Forever Chemicals, Forever Consequences: What PFAS Teaches Us About AI

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4.8 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2025

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

AI could unlock vast technological potential—if we do it right. Rob Bilott, who fought chemical giants over toxic PFAS, shares a cautionary tale: how the harms of new tech can go unchecked, and why we must align innovation with safety before it’s too late.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, it's Tristan.
0:06.0	And last episode we had the historian Naomi Orestes on to talk about the playbook that various
0:11.0	industries, from big tobacco to pesticides to fossil fuels, have used to delay a reckoning with
0:17.0	the harms of their products.
0:19.0	Now, to really understand that playbook and to help build our defenses against it,
0:22.9	we wanted to have someone on the show
0:24.2	who's had that playbook thrown at them
0:26.3	and yet triumphed against it.
0:30.1	Rob Ballot is an environmental lawyer
0:32.2	who spent nearly three decades
0:34.1	taking on the makers of forever chemicals
0:36.2	or PIFAS.
0:38.0	Now, these were chemicals that were first mass produced in the 1950s, and they helped build
0:42.0	the modern economy. They've been used in everything from dental floss to food packaging,
0:46.9	to airplanes, to Teflon non-stick cookware. But they were also poisoning us. Pfeas had been
0:53.1	shown to cause a whole range of health problems,
0:56.0	from cancer, diabetes, and even fertility issues.
0:59.0	And they're called forever chemicals because they persist in the ecosystem in our environment and our bodies indefinitely.
1:06.0	They're in the blood of nearly everyone in America, including you and me.
1:13.3	They're in our water. They're in our soil.
1:22.2	And the thing is, the big companies that were making PIFU, DuPont, and 3M, knew about the harmful side effects and yet kept that information hidden.
1:31.3	A ProPublica investigation found that between 1951 and the year 2000, 3M produced 100 million pounds of the chemicals, roughly the weight of the Titanic, and most of that came after they knew
	...

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