upon that industry. Even if
(22:35):
you're you know, like you're the you're the h family
that runs the local diner. You've never been in a
coal mine, But if the coal mine closes, then the
diner isn't isn't far off from closing as well. And
that you set us up earlier when you talked about
open pit mining, which was the primary technique for for
(23:00):
mining asbestos in the US and also across the planet. Um,
let's maybe talk a little bit about this. What was
open pit mining? What makes it different from other types
of mining. You've probably seen pictures of a mine like
this before. It almost looks like tiered like roads that
(23:20):
go around almost in an invertiment inverted pyramid style, right, Um,
they kind of go down towards the towards the lowest
level like that. The way to get the asbestos out
in a mining situation like this is to plant explosives
in one section. That would if you imagine a going
all across a very long section and then you'd explode
(23:43):
what exists there. Then you'd gather all of that up,
all of that rock and you know, dirt and everything
that's in there, and you you basically get the asbestos
and the usable substances and minerals out from that stuff.
You explode it out from the major rock structure. Yeah,
and as you can tell when those explosions occur, this
(24:05):
also fractures or you know, splinters the asbestos, and you
have tiny microscopic pieces of contaminant that are in the
air and unavoidable without protection. This isn't something where you
can just hold your breath, you know what I mean.
Not only that, I mean it's similar to the way
radioactive materials are carried, you know, fallout zones, et cetera.
(24:27):
I mean, it's not exactly the same, but this material,
being so durable, it just kind of goes to the
surrounding areas on the wind and then ends up in
the water supply. And I'll manner of other ways that
people can absorb it the clothing of the miners, say,
for example, even like you know, children or family members,
even if they're not directly breathing the stuff in from
(24:47):
the explosion, they might be subjected to it when their
family member comes home and the stuff is all over
their clothes. Yeah. It's important to note that when it
becomes aerosolized like that, it really does get everywhere, including
the sand and stones and rocks on beaches, and you know,
around waterfronts, on the water itself, on the plant life,
(25:09):
on the animals, on I mean, it's just it gets
everywhere because it's traveling through the air like this unseen
misst it's just permeating everything. Yeah, forget communism, there's another
invisible enemy in America. At this time, right, Uh, people
were also beginning to understand that asbestos may not be
(25:31):
quite the miracle manufacturers would telling them it was. By
the nineteen twenties, medical journals in this country had already
published articles linking asbestos to asbestosis, which, again, if a
disease or condition is named after a substances thing, yeah,
it's kind of hard to say, oh no, we didn't know,
(25:53):
you know, there are only too many letters in the
alphabet whatever. We'll get to it later too. But another
place that is named after the thing as a mining
town in Russia called asbest because they're really proud of
their asbestos mining industry. That is, unfortunately, I believe, still
going on today. Yeah, with a huge monument actually carved
(26:16):
u asbestos and everything. Yeah, as bestos is is uh
this fatal lung condition, like you guys were saying, where
it's scars the human breathing mechanism. Doctors again back in
the twenties. In the nineteen thirties, they were saying, you know,
probably the best way to prevent this condition, the scarring
of the lungs, is to you know, limit people's exposure
(26:39):
to asbestos. That seems pretty conclusive. Nobody was disagreeing. This
wasn't a matter of serious debate amid those in the
medical community. But it would still take decades and decades
before this stuff was regulated in the US, and decades
before workers were ever told that they're jobs were giving
(27:00):
them cancer. So this leads us to another question. Why
why the gap in information? Why was it still used
so widely? And why is it even being used today?
These are questions will tackle after word from our sponsors.
(27:25):
We've returned. So how about that second question. We've answered,
why and how asbestos is bad for humans? Why wasn't
the public aware of these risks? There's no way around this, folks.
Scientists had clearly linked asbestus to cancer right around the
nineteen thirties. Right around the same time, doctors made real
(27:49):
progress in understanding meslothy leoma, and some of the progress
they made was figuring out, oh hey, this is pretty
much only caused by his bestness. Like the vast major
already of these cases are from people who have been
exposed to this one substance. And at the same time
this evidence began to grow, the influence a very powerful
(28:09):
asbestos companies grew as well. Like make no mistake, you
don't maybe hear about them too often in the news,
but mining companies are a big deal. They have a
lot of political clout in various countries, and they have
a lot of financial power because people are hooked on
what they provide from the earth or what they take
(28:31):
from the earth, um literally pulling money out of the ground.
Hashtag Black Monday murders. Over over the course of four decades. Uh,
if you look at the period from the forties, ninet
forties to the nineteen eighties, this group, I don't want
to call him a cabal, but this group of manufacturers
(28:54):
in the asbestos industry, they grew their business into a
multibillion dollar enterprise. They employed hundreds of thousands of people,
and they knew, they knew good and damn well that
their success depended upon keeping the problems with asbestos a
secret for as long as possible. Not a conspiracy theory,
(29:17):
actual conspiracy. They conspired, they did it. You could see
a solid timeline for this on asbestos dot com. Um,
there is one problem though they're not problem. But there's
a thing you should know about asbestos dot com. It
is a for profit entity. It is there to help
you file legal claims for asbestos related conditions. Still looking
(29:41):
into their research and what they've gathered, even though of
course you know they would be a biased source. Uh.
Their their research is sound. They know what they're talking about. Um,
they go there. If you look at their timeline, which
is available for free online, it starts around eighty eight
with the founding of John's Manville man an asbestos manufacturer
(30:03):
that will go on to become the top dog in
the world in this in this thing, and therefore they
were on the front lines of the cover up. Yeah,
it really is devastating to actually look at the entire
time timeline that they've got there at asbestos dot Com.
I would say it's very strange to me that within
(30:23):
their timeline they jumped from nineteen forty nine to nineteen
sixty two and there's nothing in the nineteen fifties. And
one of the main reasons it's because the nineteen fifties
was boom time for putting asbestos in things. It was like,
let's go, boys, get that asbestos in there as quick
as we can. I guess nobody was worried about, you know,
(30:46):
anything else. Well, let's not forget too Ben. You mentioned
that the town of Asbest in Russia has a sculpture
made out of asbestos. So this really was a super
versatile material. Like if you look at some of these
documentaries we're talking about, you'll see people showing you little
artifacts and little drinkets made of asbestos and handling them
like it's no big deal. Yeah, exactly, kind of the
(31:07):
same way people would drink out a leaded glass with
no worries, you know what I mean. Uh, we we
see that this this timeline, as you as you guys mentioned,
is it's uneven. It has some gaps, but it does
generally map out in detail actions by various leaders of
industry to suppress the information, to keep it from the public.
(31:31):
And they were at this for a very long time.
And back in a group of as best as manufacturers
contacted a guy named Dr Anthony Lanza, who was a
medical director at Metropolitan Life Insurance, which we'll get to
in a second, asked them to investigate disease among as
(31:51):
best as factory workers. And he came back and he said, hey,
you know, these guys all show incredibly high rates of
asbestos related to diseases. And they were like cool, thanks
for playing doc. And then they buried his results. They
suppressed it. They probably had him signed something agreeing that
he wouldn't talk about this. Metropolitan Life Insurance would go
(32:12):
on to actively participate in the cover up, to help
swindle employees out of medical care, to deny their claims
and so on. Uh. They also manipulated studies to downplay
the seriousness of some conditions. Over across the pond in
the UK, manufacturer called Turner and Newell convinced cough Cough,
(32:35):
bribed cough Cough British officials to like limit regulations and
dial back any safety inspections. It wasn't until like nineteen
sixty four so that the tide started turning. And that
is sadly because a lot of people saw someone they
knew die or be afflicted with some mysterious lung condition
(32:59):
and work on the street. Everybody in a given region
new if you live near this mine, if you live
in this town, you have a much higher likelihood of
not just getting a cancer or a kind of cancer,
but a short list of very specific ones. And so
this is when his best those manufacturers did what Corporate
America calls a pivot. They got out in public and
(33:21):
they said, we were as surprised as you we we
had we had no idea. And some people believe them,
and maybe they were convincing. But later internal memos from
these companies talking with themselves, like multiple companies conspiring, and
court paperwork depositions, they all proved this was a lie.
(33:41):
There's one Bendix Corporation employee from nineteen six who wrote,
you know, if you've enjoyed a good life while working
with asbestos products, why not die from it. I'm sorry,
I didn't mean to laugh. This terrible. It's like it's
it's brilliant copyrighting is what it is, um. But it's
(34:04):
also inherently nihilistic and missing the point kind of you know. Um.
One of the experts in one of the documentaries I watched,
I think it was the Vice one, said, how at
this scale, if a company knows what they're putting out
in the world, is going to kill you, then they
are committing mass murder. They may not know who it's
gonna kill or when it's going to kill them, but
(34:26):
if they're you know, maintaining that level of negligence, uh,
you know, in favor of profit over you know, human rights,
than they are in fact mass murderers. Well, let's talk
about the Bendix concept really quickly, the one that you
just mentioned. There have been um with regards to all
of us. Imagine that you are working for a company
(34:47):
and you've been working there for a long time. You've
been making pretty good money, you've been supporting let's say
your family, right, and you're continuing to make pretty good money.
You find out that by working there, by exposure to
whatever chemical you're dealing of, you are likely going to
die at some point from a disease it's going to
cause inside of you, you know, And if you're informed
with that information, you can make the decision to continue
(35:10):
working there, to continue to support your family until you
do eventually die. Um. And that's that is one thing
for me, that's one decision. Right, What if you find
out that you're not the only one that's going to
die in your family because you're doing that that maybe
everybody in your family is going to be exposed to
the same stuff because they're using the products. It's not
(35:30):
just the manufacturing process, it's also the use of the product.
Like that to me is a whole different it's just
a different Yes. But wasn't it not until like the
two thousands even that like the World Health Organization actually
made a stand on this or that it was you know,
(35:50):
really kind of considered verboting because I have distinct memory
of going to this high school I've mentioned this before,
um where it was an old building and you got
a new school, brand new shining school, and everyone you know,
moved to the new school. But the old school was
known to be an asbestos hazard and there was all
of this like efforts to do this asbestos removal. So
(36:11):
this wouldn't have been in the two thousand. This is
probably in like the mid nineties. So when did the
public consciousness really shift in like cancel asbestos in the
United States been UH in the United States. The first
lawsuits date back to nineteen seventy one, which is still
was a century after those concerns for first raise UH,
(36:33):
and court evidence has gone on to show that multiple
companies contributed knowingly to this. Uh. Some had, like we said,
buried research. Others had kept information from their employees, like
to the point where you'd have to see the company doctor,
and the company doctor wouldn't show you your X rays
(36:55):
and you would just be They would just have you
continue working as normal until you died or were physically unable,
you know, to breathe well enough to work the mind. Okay,
So it was nineteen seventy eight when the United States
officially banned asbestos. But because it had been used for
so long, that means that all of these homes were
(37:17):
just chock full of asbestos, like my high school. And
so then asbestos removal became a whole industry, and I
think off my or off air. Then you were mentioning
how it's like one of the least regulated, like you know, oh, anybody,
any schmuck can like be an asbestos removal technician. And
I mentioned that in the Sopranos there was a subplot
(37:37):
where they were running a racket for asbestos removal, because
you know, the idea would be, yeah, remove it from
the place, but then you gotta do something with it
so it's not further contaminating you know, other people's water
supplies or whatever. It needs to be dealt with in
some sort of you know, particular way, But in the
show they just dumped it into into like the East River. Um.
Isn't it interesting though? How like you know, science kind
(37:59):
of creates a thing that is then used and then
science has to create a solution. Um. And it's also
wrapped up in industry and just money making and so
corners get cut and we're probably still dealing with the
fallout from asbestos today. Absolutely. Yeah, if we if we
look back at this timeline, we know that once John's
(38:22):
Manville became the number one manufacturer of this substance. Uh.
We we can actually do someday I usually don't like
to do, which is to put a face on a
nefarious corporate activity. But we'll give you a single person
to think about. His name is Lewis H. Brown. Um.
(38:43):
The scientific term for him would be a real piece
of sue. In nine four, there was this deposition where
these different these different attorneys and officials were describing a
eating that had occurred between Louis H. Brown. Uh, an
(39:04):
attorney for John's Manville called Van Diver Brown no relation
I believe, and officials from another firm making as best
as called un Arco. And this guy, Charles Romer was
talking this deposition and he recalls uh interchange Lewis Brown
had about his employees health, and he says, quote, I'll
(39:27):
never forget. I turned to Mr Brown. One of the
Browns made this crack that Unarcho managers were a bunch
of fools for notifying employees who had as bestoses. And
I said, Mr Brown, do you mean to tell me
that you would let them work until they dropped dead?
He said, yeah, we save a lot of money that way.
Who just straight upset? You know in a deposition? No, no,
(39:52):
them is saying this in a deposition. Brown's not there now.
I don't think he had quite that level of Hutzpah. Okay,
I don't. I'm not even gonna take it back because
I was confused, because the level of this guy had
almost would would be the kind of thing where he'd
be like, yeah, I did it. Of course, you know
what else are I gonna do? We gotta make money? Um,
(40:15):
what am I going to be? Poor? Poor? I swear
if I have to go from being super rich just rich,
I'm gonna kill myself. He's like, your honor, I dismissed
this case, and the judges like, that's not how courts work.
You don't get that luxury. So this is really just
kind of like you know, been to your point, kind
of like a little bit of a snapshot of how
(40:37):
callous some of the people at the top were. Uh
they knew people were dying, they absolutely didn't care. When
the public outcry led to all of these lawsuits, the
government finally did take action and impose regulations. And like
I said, in nineteen seventy, the stuff was outright banned. Um.
And now when we think of asbestos, what do we
think of We think of the bad stuff we think
(40:58):
of it's the stuff this I Gacy stuff that was
in everything and now is like a boondoggle on our
you know, public health. Um, I'm you know, asbestos removal
continues to this day. Oh yeah, it is still because
there's so many buildings. I think, you know, it's we
can't really understand how ubiquitous this stuff was. It's like
if all of a sudden, a toilet became a toxic thing.
(41:21):
Just the concept of the toilet. I was in New
York recently on vacation. I was like, for some reason,
because I do dumb things like this, I was like,
I wonder how many toilets there are in New York City.
It's a lot, It's gonna be a lot. And with asbestos,
it's not even only in one product, It's in all
of these building materials. So the idea of asbestos removal
(41:41):
is a generational concept, you know. I mean, they're gonna
keep doing it. Wouldn't be funny if John's Man'sville was
the number one worldwide asbestos removal corporation in that's a
Now that's a pivot. Ye, Now that's a serious. Yeah.
Let's just like as of we we we like, we
infected everyone, we exposed everyone to asbestos, and now we
(42:04):
see the air of our ways. And also it happened
to aligne with a real good money making scheme of
removing the asbestos that we put into the world. I mean, well,
good advertising is always about creating a need instead of
identifying it. Um and we do want to point out,
you know, like just for example, when I said at
the top, the people you you were probably personally infected
(42:25):
by this in some way, just for an example from
our own lives, the building in which our office is based,
pont City Market had to get a deep clean to
remove lead based paint and asbestos. And I do want
to say that people who are working in the asbestos
(42:46):
removal industry right now are doing a good thing. And
it's not easy, and it is dangerous, and there's not
it's not really a an operation with an end in
sight because there's so much there in a very away.
The current generations are are paying for the mistakes of
generations past, and other companies definitely helped with this. There
(43:09):
are still lawsuits continuing. If we look at his best
as today right now, like in this year, his bestness
will kill twelve thousand and fifteen thousand people in the
US alone. People in John's Man'sville, by the way, pulled
a sackler. They didn't go to jail. You don't go
to jail. And and and just to answer a question
(43:31):
that I asked a while ago, like when you do
dispose of asbestos, it's not like it's disappearing. The whole
point of this stuff was like mike plastics and microplastics
or whatever, it doesn't really decay, it doesn't biodegrade, So
they really just have to like seal it in containers
sort of like nuclear waste, and then put it in
an asbestos disposal site um which essentially, I guess at
(43:54):
that point becomes a super fund site or it's like
a toxic hazardous waste disposal thing like yuck a mountain
or something, you know, mm hmmm. So make no mistake.
This is a genuine, multi generational conspiracy of the most
common and disappointing sort. There's nothing occult going on here.
There's no weird spiritual thing. It's just people who had
(44:15):
money and wanted more money and didn't care about who
died as a result. This is the quintessential like conspiracy.
Like that, there's the outcomes razor of conspiracies. We don't
need there to be some spooky ulterior motive, you know,
it just makes sense. Oh there's a thing that people
want to buy that we can sell for a long time.
Oh it kills them a little bit. It's fine, they
(44:38):
won't figure that out for a while. Let's just keep
draining them of their cash for as long as possible.
And then when we you know, when the public outcry
becomes like large enough, will pivot and then be like oops, sorry,
and then We're fine, We're We're as surprised as you are.
And this, by the way, this is not ancient history.
As we have mentioned before. While there are no active
(45:01):
Asbestis minds here in the US where we record this show,
there are plenty of his best dis minds around the
world now, especially as we foreshadowed in Russia. No, no,
you and Matt and I watched that Vice documentary who
mentioned several times, Um, you can also see some pretty
harrowing studies about what's going on there. But asbestos manufacturing,
(45:25):
open pit mining of asbestos is alive and well with
our with our neighbors in Russia. Well, I mean I
mentioned that, like they are so proud of it. Like again,
there's a term I learned in that Vice documentary. It's
called a mono town, which we have these in the
United States as well. Like I mean, when the housing
market collapsed, a lot of places in the Midwest and
(45:46):
even here in the South that exclusively existed to do
say carpet manufacturing or like certain things that were specifically
for you know, housing or like construction, they just absolutely
they're they're unemployment rates were you know near um and
in Russia it is the same, but it's not even regulated.
(46:06):
I mean, none of this stuff is regulated because it's
all the behest of putin. They really don't care about
human rights or like you know, um, public health exactly
in the same way. I mean, maybe there's like a
calculus they do to make sure that like their whole
population doesn't die out. It reminds me a lot of
what happened with Chernobyl, where I mean there was this
absolute public health catastrophe that took place, but they didn't
(46:28):
announce it for a long time, a very long time.
The amount of time that led to a huge amount
of people getting exposed to radioactive fallout. And if you've
seen the Chernobyl you know, mini series on HBO or
read much about it, you understand that it becomes this
almost like kind of mentality where it's like, we don't
(46:48):
make mistakes, so if something went wrong, it it didn't
really go wrong, you know what I mean, right right,
like it would be uh you know. There there's a
really good look at this in when we see Stalin
era stories where um, oh gosh. I recently watched the
film that was kind of a critical bomb, but it
(47:11):
had Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman in it, and it's
about attempting to find a serial killer in the USSR.
And the whole problem is that Stalin has decreed murder
as a capitalist crime, so they can't they're not allowed
to investigate homicides because because they don't happen to this
(47:33):
exactly exactly, and this is very, very dangerous. Yeah, and
we we know that people have been, uh, people have
been trying to get as best as out to get
the message out, and industries have been also in their defense.
They have been working to limit his best disuse and
you know, as best as removal. As you said, as
(47:55):
an industry, it's all its own. But I found this
really interesting quote from a guy named Jacque McCullough, and
he said the following. The industry survival has been largely
due to its success and keeping alive the fiction that
asbestos can be used safely. Arguably, it's most potent weapons
have been the suppression of evidence about the hazards of
asbestos and even the corruption of science aimed to promote
(48:17):
doubt about the mineral's toxicity. This interview is not from
the nineteen sixties, Matt Noll. This interview is from two
thousand and six. The problem is real, The problem is huge.
It is still here. And at this point, you know,
we said this episode was going to be a bummer.
Here's why. First, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people
(48:39):
have died, more will die this year and the year
after that. But secondly, there's not really a clear, easy solution.
There's not a way to undo the consequences of this conspiracy. Um.
You know, no, I would even say at this point
we passed the torch to our fellow conspiracy realists. We
want to hear what you think. I would not be
(49:00):
surprised if we have friends in the audience today who
themselves work in some branch of the abestis removal industry. Right,
what do you think? Yeah, I don't know anybody personally,
but um, it absolutely is a thing that continues to
be one of those dirty jobs they talk about. But
this is probably not one that they really have done
an episode on, um because it is so heavy. Uh,
(49:23):
And it is an example of like, oh no one
else will do this job, Well I'll do it. It
probably pays a decent hourly wage, but um, at what costs?
At least here? I mean when when in that documentary
on Vice when they're in the town of Asbest. Um
they talk to people that work at the minds and
they don't wear any protective gear. They borderline don't even
acknowledge the dangers of the stuff. Um. And then there's
(49:46):
a few scientists that they interviewed, you know, from Russia
who are like the most telling one was there's a
scientist um who is actually contracted by the World Health
Organization to do research on asbestos um acts in the
town of asbest And the vice journalists point blank just said,
so there's people in this town that live near an
(50:06):
open pit mine, and open asbestos pit mine is asbestos
dangerous And this like super cool, calculated like company man
Russian scientists says, well, life is dangerous. I mean that's
about as dismissive as you can get. Yeah, it's definitely
an answer to a different question. Russia is by far
the world's largest producer of asbestos today. Uh In like
(50:31):
any way you look at it, the second place would
be Kazakhstan. Uh they make Russia makes seven hundred ninety
thousand metric tons. Kazakhstan makes two hundred and ten thousand
metric tons. At least that's what they did last year,
and the numbers don't seem set to uh to go
down anytime soon because industry still use this stuff. So
(50:52):
at this point, folks, we've laid out the case. We
want to hear from you. What is to be done,
what should be done? What it's your take? And then
are there stories of other substances like asbestos that have
been the subject of multigenerational conspiracies, corruption and cover ups.
Let us know. We try to be easy to find online.
(51:12):
Oh the Internet, We're on it. You can find us
on Twitter, you can find us on Facebook. You can
find us on YouTube, most importantly under the handle conspiracy Stuff.
Check out the YouTube channel we do pulls of every
one of these episodes that we do. UM usually a
cool little ten minute clip and then if you don't
want to listen to the whole episode, check that out,
but usually it'll make you want to listen to the
whole episode. UM. You can also find us on Instagram,
(51:35):
where we are the handle at Conspiracy Stuff Show. You
can also find us as individual people. I am at
how now Noel Brown on Instagram how about you, Bud.
You can you can get a look backstage at the
research and doing various misadventures at Ben Bullen hsw on Twitter,
at Ben Bulling on Instagram. Bo w l I n
(51:57):
uh good pal Matt has become a conscientious objector to
social media. Fully support him. I fully support him in this. Yeah,
so out of respect for him, uh, we'll we'll leave
it to him to uh maybe share his social media
at a later date. For now. If you don't particularly
(52:17):
sip the social meats, never fear, there's another way you
can contact us. We have a phone number. It is
one eight three three s T d W y t K.
Leave a message of the sound of Ben's dulcet tone
three minutes of the time. You will have to tell
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yourself a cool nickname, or tell us not to call
you anything, and to anonymize you completely. Will absolutely do that,
(52:38):
and you might hear yourself on one of our weekly
Listener Male episodes. And if that is not your bag,
you can reach out to us the good old fashioned
way with an email. We are conspiracy at iHeart radio
dot com m h H. Stuff they Don't Want You
(53:10):
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