December 7, 2025 • 38 mins
Organ transplants, ice baths, Russian propaganda, RFK Jr.'s science denialism... Scott Carney has investigated in depth about where lies the truth and who is taking advantage of our ignorance.
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
Mission Implausible is now something you can watch. Just go
to YouTube and search Mission Implausible podcasts, or click on
the link to our channel.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
In our show notes, I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea.
We have over sixty years of experience as clandestine officers
in the CIA, serving in high risk areas all around
the world, and part.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the
conspiracy theories everyone's talking about, as well as some you
may not have heard.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 2 (00:43):
We'll find out now on Mission Implausible. All right, Our
guest today is investigative journalists and anthropologist Scott Carney. Scott
has written five successful and fascinating books, including the New
York Times bestseller What Doesn't Kill Us. He also wrote
The Wedge, The Red Market, and The Enlightenment Trap. He's
(01:03):
also prolific on YouTube substack, and has written for all
sorts of outlets such as Wired, Mother, John Owes, Men's Journal, Playboy,
Foreign Policy, Outside, and Fast Company. His work has been
the subject of a variety of radio and television programs
and He's won the Pay Award for Ethics and Journalism
for a story he did on tracking international kidnapping to
(01:24):
adoption ring. He's traveled to some of the most dangerous
spots on Earth to explore the limits of endurance, and
perhaps most importantly, he's a husband of our previous guest
Lawer Krantz, with whom we solved the century's long hunt
for Bigfoot.
Speaker 4 (01:37):
That is definitely important part.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
You write about organ transplants and organ sort of like
the trade. I mean, one of my kids doesn't drink,
so I'm figuring I'm good for a kidney there conspiracy theories.
One of the first like scary conspiracy theories that I
considered as a kid was this old canard about a
(02:00):
man meets a woman at a bar and they go
back to his place to drink something. Everything spins around
and he wakes up in a bathtub of ice with
his kidney gone. So you've looked into this, how much
truth is there in this actually happening as opposed to
you specifically?
Speaker 4 (02:21):
You know, I'd love to know where that story first
showed up, because I feel like it had to be
some pulp fiction thriller. There was a movie dirty pretty things.
That was basically that plot, and there have been like
organ trafficking movies for as long as I can remember,
because when kidneys first became transplantable in the fifties sixties,
it was a really difficult operation. But the barriers to
(02:43):
doing it, the microsurgeries, the anti rejection drugs. It's gotten
a lot easier to do organ transplants, which led to
this idea of organ thieves coming to steal your personal kidneys.
And it's probably related to the blood libel conspiracy that
goes all the way back to the fourteen hundreds, which was,
you know, the rich people were basically vampires and they
(03:06):
were using other people's body parts to get back, and
it's related to that. The reality is, yes there is
organ crime, Yes organs are being stolen, but no it's
not happening at bars and Tijuana. The bathtubule of ice.
Interesting mightia, but no, no, that's not that. It would
never work like that. Because you guys are are law enforcement.
(03:28):
You understand that criminals, if they're going to be good
at their job. Now there's idiot criminals out there, but
if you're going to be good at your job, you
have to have a rational business plan, and you have
to try not to get caught. That's like part of
the game. And you don't go kidnapping affluent foreign travelers
who go to third world countries as a sustainable business
(03:49):
plan to get large amounts of flesh. There is a
much easier way to do it, which is what I
uncovered basically back in two thousand and seven where I
coined the word the red market. And what happens is
where you find organ trafficking. There's a recipe for it.
It's where you have a world class hospital, just a
great hospital, and there's tons of them in every country
(04:09):
in the world or most countries in the world. Next
to absolute desperation, a population of desperation. We're talking about
refugee camps, we're talking about just favelas and slums and
just abject poverty. When you have those two things, the
great hospital next to the abject poverty, bingo, you've got
organ trafficking. Because what happens is the people at the
(04:30):
hospital find brokers who are able to go in and
find organs by offering. Usually the way it works, as
they go to a slum, an organ trafficker will be like, hey,
I'll give you four hundred dollars for your kidneys or
eight hundred dollars for your kidney, not both, just one.
You don't need to eat it anyway. And they'll then
buy a kidney, and oftentimes they'll screw them out of
half the money later or something like that. But they
(04:52):
find ways to get agreeable transactions to people who are desperate,
who don't really have the ability to negotiate fairness or
the price of their own kidney. Because if I asked you,
Jerry and John, how much are you going to sell
your kidney for right now, it's gonna be more than
four hundred bucks.
Speaker 5 (05:08):
It's gonna get yes.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
So Scott, your book The red Market fascinating, but it's
also a conspiracy theory. So I remember that when the
Ukraine War started, at least the latest iteration one of
the reads that the Russians officially back this up was
they claimed that the Ukrainians were stealing Russian were basically
(05:30):
organ harvesting from their Russian population, from Ukraine's Russian population,
and they were justifying the war within I know that
the Hamas claims that the Israelis harvest the organs of Palestinians,
the Algerian War. They claimed that way back when they
the Algerian guerrillas. So even just conspiracy theories around oregon
(05:51):
harvesting are huge in China, which is the one thing
that maybe heavy speak about is that seems to be
maybe something to it. In China is like it takes
only weeks to get like a kidney or a liver,
and with like sentence prisoners, apparently there's organ harvesting. So
I was wondering if you could that whole conspira theory,
what's real what's not as far as you can tell.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
Yeah, it's a really hard question because one usually these
governments don't release statistics about their organ crimes, right if
they're doing an organ crime, they're not like, hey, here
it is all laid out on a platter for you.
We do know that China when I was writing this book,
and they often say they don't do it anymore, and
then three years later it comes out again. But we
(06:33):
do know that for a long time China was literally
using prisoners who are in their penal system to be
sources for organs. And I spoke to people who were
of the Falong Daffa Foullong Goong however, you want to
the shen Yun people, you see them on billboards everywhere.
Speaker 5 (06:50):
That's a political.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
Dissident group in China, and they would be arrested as
political prisoners relatively frequently. And what happened is they would
be tissue typed when they got in because they would
all get these blood tests that no one else got.
And then the presumption was that these people would be
entered into a database for matches when people are looking
for organs. And then there were several accounts of both
(07:13):
surgeons doing execution by organ donations. So they would have
people basically an assembly line and execute them until they
were dead. So they would take out the organs in
a rapid succession twenty thirty minutes or however long it
takes to remove an organ, and that would be the
way they would kill them. And there was a congressional
testimony about that, so we do know this happens, and
I actually did speak to some people who went to
(07:34):
China to get organs in this way. However, you also
talk about other countries and when you have destitution next
to world class hospitals, there will be demand that creates
this market, whether it's an official government policy China, maybe
Iran to you see these as official policies or more
just like commercial enterprise doing commercial uprice things the Philippines
(07:55):
and Indonesia, Brazil, those sorts of things. I don't know.
I don't think it's impossible at all that organ donation.
Speaker 5 (08:02):
Could be used as a weapon of war.
Speaker 4 (08:04):
Why not. You've got these people you're already killing anyway,
so why not use them as sources of organs. I
see that those mental gymnastics moving very easily.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Like in the book, you discuss grave robbing, blood farming,
kidney brokers, and you point out that advances in science
have increased the demand for human tissue for ligaments and kidneys,
even rented space in women's roombs. So what got you
interested in digging into this dangerous area?
Speaker 4 (08:30):
In the book The Red Market, I talk about the
death of a former student of mine in India while
I were on a meditation retreat, where she took her
own life after jumping off the roof of a monastery,
and I was in charge of her body. And what
was interesting. I mean, it was a horrible pivotal moment
in my life, but there were also all these people
I saw the transition from a live human to a thing,
(08:51):
and I saw the money that was involved in transporting
the insurance the government, like there was just a lot
of like fingers suddenly in the value of a corpse.
And that sort of turned opened my eyes to this
commodification of bodies. And then literally about two months later,
when I went back to my home. I was living
in the South Indian city of Chennight, a village right
(09:12):
next door to my house, like four miles from my house,
a news report in the local papers announce that eighty
women had stolen their kidneys, and I followed up on
that story. I did reporting on that for six or
seven more months after that, and getting you know, the
question of like getting access to people to talk about it,
you know, as an investigator journalist. Is what I would
do is I'd go in and I'd locate the brokers
(09:32):
through various methods, and I'd ask them why what they
do is necessary. I wouldn't be like, why are you
an evil criminal? I'd be like, how are you saving
people's lives. I would often go to the more respectable
sides of the industry, the medical side of the industry,
and a lot of the people doing the operations they
have medical degrees. They're not thugs with guns trying to
shoot me. When I got closer to the thugs with
(09:54):
guns people, I was more circumspect.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
The blood libell, I think you mentioned it goes back
to the even before the Middle Ages, right, that the
Jews were blamed with kidnapping Christian children and using their
blood to bake their levin bread.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
Which is not kosher. I mean, it's just not problem.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
But also as a form of state craft or politics
where this is weaponized, and Qwanon claimed famously that Hillary
Clinton and a cabal of sex fiends all Democrats living
in a basement of common pizza, which they have a basement,
but they were harvesting children for their adrenal glands and medically.
(10:35):
This is complete nonsense. But the whole point seemed to
be to build a conspiracy that allows you to attack
your enemy. Right if the Russians claim that the Ukrainians
are harvesting organs, or if the QAnon people claim that
Democrats are doing this to children, this allows you to
do almost anything to them. Bare Why do you think
(10:57):
that's so potent and still being used today? People?
Speaker 4 (11:00):
Humans are attracted to sensational stories, lo and behold the
old newspaper adage, if it bleeds, it leads. And what
we have seen is this particular story blood libel going.
You know, Dracula, that's blood libel too. This particular story
has been just incredibly persistent for centuries. And what's shocking
(11:21):
to me is that they that it just keeps working, right,
that it just keeps It's so far fetched. That's not
what people do. That's what occasional serial killers do. A
very small one or two people do this. But it's
not the Tutsies do this. It's not like the Irish,
they're big into this. It's it doesn't work like that
in reality. It's like, maybe there's a couple horrible people
(11:43):
who just do horrible.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Things, unless it's a religious rite, you know.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
Weirdly, there are religious groups that do have practiced these
sorts of things, right. The Aztecs were notable for ripping
people's hearts out of the top of pyramids and throwing
them down and doing all that stuff. There's the groups
like the Kanima in South America. It's and other dark
shamanic group. There are the Agori in India. I mean,
there are these things. Some have been very powerful over
the course of history, and so it's not like it's
(12:08):
totally beyond the capabilities of humans to do it. I
think in all of those cases, though, they were using
the horror of saying, hey, I'm the bad guy. I
am so powerful, I can rip someone's hard out and
throw it down the pyramids, so don't mess with me.
And same in those other groups that I was mentioning,
And so it's they do it in order to shock you.
And then in the other way it gets weaponized is
(12:30):
people say in a political party that our enemies are
those people.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
I mean, there is a need for organs, right, people
are dying waiting for transplants. Is there a model that
can better balance these competing realities or is it just
that poor people in the need for money is going
to keep that the grift side of this business? Mind
to me going Yeah.
Speaker 4 (12:50):
What I argue in the book is for radical transparency
in organ markets. We have this ethic in America. You've
heard of hippa right, which is medical privacy in this
law has created the cover for horrible crimes because they
say we're going to make this private. We're going to
make but hospitals in control of it and then when
the hospitals control it, they're also the one who could
potentially profit off of these crimes.
Speaker 5 (13:11):
Not all hospitals do this.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
Most hospitals are honest and above the board, but it
creates the cover story for doing that. So what I
call for in the book is to say, let's put
radical transparency. So every pint of blood you get, every
human skeleton on the wall, every heart, every kidney, you
can trace it back publicly through a database to know
where it comes from. And when I have raised this
(13:33):
to the people and they were like, no, we should
never do that because we want this to be secret.
We want to make it not personal. And I'm my
argument is it is inherently personal. When you're dealing with
body parts. It is not just like a normal commodity.
If you treat it like a normal commodity, you become unhuman.
The other thing I'd like to point out is that
we often think that there is a shortage of kidneys.
(13:56):
Right you say, oh, there's are not enough kidneys to
go around. This is probably wrong. Instead of the demand
being sort of like static, it is actually a function
of supply. When kidneys first started to become Availabhen We're
talking the fifties sixties, where it was a ten year
waiting list to get a kidney. Since then, we have
radically increased the number of kidneys, So this is radically
(14:18):
it's hundreds of thousands of kidneys. Operations are done every
year in America. The waiting list is still ten years long.
So what's actually going on is that the available supply,
the more we have allowed kidneys to become available on
the market, the more uses we have found for kidneys.
We're just expanding the criteria to do more because this
is big business. This is billions of dollars, not only
(14:39):
the transplantation process, but also the pharmaceutical drugs that come afterward,
the life of interaction with the healthcare system. There is
a lot of money, even in the legal system. So
I think that perhaps other than transparency, we also need
to and this is shocking, get right with death. Realize
that you are going to die. I am going to die.
(15:00):
Everyone's going to die. A lot of these people in
the last a year or two more, a lot of
them are very sick. They're on cyclistport and they're on
these and our rejection drugs, which is basically like being
on eight the aids. You tamped down your immune system
so it can't deal with infections. It can be a
pretty bad time period of your life after the kidney transit.
Not always there's obviously nuance in these medical criterias. But
(15:21):
realize that we even the above ground system, money still
deill drives the whole business.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
So let's jump from the organ industry into sects, sects,
religious cults, and you've got the enlightenment trip. What is
your sense having looked into this on people creating religious
conspiracies to further their own their own desires.
Speaker 4 (15:48):
What is the difference between a religion and a cult?
And there's a formula that I like to think is
that cult plus time equals religion. Because all religions, I
don't care which one you're talking about, are founded on
bananas beliefs. I mean, even if it's even if your
religion is actually true, it's all still crazy. It's all
so far out there. And in the Buddha foundational belief
(16:12):
is that the Buddha was enlightened, and that enlightenment means
that you have basically neo in the matrix, like superpowers
to some degree, and that there's actually again a wheel
of time, and that if you get truly enlightened, you
realize that all of this was just an illusion, and
the true uber reality, the pure reality, is something else.
Like all religions have this idea that they are going
to distance you from objective reality and tell you that
(16:36):
there is another reality which is actually more real than
the one that you have. Humans love stories of creation,
and oftentimes there is wisdom in these religious traditions. There's
the Golden Rule, which is in basically all of them,
which says you should be kind of people, and you
should do unto others as others do unto you. So
I've been reading up in Bhutan, I think about it,
I write it, written a little bit about Bhutan. There's
(16:57):
this saint in Bhutan named Drukunli, couldn't they And he
is called the Saint of a thousand Women, and he's
like one of their big saints over there, Buddhist guy
and his symbol and you should google this and you
will see an erect projecting effluent out of the front
with hairy testicles beneath it, and that is his symbol.
And it's written on the walls of so many buildings
(17:19):
in Bhutan, so many buildings have these as like lintels
in Bhutan.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
If you take the number one subway up into the bronx,
they also use that symbol on a lot of the
walls and things up there. So we're talking about religion
(17:46):
and how leaders may take advantage of people or take
advantage of people's conspiratorial thinking. And you've written a lot
also about the grift diverse. If you want to call
about grifts and wellness grifters, and you write about liars
and cheats and criminals and Charlatan's I want to turn
it into the politics. Does your research help you better
understand contemporary politics since you've become an expert on grifting.
Speaker 4 (18:08):
I tried to avoid politics so much in my work,
but I was going after health grifters. I was looking
up these people who were selling supplements, who are promoting
false health ideas and then making massive sums of money.
And then we get the Trump presidency where he literally
appoints RFK Junior, one of the biggest health miss informers
in history, as the Secretary of Health and Human Services,
(18:33):
which has fundamentally changed. It's so weird because at one
point the health grifters existed in this universe where they
had to be in opposition to the government. Right, they
were like, Ah, the government's not telling you, Big barber's
going after us. And that's why you got to take
my ivermectin and whatever else. And that's why light enemas
and coffee animas and my chakra healings are good because
those authority figures they're hiding the truth from you. That's general,
(18:54):
that's a summary of all wellness. But now we're in
a world where the guy who was doing that before
is now the head of you in health and services.
And we had this reversal in how we even approach
and think about human health, which just led to it
like an epistemological problem. So the idea like how do
we understand what truth is, especially in the health space,
And it's all so confusing right now.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
Scott, you lived in Madras, Chenai. I lived in Deli,
spent a lot of time in India. I think if
we could take our audience to the streets of just
streets of Delhi, right, you would see elephant tiases, leprosy,
you know, super rating incredible things that that we most
people assume illnesses that we got rid of. They've only
(19:35):
read about him in the Bible and it still exists.
But we in the West don't have them, and we're
going to get a meck though, Jerry, it looks like
I think we are measles smallpox. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:46):
The first time you see someone wheeling around their scrotum
in a wheelbarrow, you're like, let's not do that.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
Elephants my kids have seeing that. Yeah, and you suddenly
look at immunization a little bit different, right when you've
seen somebody with smallpox scars and things like that. I
don't know how to put that across to an audience
that just assumes that they're going to be okay. But
YE don't know. There seems to be the conspiratorial mindset
(20:13):
around that is such that I don't know, is it
people are trying to monetize it or is just a
lack of imagination.
Speaker 4 (20:20):
I think that you really hit on a good point
is that we have been the beneficiaries of a lot
of success, and we think that our affluence financial but
also more importantly health affluence is the is the standard
of reality because we've never experienced another reality. Right, we
grew up in I don't know, Providence, Rhode Island or
(20:40):
des Moines, Iowa or whatever, and like you grew up
and yet with your experience is the low level of
disease and you just think that's the normal state. Where
these reform movements came from were epidemics, were smallpox, where
what a third of the population died in front of them,
Their mom died in front of them and her face
exploded with pust jewels, and that was like a formative
(21:02):
experience in like probably eighteen percent of the globe's life,
right seeing your mother die of smallpox. And then people
were like, let's not do that. Let's dedicate our lives
to not doing it. So what we have now is
we have people who are aware of breast cancer. Everyone
knows somebody whos had breast cancer and that's a terrible thing.
So no one is anti breast cancer research right now.
Even the conspiractorial most conspiratorial people I've come across aren't like,
(21:26):
breast cancer research should not continue and you should use
ivermective people are like, we have to deploy the best
science to get rid of that because they've experienced it.
But if you haven't experienced it, it almost seems like
the reality of the disease state of the germ theory
of disease is actually just a story that people told you,
And maybe it's not. And then maybe and I guess
where I'm going this is, maybe we have to have consequences.
(21:48):
Maybe COVID. Maybe the problem with COVID was that it
wasn't bad enough. But if we had seen all of
our mothers die of COVID, of asphyxiating in front of us,
we have been all about the science.
Speaker 5 (21:59):
I'll tell you what.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
In one of your other books and your videos and things,
you talk about people engage in extreme activities, and you've
explored the limits of human endurance. A couple of your
books you talk about some of these things in freezing
water and you climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and just shorts and
things like that.
Speaker 4 (22:16):
I'd written the book The Enlightenment Trap, and I was
looking at gurus who were offering superpowers, telling you could
levitate and walk through walls and stuff like that, and
they made quite a bit of money doing that. And
then I ran across this dude, a photo of a
dude who was sitting like naked on an iceberg, and
he was saying, I can treat whim hoff. Yeah, I
could teach you to do the same thing. And I
was like, that's bullshit. And I got a commission from
(22:37):
a magazine to go out and debunk him as a
false guru because there was something compelling about it. There
was something obviously, how do you do that? And I
wanted to know what was going on. He was also
saying that he could give you some pretty important and
crazy health outcomes from doing this. I went out to
debunk him, but lo and behold, it turned out that
the stuff he promised worked. I was sitting on icebergs,
(22:58):
I'd climb up mountains in my underwear like I was
doing these things that were pretty cool. And so I
wrote this New York Times bestselling book called What Doesn't
Kill Us about him, And I was on the forefront
of the ice bathing movement.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
I lived in Finland, and I spent a lot of
time in holes in the ice, and I was a
pretty normal experience in Finland.
Speaker 4 (23:16):
So it's funny I've gone from being skeptical to being
a major promoter to being, oh, hell no, what have
we done? And I'm sort of in the hell know
what have we done? Section of my life.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Let's bring everything back to the middle eventually.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
Yeah, and then I wrote a follow u book called
The Wedge, which was basically about how you can use
the environment so extreme feelings such as heat or cold,
or sex or fear or isolation, tanks and ayahuasca. I
talked about like different things that you can do to
give yourself sensations and how you can use those sensations
to train your body to do things that are crazy
(23:50):
and unusual and cool. And I talk about the physiological
sides of this. And I decided not to start a
cult about it because.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
Makes some money.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
Do I seriously could have.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
So, just as a proponent of ice bass from years ago.
So what have you learned about the connection between the
mind and the body And is there a way to
hack our bodies to make them more resilient. It's a
normal way, not some weird thing.
Speaker 4 (24:11):
Yeah, absolutely, I mean the idea is that the more
you do in your life, the more that you will
be able to do Like. This is not busticism. This
is saying that you we generally live our lives in
a contained way where we limit the number of interactions
we have because it's where we're comfortable. And if you
were to expand the range to the things that are
comfortable in ice pass or are super uncomfortable. Right, you
(24:33):
are going to be more comfortable in a sensation of
death because your body only knows fight or flight or
rest and digest. So when you're in ice bath, it's
like fight or flight. And if you get into that
fight or flight state and you say to yourself, I
can handle it, It's okay, I can do this, that
has a systemic effect on everything in your body. Now,
(24:53):
it doesn't cure cancer. Probably it might help whatever that
means in a very nebulous way, but it certainly helps
with anxiety in your perception of pain and you're feeling
about where you can exist comfortably in the world, which
does extend a lot of your human abilities. And so
what I did in the book the wedge is as
I looked at not only ice baths, which was with
(25:13):
the first book, but also many other sensations where you
can insert a wedge between the stimulus, the thing that's
causing a sensation, and your perception of that sensation. And
a lot of it has to do with what you
perceived beforehand, because I often will say the hardest part
of doing an ice bath is not getting in the
ice bath.
Speaker 5 (25:33):
It's looking at the ice bath.
Speaker 4 (25:35):
It's just standing outside it and be like, oh, that's
going to be terrible. And even now I've been doing
it for thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years, I still am like,
why am I the ice bath guy? Like, I look
at the ice bath book, I hate that. That's terrible,
And then I get in that I feel great afterwards.
And I think that that skill, that ability to be
like the perception and the anticipation of something and getting
(25:55):
over it and then realizing that once you're in the
hard situation, you actually usually have more opportunity.
Speaker 5 (26:03):
To act than you had anticipated earlier.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
So you said you had some questions for us about
CIA or other things.
Speaker 4 (26:24):
What do you got how much when we invaded Iraq?
In Iraq too, how much did the CIA know that
it was bullshit from the beginning.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
That's a very good question. And the first answer is
the CIA is a lot of people, and so there's
probably people had different views, and there's probably people who
knew the senior level the administration wants to do this
and whether it's true or not, we have to do it.
And then there's people who are reading the news and
a few steps away and you know, believe, oh what,
we're being told that this is important, they're going to
(26:52):
do it, And there's people who are really in the
know what's going on in Iraq and all those other
kind of things. One thing I can say for sure
is I know my friend who ran the operational side
of Iraq. You know, he thought it was bullshit from
the beginning. He's like, you know, these guys want to
go to war, even if it turns out that Sodam
Hussein has like a paper clip been a rubber band,
that we're going to go to war with them. But
(27:12):
there's processes and presidents and Congress, and we're moving forward,
and you can either choose not to be part of
it or which is a good and legitimate moral, ethical choice,
or you can move forward. But I think a lot
of people did believe because essentially the Iraqi people and
most other countries believed he had nuclear stuff because he
had in the past and covered it up in light
(27:33):
about it. So Jerry probably knows more about he spent
more time in Iraq.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
Yeah, and it depends what it is. John is absolutely
right on this. They decided to go to war, and
we're looking for a reason that's CIA, and I'm happy
to criticize CIA, but the CIA was a stucky They
looked at CIA and said, find us a reason. We
don't give a shit what it is. So in the beginning,
the first reason they put out there was that Saddam
(27:58):
and al Qaeda bin Laden were in cahoots together. They
were working together, and anybody who knew anything about Connor
Terris and knew that was complete bullshit, but Cheney didn't care.
The second thing was weapons of mass destruction, and that
was more difficult. My understanding is we didn't have any
information that conclusively that he did, but that doesn't mean
(28:22):
that he didn't. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
So that afterwards we were being told look harder, and
there was reporting coming in, mostly tendentious people who wanted
us to get into war or were looking to make
money off of this, saying yeah, yeah, he's got information.
And I think where the analysis broke down is that
(28:42):
the analysts were under a huge pressure to say yes,
and the analyst, initially my understanding, was, wanted to say
we think it's more likely than not that he does
because he did before he says he does, We've got
people saying he does, so probably he does, and the
White House was saying, cut that shit out. It's yes
or no, it's a binary decision. Don't push his foot around.
(29:06):
And George TenneT, who I think the world of, basically
said we got to say yes or no. So yes.
Turns out it was. The answer was they likely had it,
but when we looked, they didn't have it anymore. My
sense was there was a conspiracy at the White House.
Conspiracy and how you use that term. We're going to
war and they probably have it and we need to
(29:28):
stop it. And Sadam is a bad guy, no doubt
about it, and even.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Use that one percent. If there's one percent chance that
he has it, we need to go to war, you know.
Speaker 4 (29:36):
So the second question is in the past, the CIA
has been and the government in various agencies have been
involved in pushing stories, fake stories in order to cover
up other activities. For instance that Roswell's the most obvious
one where we have maybe some a project mogul. You
have this detector of nuclear weapons, it crashes and they
(29:59):
run with a story of aliens, and then everyone loves
it and we'll keep it. We'll keep saying it's aliens
because we don't want to release the actual question, which
is that we are running a secret nuclear thing and
that was a thing that happened. How often would you
say the CIA or other government agents. It allows stories
that are preposterous to circulate in order to cover up
(30:21):
other things. And second part of the question, what are
those stories are going on right now?
Speaker 2 (30:25):
So I think Roswell and stuff. I mean, that wasn't
the CIA, that was the military. I don't people always
bring up that stuff with us, And I don't know
anything about the alien stuff or any of those kind
of things. And in terms of coming up with fake stories,
at least since the seventies, in reform of the intelligence
community and oversight by the Congress and stuff, we are
not allowed to put out false stories that appeal to
(30:48):
the American public. Like we can create a false story
that's aimed at the Russian military or the Iranians so
they think that we know something we don't know. But
we cannot put a story out publicly into the United
States against American We can try to keep up secret
because it's not tell anyone, but to create a fake
story that is to the American peace people, I'm not
(31:10):
aware of any of that.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
So, for example, when John and I were under cover,
we were State Department officers. We've now officially rolled or
covered back. You don't want to tell if you're working Pakistan,
you don't want to say I'm a CIA officer because
you're gonna get You're gonna be killed, so you have
a cover story. So yeah, that's a fake story, but
I think we would kind of gree that's okay. And
(31:32):
then they get to go into a story like the
Glomar explore. Right, we were gonna go down to get
a Russian sub that had sunk with nuclear missiles, right,
and we built this whole thing, and the cover story
was that Howard Hughes vouched for us that it was
we were going to manganese mining right to and we
(31:53):
were going to try to get this Russian sub and
may or may not have gotten it, who knows. So
that's a cover story too, And that's been blitter. But
I don't think those are those are that's not really
what you're getting at. However, sometimes these things no snowball
and get out of it, and I don't know, I
don't think we have a ability to roll them back then,
and you lived in India and I wanted to, so
(32:15):
I was there as well, and there was a story
there that I had always heard that the CIA was
responsible for glaciers melting, for floods and earthquakes up in
the Himalayas, and I thought, what bullshit is that? And
I was in the agency, right, I'm like, that's utter horseshit.
After I retired, I found out that there was this
(32:35):
little nugget of truth to it that in nineteen sixty
and I was wondering, if you've heard this. In nineteen
sixty five, the CIA and the Indian government of the
IB their Internal Service that we put seven plutonium like
i'll say reactors but small components devices on this mountain
(32:56):
called Nanda Devi, which is India's second highest mountain, right
on the Chinese border, and had it an antenna. It
was basically despy on Chinese nuclear testing right that both
Indian and the United States wanted to And so a
team of mountain climbers, American and Indian mountain climbers climbed
up Non the Devi with these like hundreds and hundreds
(33:18):
of pounds of these nuclear plutonium devices that were going
to power the antenna. And they ran into a snowstorm
and they had to abandon all this equipment like halfway
up the mountain. And then they went back the next
year and they couldn't find it because it was all
snowed over. And supposedly it's still up there, right, So
(33:39):
this is in the Indian press. The Indian Prime Minister
has talked about it, and that was kind of an oopsie, right,
Maybe somebody go find it somedays. But of course the
local villagers every time there's a flood, that's not global warming,
it's those CIA nuclear and there's no way of rolling
that story back. And I'll tell you this, those small
devices are not causing earthquakes and huge floods up there.
(34:03):
It is global warm.
Speaker 4 (34:05):
I have another CIA question for you. You cannot be able
to answer this one for a number of reasons.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
So I wrote this.
Speaker 4 (34:09):
Book called The Vortex, which is the true story of
history is Deadly at Storm and the Liberation of Bangladesh,
which is connecting a storm, the deadlyest storm in history
that killed half a million people in what was then
East Pakistan is now Bangladesh, and then how that storm
sort of set things in motion to ultimately lead to
a genocide and a revolution, and then the creation of Bangladesh.
(34:33):
Nixon was involved in everything here. Nixon was heavily involved
on the bad guy's side, the Pakistani side, helping the
genocide going on. At one point, there was even almost
a nuclear confrontation in the Bay of Bengal, where the
American aircraft carrier in the Russian fleet were facing off
and we were minutes from destruction. And it didn't happen
because Daka, the capital of now Bangladesh, fell. So that's
(34:55):
the story of this book. But here's the CIA question. Afterwards, Mudjib,
who was the leader of bangladesh first president their George
Washington Fellow, was eventually assassinated in a coup, and the
Bangladeshis are convinced that the assassination was backed by the
CIA in retribution for the fight for independence.
Speaker 5 (35:16):
Is that possible.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
That's a good question. I served in Pakistan, Jerry served
in India. I don't know anything about that, and I
don't know that we had much resources or whatever in
Bangladesh at the time, but we were we meeting Nixon
and the administration was pro Pakistan, that's for sure. So
it is possible that there was a covert action that
essentially the US comment supported, which led to the wouldn't
(35:38):
be a CIA person killing, But.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
It led to that.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
But I don't know, I don't know anything about it,
do you know, Jerry.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
A little bit? And it's you know, I want to
apologize to all the Bengali and Bangladeshi, our Bengali viewership
out there. The United States doesn't give a shit about Bangladesh.
We just don't. We would only care if it like
our client state Pakistan at that time in India, which
(36:03):
was backed by the Russians. We would look at it
through that lens. But once the Muti Bohemi had won
and East Pekastan had become Bangladesh, washed our hands of it.
And I served in India and I got to tell
you I could count on my fist the number of
days we dealt with anything to do with Bangladesh were
just like it was important to the US as a
(36:24):
humanitarian place and increasingly is a place where people made textiles.
But I got to tell you there was there's no
strategic interest in Bangladesh and things like oh that leader
they went against US ten years ago, Let's go get them.
It's like there's there's simply is no motivation, like the
government doesn't work like that, We're onto the next next
(36:44):
pilot shit. It was like, I don't see why we'd
ever take risk. It would only be it wanted to
get along with the Bangladesh's.
Speaker 4 (36:52):
One thing is clear is that it was that the
Bangladeshi that the Nixon administration was eagerly withdrawing all food
aid and all aid that could possibly help the Bangladeshis
at that time. So they certainly orchestrated a famine, so
why not orchestrate a assassination.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Administration is the presidents make policy, and the CIA is
an action arm of the presidency. So when we go
to warn and go to war in Iraq, it's not
the Department of Defense war, it's the United States war.
And so the CIA is used by a president to
do something. It's the US action. And I'm not aware
of anything related to Bangladesh but the but Nixon and
Kissinger were involved in those things. They were the same
(37:29):
thing with the East Tmoor. It was a pretty ugly
situation at the time, and.
Speaker 3 (37:32):
The Russians were pushing that we were behind the Khalistan
movement to create a free seek pun job and that
the CIA was behind killing India ra Gandhi. So I
guess whenever I hear these things, it's yeah, okay. I
mean there's not an assassination that you know that somebody
doesn't claim there's a force.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Behind you know, your writings, your sub stack, your videos.
I would encourage people to do it. Is your your
site of Scottcarney dot com Is that right?
Speaker 4 (38:00):
Scott Carney dot com is my website. YouTube is where
I am the most active these days. On substack, where
I put out newsletters and things like that. But obviously
I've written six books, so's there's lots of ways to
interact with the stuff that I do.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher,
and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable Pictures
for I
Mission Implausible is now something you can watch. Just go
to YouTube and search Mission Implausible podcasts, or click on
the link to our channel.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
In our show notes, I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea.
We have over sixty years of experience as clandestine officers
in the CIA, serving in high risk areas all around
the world, and part.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the
conspiracy theories everyone's talking about, as well as some you
may not have heard.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 2 (00:43):
We'll find out now on Mission Implausible. All right, Our
guest today is investigative journalists and anthropologist Scott Carney. Scott
has written five successful and fascinating books, including the New
York Times bestseller What Doesn't Kill Us. He also wrote
The Wedge, The Red Market, and The Enlightenment Trap. He's
(01:03):
also prolific on YouTube substack, and has written for all
sorts of outlets such as Wired, Mother, John Owes, Men's Journal, Playboy,
Foreign Policy, Outside, and Fast Company. His work has been
the subject of a variety of radio and television programs
and He's won the Pay Award for Ethics and Journalism
for a story he did on tracking international kidnapping to
(01:24):
adoption ring. He's traveled to some of the most dangerous
spots on Earth to explore the limits of endurance, and
perhaps most importantly, he's a husband of our previous guest
Lawer Krantz, with whom we solved the century's long hunt
for Bigfoot.
Speaker 4 (01:37):
That is definitely important part.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
You write about organ transplants and organ sort of like
the trade. I mean, one of my kids doesn't drink,
so I'm figuring I'm good for a kidney there conspiracy theories.
One of the first like scary conspiracy theories that I
considered as a kid was this old canard about a
(02:00):
man meets a woman at a bar and they go
back to his place to drink something. Everything spins around
and he wakes up in a bathtub of ice with
his kidney gone. So you've looked into this, how much
truth is there in this actually happening as opposed to
you specifically?
Speaker 4 (02:21):
You know, I'd love to know where that story first
showed up, because I feel like it had to be
some pulp fiction thriller. There was a movie dirty pretty things.
That was basically that plot, and there have been like
organ trafficking movies for as long as I can remember,
because when kidneys first became transplantable in the fifties sixties,
it was a really difficult operation. But the barriers to
(02:43):
doing it, the microsurgeries, the anti rejection drugs. It's gotten
a lot easier to do organ transplants, which led to
this idea of organ thieves coming to steal your personal kidneys.
And it's probably related to the blood libel conspiracy that
goes all the way back to the fourteen hundreds, which was,
you know, the rich people were basically vampires and they
(03:06):
were using other people's body parts to get back, and
it's related to that. The reality is, yes there is
organ crime, Yes organs are being stolen, but no it's
not happening at bars and Tijuana. The bathtubule of ice.
Interesting mightia, but no, no, that's not that. It would
never work like that. Because you guys are are law enforcement.
(03:28):
You understand that criminals, if they're going to be good
at their job. Now there's idiot criminals out there, but
if you're going to be good at your job, you
have to have a rational business plan, and you have
to try not to get caught. That's like part of
the game. And you don't go kidnapping affluent foreign travelers
who go to third world countries as a sustainable business
(03:49):
plan to get large amounts of flesh. There is a
much easier way to do it, which is what I
uncovered basically back in two thousand and seven where I
coined the word the red market. And what happens is
where you find organ trafficking. There's a recipe for it.
It's where you have a world class hospital, just a
great hospital, and there's tons of them in every country
(04:09):
in the world or most countries in the world. Next
to absolute desperation, a population of desperation. We're talking about
refugee camps, we're talking about just favelas and slums and
just abject poverty. When you have those two things, the
great hospital next to the abject poverty, bingo, you've got
organ trafficking. Because what happens is the people at the
(04:30):
hospital find brokers who are able to go in and
find organs by offering. Usually the way it works, as
they go to a slum, an organ trafficker will be like, hey,
I'll give you four hundred dollars for your kidneys or
eight hundred dollars for your kidney, not both, just one.
You don't need to eat it anyway. And they'll then
buy a kidney, and oftentimes they'll screw them out of
half the money later or something like that. But they
(04:52):
find ways to get agreeable transactions to people who are desperate,
who don't really have the ability to negotiate fairness or
the price of their own kidney. Because if I asked you,
Jerry and John, how much are you going to sell
your kidney for right now, it's gonna be more than
four hundred bucks.
Speaker 5 (05:08):
It's gonna get yes.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
So Scott, your book The red Market fascinating, but it's
also a conspiracy theory. So I remember that when the
Ukraine War started, at least the latest iteration one of
the reads that the Russians officially back this up was
they claimed that the Ukrainians were stealing Russian were basically
(05:30):
organ harvesting from their Russian population, from Ukraine's Russian population,
and they were justifying the war within I know that
the Hamas claims that the Israelis harvest the organs of Palestinians,
the Algerian War. They claimed that way back when they
the Algerian guerrillas. So even just conspiracy theories around oregon
(05:51):
harvesting are huge in China, which is the one thing
that maybe heavy speak about is that seems to be
maybe something to it. In China is like it takes
only weeks to get like a kidney or a liver,
and with like sentence prisoners, apparently there's organ harvesting. So
I was wondering if you could that whole conspira theory,
what's real what's not as far as you can tell.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
Yeah, it's a really hard question because one usually these
governments don't release statistics about their organ crimes, right if
they're doing an organ crime, they're not like, hey, here
it is all laid out on a platter for you.
We do know that China when I was writing this book,
and they often say they don't do it anymore, and
then three years later it comes out again. But we
(06:33):
do know that for a long time China was literally
using prisoners who are in their penal system to be
sources for organs. And I spoke to people who were
of the Falong Daffa Foullong Goong however, you want to
the shen Yun people, you see them on billboards everywhere.
Speaker 5 (06:50):
That's a political.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
Dissident group in China, and they would be arrested as
political prisoners relatively frequently. And what happened is they would
be tissue typed when they got in because they would
all get these blood tests that no one else got.
And then the presumption was that these people would be
entered into a database for matches when people are looking
for organs. And then there were several accounts of both
(07:13):
surgeons doing execution by organ donations. So they would have
people basically an assembly line and execute them until they
were dead. So they would take out the organs in
a rapid succession twenty thirty minutes or however long it
takes to remove an organ, and that would be the
way they would kill them. And there was a congressional
testimony about that, so we do know this happens, and
I actually did speak to some people who went to
(07:34):
China to get organs in this way. However, you also
talk about other countries and when you have destitution next
to world class hospitals, there will be demand that creates
this market, whether it's an official government policy China, maybe
Iran to you see these as official policies or more
just like commercial enterprise doing commercial uprice things the Philippines
(07:55):
and Indonesia, Brazil, those sorts of things. I don't know.
I don't think it's impossible at all that organ donation.
Speaker 5 (08:02):
Could be used as a weapon of war.
Speaker 4 (08:04):
Why not. You've got these people you're already killing anyway,
so why not use them as sources of organs. I
see that those mental gymnastics moving very easily.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Like in the book, you discuss grave robbing, blood farming,
kidney brokers, and you point out that advances in science
have increased the demand for human tissue for ligaments and kidneys,
even rented space in women's roombs. So what got you
interested in digging into this dangerous area?
Speaker 4 (08:30):
In the book The Red Market, I talk about the
death of a former student of mine in India while
I were on a meditation retreat, where she took her
own life after jumping off the roof of a monastery,
and I was in charge of her body. And what
was interesting. I mean, it was a horrible pivotal moment
in my life, but there were also all these people
I saw the transition from a live human to a thing,
(08:51):
and I saw the money that was involved in transporting
the insurance the government, like there was just a lot
of like fingers suddenly in the value of a corpse.
And that sort of turned opened my eyes to this
commodification of bodies. And then literally about two months later,
when I went back to my home. I was living
in the South Indian city of Chennight, a village right
(09:12):
next door to my house, like four miles from my house,
a news report in the local papers announce that eighty
women had stolen their kidneys, and I followed up on
that story. I did reporting on that for six or
seven more months after that, and getting you know, the
question of like getting access to people to talk about it,
you know, as an investigator journalist. Is what I would
do is I'd go in and I'd locate the brokers
(09:32):
through various methods, and I'd ask them why what they
do is necessary. I wouldn't be like, why are you
an evil criminal? I'd be like, how are you saving
people's lives. I would often go to the more respectable
sides of the industry, the medical side of the industry,
and a lot of the people doing the operations they
have medical degrees. They're not thugs with guns trying to
shoot me. When I got closer to the thugs with
(09:54):
guns people, I was more circumspect.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
The blood libell, I think you mentioned it goes back
to the even before the Middle Ages, right, that the
Jews were blamed with kidnapping Christian children and using their
blood to bake their levin bread.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
Which is not kosher. I mean, it's just not problem.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
But also as a form of state craft or politics
where this is weaponized, and Qwanon claimed famously that Hillary
Clinton and a cabal of sex fiends all Democrats living
in a basement of common pizza, which they have a basement,
but they were harvesting children for their adrenal glands and medically.
(10:35):
This is complete nonsense. But the whole point seemed to
be to build a conspiracy that allows you to attack
your enemy. Right if the Russians claim that the Ukrainians
are harvesting organs, or if the QAnon people claim that
Democrats are doing this to children, this allows you to
do almost anything to them. Bare Why do you think
(10:57):
that's so potent and still being used today? People?
Speaker 4 (11:00):
Humans are attracted to sensational stories, lo and behold the
old newspaper adage, if it bleeds, it leads. And what
we have seen is this particular story blood libel going.
You know, Dracula, that's blood libel too. This particular story
has been just incredibly persistent for centuries. And what's shocking
(11:21):
to me is that they that it just keeps working, right,
that it just keeps It's so far fetched. That's not
what people do. That's what occasional serial killers do. A
very small one or two people do this. But it's
not the Tutsies do this. It's not like the Irish,
they're big into this. It's it doesn't work like that
in reality. It's like, maybe there's a couple horrible people
(11:43):
who just do horrible.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Things, unless it's a religious rite, you know.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
Weirdly, there are religious groups that do have practiced these
sorts of things, right. The Aztecs were notable for ripping
people's hearts out of the top of pyramids and throwing
them down and doing all that stuff. There's the groups
like the Kanima in South America. It's and other dark
shamanic group. There are the Agori in India. I mean,
there are these things. Some have been very powerful over
the course of history, and so it's not like it's
(12:08):
totally beyond the capabilities of humans to do it. I
think in all of those cases, though, they were using
the horror of saying, hey, I'm the bad guy. I
am so powerful, I can rip someone's hard out and
throw it down the pyramids, so don't mess with me.
And same in those other groups that I was mentioning,
And so it's they do it in order to shock you.
And then in the other way it gets weaponized is
(12:30):
people say in a political party that our enemies are
those people.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
I mean, there is a need for organs, right, people
are dying waiting for transplants. Is there a model that
can better balance these competing realities or is it just
that poor people in the need for money is going
to keep that the grift side of this business? Mind
to me going Yeah.
Speaker 4 (12:50):
What I argue in the book is for radical transparency
in organ markets. We have this ethic in America. You've
heard of hippa right, which is medical privacy in this
law has created the cover for horrible crimes because they
say we're going to make this private. We're going to
make but hospitals in control of it and then when
the hospitals control it, they're also the one who could
potentially profit off of these crimes.
Speaker 5 (13:11):
Not all hospitals do this.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
Most hospitals are honest and above the board, but it
creates the cover story for doing that. So what I
call for in the book is to say, let's put
radical transparency. So every pint of blood you get, every
human skeleton on the wall, every heart, every kidney, you
can trace it back publicly through a database to know
where it comes from. And when I have raised this
(13:33):
to the people and they were like, no, we should
never do that because we want this to be secret.
We want to make it not personal. And I'm my
argument is it is inherently personal. When you're dealing with
body parts. It is not just like a normal commodity.
If you treat it like a normal commodity, you become unhuman.
The other thing I'd like to point out is that
we often think that there is a shortage of kidneys.
(13:56):
Right you say, oh, there's are not enough kidneys to
go around. This is probably wrong. Instead of the demand
being sort of like static, it is actually a function
of supply. When kidneys first started to become Availabhen We're
talking the fifties sixties, where it was a ten year
waiting list to get a kidney. Since then, we have
radically increased the number of kidneys, So this is radically
(14:18):
it's hundreds of thousands of kidneys. Operations are done every
year in America. The waiting list is still ten years long.
So what's actually going on is that the available supply,
the more we have allowed kidneys to become available on
the market, the more uses we have found for kidneys.
We're just expanding the criteria to do more because this
is big business. This is billions of dollars, not only
(14:39):
the transplantation process, but also the pharmaceutical drugs that come afterward,
the life of interaction with the healthcare system. There is
a lot of money, even in the legal system. So
I think that perhaps other than transparency, we also need
to and this is shocking, get right with death. Realize
that you are going to die. I am going to die.
(15:00):
Everyone's going to die. A lot of these people in
the last a year or two more, a lot of
them are very sick. They're on cyclistport and they're on
these and our rejection drugs, which is basically like being
on eight the aids. You tamped down your immune system
so it can't deal with infections. It can be a
pretty bad time period of your life after the kidney transit.
Not always there's obviously nuance in these medical criterias. But
(15:21):
realize that we even the above ground system, money still
deill drives the whole business.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
So let's jump from the organ industry into sects, sects,
religious cults, and you've got the enlightenment trip. What is
your sense having looked into this on people creating religious
conspiracies to further their own their own desires.
Speaker 4 (15:48):
What is the difference between a religion and a cult?
And there's a formula that I like to think is
that cult plus time equals religion. Because all religions, I
don't care which one you're talking about, are founded on
bananas beliefs. I mean, even if it's even if your
religion is actually true, it's all still crazy. It's all
so far out there. And in the Buddha foundational belief
(16:12):
is that the Buddha was enlightened, and that enlightenment means
that you have basically neo in the matrix, like superpowers
to some degree, and that there's actually again a wheel
of time, and that if you get truly enlightened, you
realize that all of this was just an illusion, and
the true uber reality, the pure reality, is something else.
Like all religions have this idea that they are going
to distance you from objective reality and tell you that
(16:36):
there is another reality which is actually more real than
the one that you have. Humans love stories of creation,
and oftentimes there is wisdom in these religious traditions. There's
the Golden Rule, which is in basically all of them,
which says you should be kind of people, and you
should do unto others as others do unto you. So
I've been reading up in Bhutan, I think about it,
I write it, written a little bit about Bhutan. There's
(16:57):
this saint in Bhutan named Drukunli, couldn't they And he
is called the Saint of a thousand Women, and he's
like one of their big saints over there, Buddhist guy
and his symbol and you should google this and you
will see an erect projecting effluent out of the front
with hairy testicles beneath it, and that is his symbol.
And it's written on the walls of so many buildings
(17:19):
in Bhutan, so many buildings have these as like lintels
in Bhutan.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
If you take the number one subway up into the bronx,
they also use that symbol on a lot of the
walls and things up there. So we're talking about religion
(17:46):
and how leaders may take advantage of people or take
advantage of people's conspiratorial thinking. And you've written a lot
also about the grift diverse. If you want to call
about grifts and wellness grifters, and you write about liars
and cheats and criminals and Charlatan's I want to turn
it into the politics. Does your research help you better
understand contemporary politics since you've become an expert on grifting.
Speaker 4 (18:08):
I tried to avoid politics so much in my work,
but I was going after health grifters. I was looking
up these people who were selling supplements, who are promoting
false health ideas and then making massive sums of money.
And then we get the Trump presidency where he literally
appoints RFK Junior, one of the biggest health miss informers
in history, as the Secretary of Health and Human Services,
(18:33):
which has fundamentally changed. It's so weird because at one
point the health grifters existed in this universe where they
had to be in opposition to the government. Right, they
were like, Ah, the government's not telling you, Big barber's
going after us. And that's why you got to take
my ivermectin and whatever else. And that's why light enemas
and coffee animas and my chakra healings are good because
those authority figures they're hiding the truth from you. That's general,
(18:54):
that's a summary of all wellness. But now we're in
a world where the guy who was doing that before
is now the head of you in health and services.
And we had this reversal in how we even approach
and think about human health, which just led to it
like an epistemological problem. So the idea like how do
we understand what truth is, especially in the health space,
And it's all so confusing right now.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
Scott, you lived in Madras, Chenai. I lived in Deli,
spent a lot of time in India. I think if
we could take our audience to the streets of just
streets of Delhi, right, you would see elephant tiases, leprosy,
you know, super rating incredible things that that we most
people assume illnesses that we got rid of. They've only
(19:35):
read about him in the Bible and it still exists.
But we in the West don't have them, and we're
going to get a meck though, Jerry, it looks like
I think we are measles smallpox. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:46):
The first time you see someone wheeling around their scrotum
in a wheelbarrow, you're like, let's not do that.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
Elephants my kids have seeing that. Yeah, and you suddenly
look at immunization a little bit different, right when you've
seen somebody with smallpox scars and things like that. I
don't know how to put that across to an audience
that just assumes that they're going to be okay. But
YE don't know. There seems to be the conspiratorial mindset
(20:13):
around that is such that I don't know, is it
people are trying to monetize it or is just a
lack of imagination.
Speaker 4 (20:20):
I think that you really hit on a good point
is that we have been the beneficiaries of a lot
of success, and we think that our affluence financial but
also more importantly health affluence is the is the standard
of reality because we've never experienced another reality. Right, we
grew up in I don't know, Providence, Rhode Island or
(20:40):
des Moines, Iowa or whatever, and like you grew up
and yet with your experience is the low level of
disease and you just think that's the normal state. Where
these reform movements came from were epidemics, were smallpox, where
what a third of the population died in front of them,
Their mom died in front of them and her face
exploded with pust jewels, and that was like a formative
(21:02):
experience in like probably eighteen percent of the globe's life,
right seeing your mother die of smallpox. And then people
were like, let's not do that. Let's dedicate our lives
to not doing it. So what we have now is
we have people who are aware of breast cancer. Everyone
knows somebody whos had breast cancer and that's a terrible thing.
So no one is anti breast cancer research right now.
Even the conspiractorial most conspiratorial people I've come across aren't like,
(21:26):
breast cancer research should not continue and you should use
ivermective people are like, we have to deploy the best
science to get rid of that because they've experienced it.
But if you haven't experienced it, it almost seems like
the reality of the disease state of the germ theory
of disease is actually just a story that people told you,
And maybe it's not. And then maybe and I guess
where I'm going this is, maybe we have to have consequences.
(21:48):
Maybe COVID. Maybe the problem with COVID was that it
wasn't bad enough. But if we had seen all of
our mothers die of COVID, of asphyxiating in front of us,
we have been all about the science.
Speaker 5 (21:59):
I'll tell you what.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
In one of your other books and your videos and things,
you talk about people engage in extreme activities, and you've
explored the limits of human endurance. A couple of your
books you talk about some of these things in freezing
water and you climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and just shorts and
things like that.
Speaker 4 (22:16):
I'd written the book The Enlightenment Trap, and I was
looking at gurus who were offering superpowers, telling you could
levitate and walk through walls and stuff like that, and
they made quite a bit of money doing that. And
then I ran across this dude, a photo of a
dude who was sitting like naked on an iceberg, and
he was saying, I can treat whim hoff. Yeah, I
could teach you to do the same thing. And I
was like, that's bullshit. And I got a commission from
(22:37):
a magazine to go out and debunk him as a
false guru because there was something compelling about it. There
was something obviously, how do you do that? And I
wanted to know what was going on. He was also
saying that he could give you some pretty important and
crazy health outcomes from doing this. I went out to
debunk him, but lo and behold, it turned out that
the stuff he promised worked. I was sitting on icebergs,
(22:58):
I'd climb up mountains in my underwear like I was
doing these things that were pretty cool. And so I
wrote this New York Times bestselling book called What Doesn't
Kill Us about him, And I was on the forefront
of the ice bathing movement.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
I lived in Finland, and I spent a lot of
time in holes in the ice, and I was a
pretty normal experience in Finland.
Speaker 4 (23:16):
So it's funny I've gone from being skeptical to being
a major promoter to being, oh, hell no, what have
we done? And I'm sort of in the hell know
what have we done? Section of my life.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Let's bring everything back to the middle eventually.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
Yeah, and then I wrote a follow u book called
The Wedge, which was basically about how you can use
the environment so extreme feelings such as heat or cold,
or sex or fear or isolation, tanks and ayahuasca. I
talked about like different things that you can do to
give yourself sensations and how you can use those sensations
to train your body to do things that are crazy
(23:50):
and unusual and cool. And I talk about the physiological
sides of this. And I decided not to start a
cult about it because.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
Makes some money.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
Do I seriously could have.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
So, just as a proponent of ice bass from years ago.
So what have you learned about the connection between the
mind and the body And is there a way to
hack our bodies to make them more resilient. It's a
normal way, not some weird thing.
Speaker 4 (24:11):
Yeah, absolutely, I mean the idea is that the more
you do in your life, the more that you will
be able to do Like. This is not busticism. This
is saying that you we generally live our lives in
a contained way where we limit the number of interactions
we have because it's where we're comfortable. And if you
were to expand the range to the things that are
comfortable in ice pass or are super uncomfortable. Right, you
(24:33):
are going to be more comfortable in a sensation of
death because your body only knows fight or flight or
rest and digest. So when you're in ice bath, it's
like fight or flight. And if you get into that
fight or flight state and you say to yourself, I
can handle it, It's okay, I can do this, that
has a systemic effect on everything in your body. Now,
(24:53):
it doesn't cure cancer. Probably it might help whatever that
means in a very nebulous way, but it certainly helps
with anxiety in your perception of pain and you're feeling
about where you can exist comfortably in the world, which
does extend a lot of your human abilities. And so
what I did in the book the wedge is as
I looked at not only ice baths, which was with
(25:13):
the first book, but also many other sensations where you
can insert a wedge between the stimulus, the thing that's
causing a sensation, and your perception of that sensation. And
a lot of it has to do with what you
perceived beforehand, because I often will say the hardest part
of doing an ice bath is not getting in the
ice bath.
Speaker 5 (25:33):
It's looking at the ice bath.
Speaker 4 (25:35):
It's just standing outside it and be like, oh, that's
going to be terrible. And even now I've been doing
it for thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years, I still am like,
why am I the ice bath guy? Like, I look
at the ice bath book, I hate that. That's terrible,
And then I get in that I feel great afterwards.
And I think that that skill, that ability to be
like the perception and the anticipation of something and getting
(25:55):
over it and then realizing that once you're in the
hard situation, you actually usually have more opportunity.
Speaker 5 (26:03):
To act than you had anticipated earlier.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
So you said you had some questions for us about
CIA or other things.
Speaker 4 (26:24):
What do you got how much when we invaded Iraq?
In Iraq too, how much did the CIA know that
it was bullshit from the beginning.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
That's a very good question. And the first answer is
the CIA is a lot of people, and so there's
probably people had different views, and there's probably people who
knew the senior level the administration wants to do this
and whether it's true or not, we have to do it.
And then there's people who are reading the news and
a few steps away and you know, believe, oh what,
we're being told that this is important, they're going to
(26:52):
do it, And there's people who are really in the
know what's going on in Iraq and all those other
kind of things. One thing I can say for sure
is I know my friend who ran the operational side
of Iraq. You know, he thought it was bullshit from
the beginning. He's like, you know, these guys want to
go to war, even if it turns out that Sodam
Hussein has like a paper clip been a rubber band,
that we're going to go to war with them. But
(27:12):
there's processes and presidents and Congress, and we're moving forward,
and you can either choose not to be part of
it or which is a good and legitimate moral, ethical choice,
or you can move forward. But I think a lot
of people did believe because essentially the Iraqi people and
most other countries believed he had nuclear stuff because he
had in the past and covered it up in light
(27:33):
about it. So Jerry probably knows more about he spent
more time in Iraq.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
Yeah, and it depends what it is. John is absolutely
right on this. They decided to go to war, and
we're looking for a reason that's CIA, and I'm happy
to criticize CIA, but the CIA was a stucky They
looked at CIA and said, find us a reason. We
don't give a shit what it is. So in the beginning,
the first reason they put out there was that Saddam
(27:58):
and al Qaeda bin Laden were in cahoots together. They
were working together, and anybody who knew anything about Connor
Terris and knew that was complete bullshit, but Cheney didn't care.
The second thing was weapons of mass destruction, and that
was more difficult. My understanding is we didn't have any
information that conclusively that he did, but that doesn't mean
(28:22):
that he didn't. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
So that afterwards we were being told look harder, and
there was reporting coming in, mostly tendentious people who wanted
us to get into war or were looking to make
money off of this, saying yeah, yeah, he's got information.
And I think where the analysis broke down is that
(28:42):
the analysts were under a huge pressure to say yes,
and the analyst, initially my understanding, was, wanted to say
we think it's more likely than not that he does
because he did before he says he does, We've got
people saying he does, so probably he does, and the
White House was saying, cut that shit out. It's yes
or no, it's a binary decision. Don't push his foot around.
(29:06):
And George TenneT, who I think the world of, basically
said we got to say yes or no. So yes.
Turns out it was. The answer was they likely had it,
but when we looked, they didn't have it anymore. My
sense was there was a conspiracy at the White House.
Conspiracy and how you use that term. We're going to
war and they probably have it and we need to
(29:28):
stop it. And Sadam is a bad guy, no doubt
about it, and even.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Use that one percent. If there's one percent chance that
he has it, we need to go to war, you know.
Speaker 4 (29:36):
So the second question is in the past, the CIA
has been and the government in various agencies have been
involved in pushing stories, fake stories in order to cover
up other activities. For instance that Roswell's the most obvious
one where we have maybe some a project mogul. You
have this detector of nuclear weapons, it crashes and they
(29:59):
run with a story of aliens, and then everyone loves
it and we'll keep it. We'll keep saying it's aliens
because we don't want to release the actual question, which
is that we are running a secret nuclear thing and
that was a thing that happened. How often would you
say the CIA or other government agents. It allows stories
that are preposterous to circulate in order to cover up
(30:21):
other things. And second part of the question, what are
those stories are going on right now?
Speaker 2 (30:25):
So I think Roswell and stuff. I mean, that wasn't
the CIA, that was the military. I don't people always
bring up that stuff with us, And I don't know
anything about the alien stuff or any of those kind
of things. And in terms of coming up with fake stories,
at least since the seventies, in reform of the intelligence
community and oversight by the Congress and stuff, we are
not allowed to put out false stories that appeal to
(30:48):
the American public. Like we can create a false story
that's aimed at the Russian military or the Iranians so
they think that we know something we don't know. But
we cannot put a story out publicly into the United
States against American We can try to keep up secret
because it's not tell anyone, but to create a fake
story that is to the American peace people, I'm not
(31:10):
aware of any of that.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
So, for example, when John and I were under cover,
we were State Department officers. We've now officially rolled or
covered back. You don't want to tell if you're working Pakistan,
you don't want to say I'm a CIA officer because
you're gonna get You're gonna be killed, so you have
a cover story. So yeah, that's a fake story, but
I think we would kind of gree that's okay. And
(31:32):
then they get to go into a story like the
Glomar explore. Right, we were gonna go down to get
a Russian sub that had sunk with nuclear missiles, right,
and we built this whole thing, and the cover story
was that Howard Hughes vouched for us that it was
we were going to manganese mining right to and we
(31:53):
were going to try to get this Russian sub and
may or may not have gotten it, who knows. So
that's a cover story too, And that's been blitter. But
I don't think those are those are that's not really
what you're getting at. However, sometimes these things no snowball
and get out of it, and I don't know, I
don't think we have a ability to roll them back then,
and you lived in India and I wanted to, so
(32:15):
I was there as well, and there was a story
there that I had always heard that the CIA was
responsible for glaciers melting, for floods and earthquakes up in
the Himalayas, and I thought, what bullshit is that? And
I was in the agency, right, I'm like, that's utter horseshit.
After I retired, I found out that there was this
(32:35):
little nugget of truth to it that in nineteen sixty
and I was wondering, if you've heard this. In nineteen
sixty five, the CIA and the Indian government of the
IB their Internal Service that we put seven plutonium like
i'll say reactors but small components devices on this mountain
(32:56):
called Nanda Devi, which is India's second highest mountain, right
on the Chinese border, and had it an antenna. It
was basically despy on Chinese nuclear testing right that both
Indian and the United States wanted to And so a
team of mountain climbers, American and Indian mountain climbers climbed
up Non the Devi with these like hundreds and hundreds
(33:18):
of pounds of these nuclear plutonium devices that were going
to power the antenna. And they ran into a snowstorm
and they had to abandon all this equipment like halfway
up the mountain. And then they went back the next
year and they couldn't find it because it was all
snowed over. And supposedly it's still up there, right, So
(33:39):
this is in the Indian press. The Indian Prime Minister
has talked about it, and that was kind of an oopsie, right,
Maybe somebody go find it somedays. But of course the
local villagers every time there's a flood, that's not global warming,
it's those CIA nuclear and there's no way of rolling
that story back. And I'll tell you this, those small
devices are not causing earthquakes and huge floods up there.
(34:03):
It is global warm.
Speaker 4 (34:05):
I have another CIA question for you. You cannot be able
to answer this one for a number of reasons.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
So I wrote this.
Speaker 4 (34:09):
Book called The Vortex, which is the true story of
history is Deadly at Storm and the Liberation of Bangladesh,
which is connecting a storm, the deadlyest storm in history
that killed half a million people in what was then
East Pakistan is now Bangladesh, and then how that storm
sort of set things in motion to ultimately lead to
a genocide and a revolution, and then the creation of Bangladesh.
(34:33):
Nixon was involved in everything here. Nixon was heavily involved
on the bad guy's side, the Pakistani side, helping the
genocide going on. At one point, there was even almost
a nuclear confrontation in the Bay of Bengal, where the
American aircraft carrier in the Russian fleet were facing off
and we were minutes from destruction. And it didn't happen
because Daka, the capital of now Bangladesh, fell. So that's
(34:55):
the story of this book. But here's the CIA question. Afterwards, Mudjib,
who was the leader of bangladesh first president their George
Washington Fellow, was eventually assassinated in a coup, and the
Bangladeshis are convinced that the assassination was backed by the
CIA in retribution for the fight for independence.
Speaker 5 (35:16):
Is that possible.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
That's a good question. I served in Pakistan, Jerry served
in India. I don't know anything about that, and I
don't know that we had much resources or whatever in
Bangladesh at the time, but we were we meeting Nixon
and the administration was pro Pakistan, that's for sure. So
it is possible that there was a covert action that
essentially the US comment supported, which led to the wouldn't
(35:38):
be a CIA person killing, But.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
It led to that.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
But I don't know, I don't know anything about it,
do you know, Jerry.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
A little bit? And it's you know, I want to
apologize to all the Bengali and Bangladeshi, our Bengali viewership
out there. The United States doesn't give a shit about Bangladesh.
We just don't. We would only care if it like
our client state Pakistan at that time in India, which
(36:03):
was backed by the Russians. We would look at it
through that lens. But once the Muti Bohemi had won
and East Pekastan had become Bangladesh, washed our hands of it.
And I served in India and I got to tell
you I could count on my fist the number of
days we dealt with anything to do with Bangladesh were
just like it was important to the US as a
(36:24):
humanitarian place and increasingly is a place where people made textiles.
But I got to tell you there was there's no
strategic interest in Bangladesh and things like oh that leader
they went against US ten years ago, Let's go get them.
It's like there's there's simply is no motivation, like the
government doesn't work like that, We're onto the next next
(36:44):
pilot shit. It was like, I don't see why we'd
ever take risk. It would only be it wanted to
get along with the Bangladesh's.
Speaker 4 (36:52):
One thing is clear is that it was that the
Bangladeshi that the Nixon administration was eagerly withdrawing all food
aid and all aid that could possibly help the Bangladeshis
at that time. So they certainly orchestrated a famine, so
why not orchestrate a assassination.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Administration is the presidents make policy, and the CIA is
an action arm of the presidency. So when we go
to warn and go to war in Iraq, it's not
the Department of Defense war, it's the United States war.
And so the CIA is used by a president to
do something. It's the US action. And I'm not aware
of anything related to Bangladesh but the but Nixon and
Kissinger were involved in those things. They were the same
(37:29):
thing with the East Tmoor. It was a pretty ugly
situation at the time, and.
Speaker 3 (37:32):
The Russians were pushing that we were behind the Khalistan
movement to create a free seek pun job and that
the CIA was behind killing India ra Gandhi. So I
guess whenever I hear these things, it's yeah, okay. I
mean there's not an assassination that you know that somebody
doesn't claim there's a force.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Behind you know, your writings, your sub stack, your videos.
I would encourage people to do it. Is your your
site of Scottcarney dot com Is that right?
Speaker 4 (38:00):
Scott Carney dot com is my website. YouTube is where
I am the most active these days. On substack, where
I put out newsletters and things like that. But obviously
I've written six books, so's there's lots of ways to
interact with the stuff that I do.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher,
and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable Pictures
for I
Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
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