WARNING: This Podcast Contains Chemicals Known to the State of California to Cause Cancer or Other Reproductive Harm
42:39 Share

When was the last time I took a road trip? How many national parks could I hit in two weeks? What about hotels? Wait!

How much am I spending on travel? When your questions about life turn into questions about money, there's Erica, the virtual financial assistant to help you spend, save, and plan smarter. Only from Bank of America. What would you like the power to do? Erica is only available in the English language. You must download the latest version of the mobile banking app, only available on select mobile devices. Your chat may be recorded and monitored for quality assurance. Message and data rates and additional terms may apply. Bank of America and a member FDIC.

Robert Half Research indicates 9 out of 10 hiring managers are having difficulty hiring. If you have open roles, chances are you're feeling this too. That's why you need Robert Half. Their specialized recruiting professionals engage their skills with their award-winning AI to connect businesses of all sizes with highly skilled talent in finance and accounting, technology, marketing and creative, legal and administrative and customer support. At Robert Half, they know talent. Visit roberthalf.com today.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Around the summer of 2023, 99PI producer Vivian Leigh decided her life was in need of an upgrade. Oh God, yes. That's Vivian. My husband and I were dying to move into a new apartment. We've jumped around a lot from place to place, and our previous residences included a rundown dingbat, a basement studio with questionable structural integrity, and my mom's house. So we were ready to live luxuriously.

And after a long Zillow search, we ended up finding a bougie apartment building in a walkable neighborhood of Los Angeles with a pool, a gym, and a God-tier amenity, Central AC. Welcome to the good life, Viv. Thank you. We were very excited. But on move-in day, as I was schlepping boxes through the lobby doors, I spotted something that slipped my attention during the initial walkthrough. Stuck to the entrance of my beautiful new apartment building was an ominous-looking sign.

It read, Warning. Entering this area can expose you to chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm, including benzene, a chemical used in urinal cleaners, and toluene, a chemical used in common household cleaning products. For more information, go to www.p65warnings.ca.gov.

This was a Proposition 65 warning. You can find these labels on all sorts of products manufactured in or distributed to the state of California. They generally all have similar language, with buzzwords starting with warning and quickly followed by chemical, cancer, birth defects.

For people who live outside the state of California, a label like this might look pretty terrifying. Maybe you've at one point ordered bedroom furniture manufactured in San Diego and found yourself Googling, can I get cancer from lampshade? Question mark.

But for those of us who do live here, there are few things more common or more Californian than a Proposition 65 warning label. As a California lifer, I've seen them on everything from power tools to leather jackets to potato chips to dietary supplements. Dishware, gas pumps, coffee tables, parking garages,

I've seen these labels on so many different things that by the time I saw it on the five-story, 169-unit apartment building that I was moving into, I didn't panic or move apartment buildings or even question what toluene is. I just carried on with my day like I always do whenever I see these labels on anything, which made me wonder what good these warnings are even doing if people like me are just ignoring them.

Well, kind of a lot, because it turns out these ugly, clunky warning labels are somehow the most elegant solution we've got for tackling an even uglier, clunkier environmental problem. To trace the origin of these poorly designed warnings, you need to talk to this man. We may be getting somewhere. I can hear that. Who, ironically, was interrupted by a poorly designed warning during our interview. This?

Everyone remain calm, it says. Perfect. This man, by the way, is David Rowe. For 25 years, I was a senior lawyer with the Environmental Defense Fund. And in 1985, I wrote a ballot proposition called Proposition 65 for the 1986 ballot. The mid-'80s was probably a wild time to be an environmental lawyer because everything was poison.

At the time, Los Angeles was averaging a total of 273 hazardous air quality days a year. There have been nearly 7,000 accidents involving toxic chemicals, which killed over 135 people in the past five years alone. The California state legislature declared childhood lead exposure the most significant environmental health problem in the state, and nearly half of Californians were afraid to drink their tap water. It's the giver of life to the earth.

But this most elemental offering of nature to man now carries a threat. There are people drinking water that's contaminated, and they don't know that the water's contaminated. The United States does not have a good record when it comes to keeping people safe from toxic chemicals. Federal agencies like the FDA and the EPA were created to protect human health and the environment,

But even in 1985, there were still huge gaps between the intent of laws regulating toxic chemicals and impact. My favorite example was the toxic section of the Clean Air Act.

The Clean Air Act was originally passed in 1963 and is enforced by the EPA. At the time, it was a landmark environmental law that aimed to set limits on certain pollutants in the air. David said it was great in theory, but in execution, not much was actually getting done. The legislation said, here are 189 chemicals. Those are the ones we want you to figure out how much is too much for and then go around and start banning them for things beyond how much is too much.

Well, in 20 years, they had managed to set those limits for six chemicals out of 189. Chemical companies and lobbyists resisted federal regulation because they felt it was costly and a burden on business to change their behavior. David wanted to actually make it in their best interest to change their behavior. And if it couldn't happen on the federal level, then it would happen on the state level. And David was about to get the opportunity to do just that.

The following year in 1986, there was going to be a big election for the governor of California. The incumbent Republican governor had a really bad record on toxic chemical cleanup. And the Democratic challenger was supported by a number of environmentally progressive groups like the Sierra Club and the Campaign for Economic Democracy.

Leaders from these groups believed that they could sway more left-leaning voters to come out to the polls and vote for their Democratic candidate if they could write a ballot initiative addressing toxic chemicals and get it on the 1986 ballot. So they needed somebody to write it.

And I was sort of the only guy left in the room. So I essentially got to write the whole thing myself. But passing a law via ballot initiative came with its own set of challenges. Writing a ballot initiative is different from writing a law in a legislature. It has to pass.

It has to work once it passes, but it also has to pass, which means it has to be pretty simple to explain and it has to be pretty good at fending off tricky negative arguments. In order to appeal to voters, this initiative would have to walk a very fine line. It needed to have a strong environmental message, but also be simple to execute.

It needed to be tough on toxic chemicals, but not so tough that it would be a burden on California businesses. Which is how David came up with the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, a.k.a. Proposition 65. According to the core language of the law, Prop 65 would do something new and innovative and honestly kind of wimpy. What it said was, if you know you're exposing me,

The law wouldn't ban toxic chemicals. It wouldn't limit exposure to toxic chemicals. It wouldn't even punish businesses for adding dangerous chemicals to their products or to the water system.

It just said that in the state of California, if a product contained a chemical that caused cancer or birth defects, there had to be a, quote, "...clear and reasonable warning."

The law would broadly be applied to all products in California rather than trying to target individual chemicals. It also applied to businesses who distribute products into California from anywhere outside of the state. The idea was that no sane company would want to brand itself with a scarlet warning label saying that they were intentionally poisoning you. So this law would nudge companies towards the magic word reformulation.

Reformulation! If a company knew that it was making something with a dangerous ingredient, it would reformulate to leave out that ingredient. And if it didn't, the product would need a warning. And the ideal number of warnings is zero.

The Proposition 65 campaign began in earnest in 1986. And to be honest, not even the people running the campaign had much hope of the law passing. The messaging, I mean, we used as our tagline, get tough on toxics, which I think in the end probably wasn't the best tagline. This is Tom Epstein, the campaign manager for Prop 65. He says the initiative came up against some pretty looming odds.

The incumbent governor came out in opposition to the law, along with oil and chemical companies and a number of businesses and agricultural groups. And along with that opposition came a lot of money supporting the No on 65 campaign. We only had about a million dollars and the opponents spent almost five million. But Prop 65 did have a couple of things going for it. One, a pretty reasonable environmental message. And two... Let's get ready.

Stand with your feet shoulder width apart, tummies are in, hips tucked under. Jane Fonda. Inhale and exhale and exhale. Actress and activist Jane Fonda and her husband at the time, State Assemblyman Tom Hayden, were co-founders of the Campaign for Economic Democracy.

Fonda and Hayden were both big supporters of the Democratic candidate running for governor and very involved with the Prop 65 campaign. Fonda used her celebrity pull to wrangle a group of famous people to hit the campaign trail to raise awareness and funds for Prop 65. It was really fun. It had a lot of the really young kind of Brat Pack stars, but also older friends of Jane. About 40 Hollywood people, some very famous and some not.

Famous only if you watch TV series, but quite a collection of people. Whoopi Goldberg, Ed Begley Jr., Rob Lowe, and Chevy Chase all got behind the initiative. Here's Michael J. Fox outside of a yes on Proposition 65 party at MGM Studios.

Why I'm interested in it, I think, is why anybody would be interested in it. It's essentially saying those responsible for dumping toxins, dumping poisons in areas and situations where it contaminates our drinking water have to live up to it, admit it, tell us what they're dumping, how it's getting to us. And I think that that's a real easy thing to support for me.

Jane Fonda, unfortunately, was not available for an interview for this story. The good news is I did manage to track down a clip of her speaking at a Yes on 65 event. The bad news is it's only about three seconds long and she's shouting what sounds like the word jelly bean. I don't know. I'm sorry.

The star-studded group crammed into a fleet of buses, which they called the Clean Water Caravan, and embarked on a three-day, nine-city tour up and down California. As a member of the campaign, David Rowe got to travel with the Celebrity Caravan. At one point, we were driving in the Central Valley,

and were pulled over by a couple of motorcycle cops. According to the LA Times, Rob Lowe and Daphne Zuniga popped open the emergency latch at the top of the clean water bus and were hanging out the roof at 60 miles per hour. And so the cop stops the lead bus, pulls him over, and the bus driver...

his signal to get out. So the bus driver comes out to talk to the motorcycle cop. And out comes Jane Fonda and Chevy Chase and Morgan Fairchild and all these people. And the cop just completely loses it. And it was hysterical because it was just, oh. Did you get a ticket? We did not get a ticket.

Signs like this are going up at thousands of businesses in California, warning that somewhere on the premises there are chemicals which could cause cancer or birth defects.

The new warning signs are the result of a 1986 ballot initiative. Proposition 65 passed overwhelmingly by California voters. Armed with some impressive celebrity endorsements and a clear environmental message, Proposition 65 passed in a landslide victory. It was the first environmental ballot measure to pass in California since the Coastal Act of 1972. So it had been 14 years since.

In the actual language of Prop 65, the drafters of the law never actually defined what a clear and reasonable warning meant. So David Rowe says that when the law actually went into effect, many businesses tried to weasel around this technicality by being purposely opaque about warnings. And the way they did that was to set up an 800 number and put a sign in front of grocery stores and hardware stores and things like that.

In the early days, a pro-business group called the Ingredient Communication Council was created to help companies scheme around Prop 65 regulations. Instead of advising businesses to warn customers about chemical exposure in their products, they hung up generic warning signs outside of places like grocery stores. Those signs basically said, "Hey guys, there's this law in California that says we have to warn you about cancer-causing chemicals, and if you want to learn more about that, call this 800 number."

If a consumer called that 800 number, they would be directed to a call center in Omaha, Nebraska. The person at the other end of the phone would say, "Well, do you mean the large-sized can or the small can? Do you mean the peas in water or the peas with cream sauce? Do you mean the brand by this company or the brand by that company?"

If you got to the end of the 20 questions, they'd push a button and give you a recorded warning. This was quickly determined to be illegal. But this early confusion of what constituted a clear and reasonable warning did do one thing. It created a very strong incentive for businesses to go in and beg for regulation. Tell us what will get us off the hook. And there's a formula of words that the state came up with early on.

That formula of words determined by the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment was warning. This product contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm. From there on out, environmental advocates put Prop 65 to good use.

The very first Prop 65 action filed was by a Democratic Senate candidate who used the law to target oil companies accused of polluting California's groundwater. And in order to avoid a warning label, a lot of big companies did exactly what the architects of Prop 65 intended. Lots of companies, including Coca-Cola and Gillette, reformulated to avoid the warning label. Uh, Roman, you forgot the, uh... Oh, right. Reformulated. Back in the day, there was this...

liquid called Whiteout. Are you old enough to remember this? And how? Whiteout had a toxic chemical in it. And after Prop 65 passed, they changed the formulation to eliminate that toxic chemical, which people were touching with their hands and breathing in and stuff like that. So that was the idea, that if they were forced to put a warning on cosmetics and stuff like that, they would stop doing it.

In an ideal world, this is how Proposition 65 would work. Dangerous chemicals would be taken out of products and no warning labels on anything. End of story. But in reality, it's been a lot messier than that. Mostly because people who violate Prop 65 don't face criminal penalties. They face lawsuits.

A lot of lawsuits. We didn't anticipate that this legal industry would develop around suing everybody. The attorney general is the principal prosecutor. But Prop 65 states that any private individual acting in the public interest can file a lawsuit against any company exposing consumers to toxic chemicals without properly warning them. And that means it is essentially enforced by everyone.

Regular enforcement by district attorneys and attorneys general and city attorneys couldn't possibly cover the waterfront. Environmental problems just pop up in too many places. So let's enlist citizen enforcement as a way to make sure that

more things get covered. So if a product doesn't have a warning label on it, any private individual can test that product for themselves. And if they find a significant level of a toxic chemical, they can file a lawsuit against that business. If that individual wins, they get to collect a penalty fee, which the defendant has to pay.

It's the responsibility of the business being sued to prove their product is under the Prop 65 limit. And if they can't, they're liable to pay up to $2,500 per violation per day, which could be a lot of money. Fees are...

settlements that we're talking about are in the five or six figures, which is a lot of money for an up and coming and growing business, especially if you're not based in California, especially if your profit margins are low, especially if you've invested your life savings in developing this brand. This is Balvu, a partner at Stoll Revis in San Francisco, who heads up the firm's Proposition 65 practice. I've had some clients that during the course of the representation go bankrupt.

The private enforcement element of Prop 65 has been a powerful tool for environmentalists, but it's also incentivized more lawsuits, which is an issue because not everyone who violates the law is a mustache-tortling Captain Planet villain.

Today, there are over 1,000 chemicals on the Proposition 65 list. And please don't freak out, but there are varying amounts of these chemicals in a lot of the crap that we eat, buy, and are exposed to. For some businesses, especially smaller ones, it can be difficult and expensive to test for all 1,000 chemicals. I've done this for over a decade. This is what I do day in and day out.

it's still hard sometimes to come up with a crystal clear yes or no answer about whether or not a warning is needed. And if this is my bread and butter, how can a small business navigate that law?

According to one 2019 study, Prop 65 lawsuits were costing California businesses around $30 million a year. And 76% of that $30 million went straight to attorney's fees. This law is enforced by bounty hunters and the lawyers that they work with. Nicole Krim is the product regulatory compliance and trade manager at Daiso USA. If you've never heard of it, Daiso is sort of like a Japanese equivalent to the dollar store, but with cuter stuff.

Nicole's job is to make sure all Daiso products meet federal, state and local regulations. And one of her biggest beefs is with the type of plaintiffs commonly referred to as bounty hunters. These are the serial plaintiffs that seek out easy settlements to collect penalty fees. You get bounty hunters that just treat your company like their own personal bank. They will come.

They will buy a handful of items. They'll go test those items. If they don't see something, they'll come back. They'll buy more and then they'll sue you for a handful. And then you settle. And then they come back around. They'll sue you for a couple more. And then as soon as you settle, they come back around and they sue you for a few more.

Sometimes these plaintiffs are individuals, sometimes they are advocacy groups, and sometimes they're finger quote advocacy groups. So it seems like the sole thing that they do is they sue companies for money and then they don't seem to do anything with the money for the good of the people of California.

I fell down a rabbit hole researching these advocacy groups. A lot of them have pseudo-environmental sounding names and the same exact Margaret Mead quote on their website. I tried very hard to speak with one of these groups to ask where the money goes from their settlements, but these people are harder to get in touch with than Jane Fonda.

And then there are concerns over who these serial plaintiffs are coming after. I have had clients and potential clients reach out to me and say that they feel a lot of Asian brands are recently being targeted. Proposition 65 annual conference debates about overwarning all the time.

Pity the poor maker of Asian snacks. This is something that's gotten, seriously, this has gotten attention because some lawyers trying to make money have sued some of those. Something that's been whispered about inside of Prop 65 circles is the number of Asian businesses who have been slapped with lawsuits.

You can see this in the number of Prop 65 violation notices on the Attorney General's website, but it's also very apparent if you've ever stepped inside an Asian supermarket in California. There are Proposition 65 warning labels lining entire supermarket shelves. While I was in the middle of writing this very sentence, I stopped what I was doing to dig through my own pantry. I pulled out at least 11 different Asian food products with a Proposition 65 warning on them.

There are a few possible reasons for this. A lot of these businesses sell goods imported from countries with different chemical regulations. Another reason is that some of these businesses are smaller and can't afford a lengthy litigation process, so they are more likely to settle.

I can't explain their motivations for that, but I will say that it's often hard for those companies to navigate Proposition 65 when they're faced with a suit. You know, a lot of times you go to Asian markets, being Asian myself, because the products are cheap. And so when you're hit with a notice of violation demanding, you know, five or six figures, it's really hard for a mom and pop company to pay for that.

I don't want any exposure to toxic chemicals, but it does make you wonder if these products have a label on them because they're a threat or because the manufacturers and distributors were an easy target.

The amount of lawsuits has become such an uphill battle that many businesses just take the easier route and cover their bases. What we see nowadays is given the challenges to defending a Proposition 65 case, we're seeing a lot of overwarning on products. The running joke is, oh, in the state of California, you can get cancer from everything.

Critics of Prop 65 describe it as a well-intentioned environmental law that has caused unnecessary collateral damage. Even those who support Proposition 65 admit that as a warning system, these labels have a lot of flaws.

But Alan Hirsch, the former chief deputy director of the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, which is the agency that regulates Prop 65, says that despite those flaws, the labels serve a purpose far beyond just warning us. All the exposures that we incur every day add up. They contribute to the risk of cancer that we all face. And

But this is the great sound effect. You see, I should be talking with a siren in the background. It's perfect. Before Alan Hirsch was interrupted by yet another scattershot warning system, he was telling me that even if they are oversaturated...

On a surface level, Prop 65 labels can help consumers make informed decisions about their health. The warning is one heads up that you may want to think about whether you want to buy this product. If you do, fine. It's your right to do it. This is one exposure. It's not necessarily a life-changing thing. But if you, again, you want to try to manage that cumulative risk of

The warnings are one piece of information that you can use to do that. And on a deeper level, Hirsch wants to emphasize that those ubiquitous warning signs are just the most conspicuous part of a hidden system that's actually working.

There have been any number of reformulations over the years, many of which honestly we don't know that much about because businesses do it quietly. They don't announce it. But we have heard many times from business lobbyists, boy, when you guys list a chemical, you wouldn't believe how much activity it generates among businesses. What's this chemical? Are we using it? How do we get it out of the product? Can we do that?

By having these warnings, I think it drives the market to do better. They can do better. This is Todd Cooperman. He's a researcher and president of ConsumerLab.com, which provides independent product testing.

He actually doesn't think the labels themselves are great at communicating danger, but he says it's not necessarily the labels protecting Californians. The Prop 65 law is really the only state law out there and really it's the only law in the country in many regards for a limit on how much contamination there can be in a product, at least without a warning label. The FDA does have some limits where products just shouldn't be sold.

But it's really far behind Prop 65 in terms of limits on most products. We often have to look at other countries. Canada is certainly ahead of the U.S. in terms of setting limits. You win this round, Canada. California is very unique, and hats off to your state for setting these limits. When I was talking with David Rowe, he pointed out a striking example from around the time when Prop 65 was first passed—

It involved the amount of lead, a substance dangerous at any level, that was allowed to be in the pipes that carried our drinking water. Lead-free, under federal law, was defined as 8% lead. Anything less than 8% lead was officially dangerous.

legally, quote, lead-free. And it's just to show you the gap between theory and practice in federal law, because obviously that was lobbied, that particular regulation that said lead-free equals less than 8% was a triumph of lobbying into a law that was supposed to keep lead out of things.

Prop 65 was able to act as a safeguard to those gaps in federal regulations by encouraging companies to regulate themselves. And it's remarkable how many things and what an incredible range of things seem to have gotten through that federal safety net and have been caught by the backstop of Prop 65.

David actually whipped out a list of all of these things. Brass faucets, dishes, china dishes, calcium supplements, water meters.

Galvanized pipe, crystal decanters, foil caps on wine bottles, brass keys, hand tools, exercise weights, raincoats, electrical tape, electrical cords, bicycle locks, baby rash powders, anti-diarrhea medicines, hair dyes, nasal sprays, spot remover. I won't even keep going. Those are all things that lead specifically was taken out of.

It's important to note that the federal definition of lead-free was eventually lowered from 8% to 0.25%. But that change didn't take place until 2011.

When companies remove dangerous chemicals to meet Prop 65 guidelines, it's not just Californians who benefit from that. The same products are made safer for the rest of the country as well. And because the state of California has the fifth biggest economy in the world, producers globally are pushed to do the same. That's just a little adjustment to the world that's invisible to most people. Nobody really knows it's happening, but is making a big difference in how...

many toxic chemicals in how many contexts people are getting exposed to in their daily lives. Which is, of course, the point. I asked everyone for this story. If they could change anything about Prop 65, what would it be? Balveu said that he would want to make the law easier to navigate for businesses. Todd Cooperman would want the warning labels themselves to be more helpful to consumers. Alan Hirsch wants it to be a little harder to bring about frivolous lawsuits.

And David Rowe? I get this question every year at the annual conference, as you can imagine. And of course, somebody wants to either have an aha moment or make me look extremely proud of the original drafting. I try to avoid both. I realized, though, that how should we change Prop 65 wasn't the right question to be asking at all.

What we should be actually asking is, how can the federal government do more to protect us so that we don't need Prop 65 anymore? Because imperfect as it is, and for all of the headaches, frustrations, and confusion it has caused, Prop 65 is kind of the best thing we've got. Now, when I see that Prop 65 label stuck to the front of my fancy new apartment building, I definitely don't brush it off anymore.

That sign is a reminder that I'm witnessing a system that's failing, because if it worked, then there wouldn't be a warning label at all. But on the other hand, at least I know there's some sort of system in place trying to keep us all safe, which I wish I could say felt more comforting.

So could I, I was wondering if I could help, if you could help me navigate something. Todd Cooperman does product testing and analysis. So I figured if anyone could help me figure out the sign on my apartment building, it would be him. It says, warning, entering this area can expose you to chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm, including benzene, a chemical used in urinal cleaners, and toluene, a chemical used in common household cleaning products.

Like me as a resident of the building, what's the best way for me to calculate that risk for myself? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. That's, that's, that's, uh, I don't know. Yeah, I'm on my own for that one. After the break, we, again. Okay, we'll wait for this to pass. Okay.

After the break, we revisit another story about excessive alarms. Stay with us.

Buy low, sell high. It's easy to say, hard to do. For example, high interest rates are crushing the real estate market right now. Demand is dropping and prices are falling, even for the best assets. It's no wonder that the Fundrise flagship fund plans to go on a buying spree, expanding its billion-dollar real estate portfolio over the next few months. You can add the Fundrise flagship fund to your portfolio in just minutes and with as little as $10 by visiting fundrise.com slash stocks.

That's F-U-N-D-R-I-S-E dot com slash stocks. Carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses of the Fundrise flagship fund before investing. This and other information can be found in the fund's prospectus at Fundrise dot com slash flagship. This is a paid advertisement. Whether you're a family vacation traveler, a business tripper, or a long weekend adventurer, Choice Hotels has a stay for any you.

That's what I like. I like to be within walking distance of all this stuff.

Radisson Hotels have flexible workspaces to get the most of your business travel and on-site restaurants. And at Comfort Hotels, you'll enjoy free hot breakfast with fresh waffles, great pools for the entire family, and spacious rooms. With so many hotel brands, Choice Hotels allows you to prioritize what you need. Choice Hotels has a stay for any you. Book direct at choicehotels.com, where travels come true.

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Finding work-life balance can be tough, but Squarespace gives you the tools to reach your goals and have time to celebrate. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Use Squarespace to create a website, engage with your audience, and sell anything from products to time, all in one place.

with the new guided design system Squarespace Blueprint, you can select from curated layout and styling options to create a personalized website optimized for every device. Get your website discovered fast with integrated optimized SEO tools. Plus, make checkout easy for customers with easy-to-use payment tools. Accept credit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, and in certain countries, give customers the chance to buy now and pay later with Afterpay and Clearpay. I built

We'll be right back.

with babbel don't pay hundreds of dollars for private tutors or waste hours on apps that don't really help you speak the language babble's quick 10-minute lessons are handcrafted by over 200 language experts to help you start speaking a new language in as little as three weeks babble's tips and tools are approachable accessible and rooted in real life situations and delivered with conversation-based teaching so that you're ready to practice what you've learned in the real world

I'm going to Spain in the fall and I'm using Babbel to brush up on my Spanish so I don't have to have like a language translator app always open on my phone and I can just interact like a real human in a place. I'm so excited. Here's a special limited time deal for our listeners. Right now, get 60% off your Babbel subscription, but only for our listeners at babbel.com slash invisible.

Get up to 60% off at babbel.com slash invisible. Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash invisible. Rules and restrictions apply. We first ran this next story that you're about to hear back in 2018 as part of our year-end mini stories. It was the first story that Vivian Leigh reported for us. Coincidentally, it was also about excessive alarms. And if you listen really closely, you can hear how nervous she is.

So I want to start with the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history. Oh, goodness. Okay, go ahead. For many years, there has been a vigorous debate in this country about the safety of the nation's 72 nuclear energy power plants. That debate is likely to be intensified because of what happened early this morning at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.

So you probably heard about this before because it was big news. But back in 1979, there was a partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A cooling pump broke down and the plant did just what it was supposed to do, shut itself off. But not before some radioactivity had escaped. A bunch of communities around the reactor ended up having to evacuate and it just freaked a lot of people out. Well, they should have been freaked out. That was freaking scary. Yeah.

So in the aftermath of what happened, the president ordered a commission to investigate what happened. And there was this big postmortem report to try to understand what had gone wrong. And what actually did go wrong? Well, it was kind of complicated because a lot of things went wrong. But Three Mile Island was a classic cascading failure type accident. So essentially, a relief valve in one of the reactor units got stuck in the open position, which caused all the coolant to be released, which

So the coolant ran out of the core and it started to overheat. And in the end, it ended up being a pretty minor mechanical breakdown. But what they found out was that it was actually human error that made the whole situation worse. Humans make everything worse. They really do. They really do. A cascading failure of humans. Yeah.

But, you know, the plant operators could see and they could hear that something was wrong because all these lights are flashing and alarms are sounding. But it wasn't clear exactly what was wrong because all the alarms were really confusing and just made the situation worse. Because they went off all at the same time.

that would have hindered communication at the very time when they needed to communicate. And who is that? So that's Judy Edworthy. She studies psychoacoustics and alarm design at the University of Plymouth. And she told me that Three Mile Island is actually a really common case study when it comes to bad and ineffective alarm design. Three Mile Island is very well known for having hundreds of alarms going off in a very short period of time. Now,

That's an example where there was no alarm philosophy because that shouldn't have happened. So alarm design really matters. Yes, it definitely matters. And there have actually been other major accidents where alarms that were supposed to help people respond to emergency, but...

but instead they made the situation worse. Like the Deepwater Horizon accident in 2010, which caused a ton of oil to spill into the Gulf of Mexico. I didn't know that had anything to do with an alarm failure. Oh yeah, yeah. It turned out that a bunch of the alarm systems on the Deepwater rig had actually been inhibited for at least a year before the accidents happened because Transocean, which is the company that ran the rig, didn't want false alarms to wake up the crew while they were sleeping. So the alarms were too easily triggered and

And so they just turned them off so they didn't upset the operation of the rig. Yeah, exactly. False alarm syndrome, basically. So this is the kind of stuff that Professor Edworthy thinks about a lot. Yes. Yeah. She thinks about the best ways to design alarms so that they can accomplish what they need to do. And one of her big concerns is that humans are just bombarded by so many alarms in our everyday life that we just start tuning them out. Or turning them off. Yeah. Because I think the whole world suffers from alarm fatigue. Yeah.

Because I think we're just so used to alarms just going off all the time. And they're almost, they're just a backdrop to our lives. She says that the average person probably hears about 100 different types of alarms a day. They're just all the time. You stand at a cash register and it's beeping away. And then you hear cars, car alarms going off and you've got microwaves and you've got...

Everything beeps for no good reason quite a lot of the time. And so people just start tuning them out and they lose track of which alarms are important and which ones aren't. If everything in the world is beeping, we kind of forget that those beeps are trying to point out actual problems. But another consideration is that alarm tones themselves should communicate something about what the problem is. And so how does that work? Okay, so when you think of an alarm sound, what do you think of? Well, I think of...

A bracing, klaxon, beeping, siren, high-pitched, shrill, alarming, upsetting. Yes, yes, exactly. So we basically all have like one cultural reference point for what an alarm should sound like. And that's because like in the olden days, we didn't really have much range in terms of alarm mechanisms.

In the past, alarms, you could only make an alarm by either pushing sound, pushing air through an object like a klaxon, or by hitting something like a bell.

We associate these archaic noises like bells and whistles and sirens and klaxons with auditory alarms because that's just what the technology at the time allowed for, and we got used to it. So Judy made actually this kind of funny point, which is that we have such a narrow idea of what an alarm should sound like that it even shows up in futuristic sci-fi movies. Sci-fi films, all sorts of wonderful things happen in the film.

But when you put alarms off, and they're just the same alarms that we're just used to. It's like in the film The Martian, right? They can do all these wonderful things and go to Mars, but they can't design better alarms than we've got now. BANG BANG BANG

That's a lot of alarm sounds. Yeah. Oh, lordy. And they all kind of sound the same. That guy's in trouble. Yeah. Totally. But yeah, but with digital sound, you know, so much more is possible. You can make an alarm sound like basically anything. You can use music. Some people use tones or sequences or melodies. You can use sounds of real objects doing real things. And we tend to refer to these as auditory icons. Right.

But really, they're just metaphors. And I love this. I love the idea of auditory icons and metaphorical sounds. It's just really interesting and cool to me. So what's a good example of an auditory icon? Okay.

Okay, so hospitals are notorious for having these terrible soundscapes because the sheer amount of alarms that are just constantly going off and like at all hours of the night. And they're all just beeps and tones that are kind of variations of each other. So Judy designed this new tone that's meant to be used when there's a problem related to a patient's medication. And this is how it works. What you might do is you would announce an alarm by using something like this.

That gets your attention, not followed by... See? Yeah, I mean, that's interesting. So there's a little bit of an attention grabber and then something metaphorical so you can really tell what it is. Right, the sound of the pill bottle kind of cues medication in your head so you kind of already know what the problem is before you even address it. What we find with these auditory icons is that they're very, very easy to learn. You just tell people once what they mean...

And then they're away. They've understood it. So instead of some generic and alarming alarm sound that could literally mean anything, which is what happened at Three Mile Island, you can imagine these auditory icons that kind of communicate exactly what the problem is. So there wouldn't be this confusion about trying to decipher what this one tone means. Except for at Three Mile Island, when there was a hundred things going wrong, it would sound like...

a preschool classroom of various sounds and whoops and rattles. But that becomes the sound design challenge of like, how do you preference which one you hear the loudest and in what order do you hear them and all that sort of thing, which, you know, is really cool concept to begin to tackle. Yeah. Yeah. You basically have to rethink an environment from the top down in terms of what it sounds like. Well, cool. Well, thank you so much. No, thank you.

Okay.

The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stephan Lawrence.

Special thanks this week to Tom Epstein and Michael Waters. Michael wrote all about Prop 65 for Vox, and if you want to read more, you can find a link to that article on our website. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California.

home of the Oakland Roots Soccer Club, of which I am a proud community owner. Other teams may come and go, but the Roots are Oakland first, always. You can find a link to us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our new Discord server. It's a great time over there. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

Cam found out that group chats between different phones aren't private. Or encrypted. Or encrypted, thank you. We only text in code. Yes, which I created. I created a code. Yes. Which can be a little annoying. Wait, was that your attempt at the code? You already forgot the code, didn't you? I should have written it down. The place to safely send messages between different devices. WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone.

Pulling up to Mickey D's just for drinks. Oh yeah, that's me. Nothing extra, just perfection and a straw. Coming in hot for the coldest cups on the block. Because there are drinks. Then there are drinks from McDonald's. Mix things up with any size lemonade or sweet tea for $1.49. Perfect with our classic fries. Price and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

Meet the next generation of podcast stars with Sirius XM's Listen Next program, presented by State Farm. As part of their mission to help voices be heard, State Farm teamed up with Sirius XM to uplift diverse and emerging creators. Tune in to Stars and Stars with Issa as host Issa Nakazawa dives into birth charts of her celeb guests. This is just the start of a new wave of podcasting. Visit statefarm.com to find out how we can help prepare for your future.

Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.