Did Lead Exposure Create Serial Killers?
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know
iHeartPodcasts
4.2 • 11K Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2026
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nowadays, everyone knows lead is toxic. Yet for thousands of years, it was treated as a miracle substance. Ancient Romans used it in everything from water pipes to wine sweetener -- an ubiquity that may well have contributed to the fall of the Empire as the civilization's collective IQ decreased due to lead exposure. And in the U.S., lead was also widespread until relatively recently. There's fascinating -- and disturbing -- speculation about how lead exposure in childhood may have created a spike in crime in the 1960s and 1970s. And, as Ben, Matt and Noel discover in tonight's episode, some experts take the theory one step further: Could lead exposure have created a boom in serial killers?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events. |
| 0:06.5 | You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. |
| 0:12.0 | A production of IHeart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt. |
| 0:28.8 | My name is Noel. |
| 0:29.6 | They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer, Dylan, the Tennessee pal Fagan. |
| 0:35.9 | Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes |
| 0:39.7 | this the stuff they don't want you to know. Now, for all of us tuning in on Netflix, fellow |
| 0:46.7 | conspiracy realist, you may notice a couple of things different in this episode. We've got |
| 0:53.1 | some different backgrounds. I am aware that there is a band-aid on my face. We're not going to address it past this point. Does it chingy that had the band-dad? No, it was, who was it? There was some, like, Dirty South rapper. Nelly. Nellie. Sorry. I know it was one of the Y guys. Air Force ones. The weekend had a bloody nose there for a while. That's true. That was an escalation of the Band-Aid as a fashion statement. But I support you, Ben. I hope you're okay. Oh, man. Right. Thank you. Did you get punched? Get into a dust up? Did you have some lead exposure as a kid? |
| 1:28.6 | Oh, man. |
| 1:29.3 | An escalation. |
| 1:30.8 | Yeah, that's right. |
| 1:32.0 | I like about that segue there. |
| 1:34.8 | Found some unhoused people. |
| 1:35.8 | Of a Band-Aid to a nosebleed. |
| 1:38.7 | We're talking about an escalation tonight. |
| 1:41.5 | We're recording on Monday, April 6th. It is time to get the lead out. Seriously, |
| 1:47.7 | let's start with a PSA. Don't hang out with or around lead if you can help it. It was once |
| 1:54.8 | a miracle substance or treated as such in the days of old, and it eventually became linked to all sorts of horrific stuff, |
| 2:02.7 | even before modern science could prove it is massively bad for you. I think today it's fair |
| 2:09.9 | for us to say that most everybody accepts the reality of lead exposure and knows that it can |
| 2:16.0 | lead to a range of lifelong debilitating conditions. |
... |
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