Gruesome Radioactive Deformities Freak Joe Rogan Out

Now, you cover how many different subjects in this book? I cover eight different campaigns of denial. And it seems like for you, in particular, climate change is the most disturbing or... That's, well, that's the one that threatens the future of human civilization and the one that I got started on, yeah. But yeah, I cover seven other industries, including slavery, radium. Radium. Radium. Yeah. And then you have industrial strength denial take on radium. Radium. Radium is a crazy, crazy story. Radium is this insanely radioactive element that was discovered around, just to write around 1900 by the Curies in France. And it was a mystery. I mean, it was way more radioactive than uranium and people didn't even know what radioactivity really meant, but there was this aura of wizardry around it. And when they discovered it, they didn't... Well, the first thing they discovered, and they discovered this the hard way, was that it burned your flesh. It didn't burn it right away, but you'd carry some around and then in a few days you would have a burn there because it was sending off all of this energy. So they thought, okay, we have this flesh killing, cell killing element. What can we do with it? And they thought, well, let's try to kill cancer tumors, which was actually a very good idea. And they experimented with that. And that was the medical use for radium. We're going to put this radium next to a tumor and then we'll take it away and it'll shrink and we can use the same radium for the next tumor. And so it was a very efficient thing. What form was the radium in? They would put it... Well, they somehow would refine it and distill it into tiny, tiny little amounts and then they would put it in a needle or put it in a vial or something and just position it near a tumor. It started out as ore and they had to refine it and refine it down, down, down, down, down. And so the governments at the time in Europe and also in the US thought, great, here's this weird, crazy, valuable stuff. Maybe we should control this ore so we make sure it gets used to actually cure cancer. And in Europe, that's pretty much what they did. In the US, we tried to do that, but the industry, there was a brand new industry that was just forming and they stepped forward. The first company was called Standard Chemical. They stepped forward and said, no, no, no, no, no. If the government starts taking over radium because it's radioactive, radium ore, well, everything's a little radioactive. Where will this stop? It was this classic sort of slippery slope argument and somehow it succeeded. And so what happened was this mysterious and potent element became another commercial product to be exploited by this company, Standard Chemical. There were some others that later popped up. Standard Chemical was founded by this guy named Joe Flannery and he had background as his family were morticians and then he went into industry and then he was kind of a snake oil salesman and he kind of failed, but he wanted with radium. He told Congress to cure cancer. He had a good motive, but he also wanted a big market, right? Cancer, you know, just one disease and if you reuse the radium, that's not a market. So he was determined to expand that market. He actually opened what was called the first free radium clinic in the world in 1913 in Pittsburgh. And he invited patients in and hired doctors and thousands of them were injected with radium or they drank radium. So if you can somehow prove that consuming radium is healthy, then you have a market, right? And many of these people did have cancer, but it turns out that injecting them with radium would actually kill them a lot faster than the cancer would have. And one of the clinic doctors was questioned before Congress and he explained, well, the way he looked at it, he was just shoving them over a little more quickly. So he wasn't worried about the fact that he was killing the cancer patients. And they weren't just treating cancer patients. They were treating anybody. They were treating arthritis. They were treating joint pain. And so they were giving this very toxic substance to people with low level chronic problems. And then he actually formed his own medical journal and he would have his doctors write up the results of this and put it in there and send it out to all the doctors. So yeah, I mean, it was really pretty crazy, but he did succeed in launching this health fad where suddenly there were lots of products that contained radium. Now some of them said they did, but didn't, but many of them really did. And you could buy your radium, get your radium in all kinds of different ways. If you wanted a radioactive drink, you could drink it. You could still get injected. You could take pills. You could, if you wanted to soak in radium, you could buy bath salts, ointments. There was radium toothpaste. And oh, and one of the more interesting ones, there were radioactive rectal suppositories. And these were marketed basically for male sexual dysfunction. That's not what they called it. What did they call it? They said this was for, as I recall, weak, discouraged men who wanted to perform the duties of a real man. I think what happens is if you're going to sell a quack product, you try to identify problems that people are kind of embarrassed about, so they're less likely to go to their doctor, they'll buy it out of the back of a magazine, and then if it doesn't work, they're not going to complain about it, they're not going to sue you. But these were not just marketed for that. They were marketed for colds. They were marketed for obesity, for constipation, for insanity. That was a big one, trying to cure insanity. So yeah, it becomes a health fad. How long did this go on for? Well, it pretty much fizzled out in the 30s, largely because one particularly prominent and wealthy individual could afford to poison himself very thoroughly by drinking these radium drinks every day. And ultimately, his facial bones started to dissolve. Oh, God. As teeth fell out, he had like holes between his sinuses in his mouth. This is actually what happened as well to a group of workers who were painting radium paint onto watch dials, which is actually a more well-known part of this history. A lot of young women were hired to paint radium onto watch dials, not just watch dials, they put them onto all kinds of products. Oh my God, look at these images. Oh. You can see it up here. Called radium jaw. Oh. Jaw necrosis. Oh my God. Wow. So this went on. Look at that one guy with his lower jaws. It's gone. On the second row. Yeah. Oh. So this, oh my God. Yikes. Yeah. So radium. This went on for 20 years? Well, yes. I mean, the industry got going in the mid-19 teens. This one man I was just talking about died in the early 30s, got lots of press, and that helped the health fad part of it go away. The worker exposure, the young women usually who were disfigured and died from this, that part of the industry of radioactive paint lasted a bit longer into the 30s. When they began, they taught these women, young women, they might have been 15 when they got hired, they taught them to make a nice sharp point on their paintbrush with their lips and tongue. And because there was this health fad around radium, they told them that this would put a glow in their cheeks. And you've seen these pictures that they really had some change in their cheeks, but it wasn't a glow. And they told them it was good for them. And so a lot of them, not all of them, I mean, so not everybody died, which made it easier for the industry to actually blame them. And later the industry would say that these people with these horrendous disfiguring diseases, that they were suffering from a preexisting condition, that this was somehow not the fault of radium, that they had hired cripples and other people who weren't super strong because this was easy work. And when they got sick, everybody blamed them and they were being punished for their generosity of hiring these folks in the first place. And by the way, these women had radioactive breath at this point. So it's not like there was any doubt that they had radium lodged in their bones. What is radioactive breath? It means they're exhaling radon. So this was measurable? Yeah. Oh, Christ. Even by the standards of the time. Oh my God. Now, one thing about the radium industry is, denials like that blaming the victim are appalling. But one of the things we did see is that the leaders of that industry, including the guy who invented that radioactive paint and including Joseph Flannery, died. And certainly the inventor of the paint died because of radium exposure. His teeth had fallen out. According to Time Magazine, his fingers had been removed. Nobody else covered that particularly gruesome detail. But then he died of anemia. These are all radium-induced ailments. Joseph Flannery, the guy who launched Standard Chemical, well, he had this great idea that he had all this radioactive waste. So he hired a botanist to find out if it could be a fertilizer. And then they published a report that you should, yeah, spread radioactive waste on your food crops because it's great. He actually had him spread waste on his own garden. And then six years later, Flannery died. And the industry didn't mention this, but his birth certificate, which I managed to dig up, mentioned that he had a contributing factor in his death of anemia, which is something that radium exposure causes. You mean death certificate? Is that what you meant? Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, death certificate. He said birth certificate. Did I? Right. His death certificate. Thank you. So yeah, he had anemia. And if he believed his own clinic, his own sales pitch, he probably drank more radium to treat his anemia. So he did die. So in these two characters, at least we have people believing what they said enough to actually kill themselves as well as other people. So it seems, again, that there's this human characteristic, this tendency. You start making money. You start justifying. You want to keep that money coming in. So you start justifying your actions, manipulating the facts, and just continuing to push out whatever it is that you're doing that's allowing you to earn this profit. Yeah. Well, and one of the reasons I talk about Joe Flannery is that he's, I think, a really good example of a certain kind of person that we celebrate because they invent things and they make things happen and they build businesses, the founders of industry. And we know from psychological studies that, well, let me back up. There's a model, when you think about how the mind works, that governs a lot of this research that we've got a going system and a stopping system, an approach system and an inhibition system. One of the things that activates the approach system is power. And if you have an approach, an active approach system, you are focused on your goal. You're focused on reward. Meanwhile, the powerless are focused. The inhibition part of the mind is more triggered by powerlessness and you're more focused on risk. So if you're focused on reward, you're not focused so much on risk, you're not focused so much on consequence for other people. And so, of course, that gets you hailed as a visionary. And Joseph Flannery was hailed as a visionary and he did, he was bold, he was inventive, he worked hard, he built a business. He just didn't ask, should we actually feed this cell killing radioactive substance that fuses into people's bones permanently? To people without any evidence of safety? Or should we just go for it and see how it works? And so, you know, that I think is troubling in the sense that you've got industry leaders who fit a certain psychological profile who rise to the tops of their industries precisely because they are reward focused. But if they are not balanced out by other people whose job it is to say, what about the risks? What about the consequences? What could go wrong here? You have a recipe for disaster. And also ignorance at the time. No one really understood that kind of stuff in terms of what the general public probably didn't really know what radiation did to you. The general public didn't know at all. And in fact, radioactivity, you know, there was this incredible aura around it. I mean, it was energy, it was stimulation. That's one of the reasons it got used for sexual dysfunction and other sorts of treatments. Yeah, we don't know. And that's the problem. I mean, with the case of a lot, yeah, me too. With the case of a whole lot of these folks, the consumers of these products, we really don't know much about what happened. We know more about the radium girls who were the ones who used this paint. God, it's so disturbing. Yeah, it's very disturbing.