What 12 Years Doing the Wim Hof Method Taught Me

It's hard to believe that I began my journey with Wim Hof 12 years ago next month. I had no idea that my attempt to debunk an eccentric ice-guru in the mountains of Poland would so profoundly change my life. That week at his dilapidated training center ultimately spawned 2 books, stopped me from getting canker sores ever again and gave me tools to tackle depression and anxiety. More than that, it opened me up to a really great community of fellow ice seekers. 

But after 12 years of (nearly) daily practice I also have a few thoughts about the overall direction of InnerFire and the official Wim Hof Brand as well as some observations about how some effects of the method seem to trail off after extended practice.  So I put together an off-the-cuff video where I only drop a few bombshells.  

This is a picture of my very first time dunking in ice water. For those of you who thought that I am the ultimate picture of human composure in the face of extreme cold: think again. Fortunately, I got a lot better with practice

Finding a Wedge for Anxiety in the Time of Social Distancing

Many of us are struggling to find our bearings in a world that feels out of control. While we can't change the events of the moment, we DO have a measure of control over how our bodies deal with the stress.

These are scary times and it's completely normal to feel anxious and upset. I spent pretty much all of yesterday staring at the endless feed of bad news. It made me feel worse, not better. While we don’t have any power to alter politics, economics or public health precautions. We do have control over how we let that stress affect our bodies.

The nervous system we inherited from our ancestors isn’t well adapted to dealing with dangers that aren’t right in front of us. No homoerectus contemplated quarantine. Instead they saw a dangerous animal on the horizon and their bodies responded by pumping adrenaline and cortisol into their blood streams to give them the energy boost that might save their lives. Our ancestors' problems required physical responses. While we denizens of the modern world have remarkably similar bodies as our greatest grandparents the threats are different. When we contemplate social distancing our bodies still respond with the same hormonal cocktails that we did hundreds of thousands of years ago. Without an outlet for that energy, the havoc turns inwards, makes us feel anxious, and compromises our immune systems. 

The solution to this conundrum isn’t to surf the internet and bombard ourselves with more stressful inputs that we can’t solve. Instead, we need to find physical outlets that make use of those stress cocktails and which will bring our internal chaos under control. 

Right now is the time to double down on a physical practice that you can do on your own. There are tons of free and cheap yoga classes online. You can still go cycling or running outdoors. And you can work out in your front yard. If you know anything about my own journey over the last decade, then you know that I am a huge advocate of the Wim Hof method.  The breathing method just takes a few minutes to learn. And it’s an extremely quick way to bring your stress hormones under control. 

We also need to do everything we can to keep our immune systems healthy. We know that COVID-19 affects elderly and immunocompromised people much more than the general population. The Wim Hof method can’t do anything about transmission--you still need to keep up social distancing, washing your hands, and follow all the public health protocols in place. However, clinical trials in Holland back in 2014 showed that Wim Hof breathing can help suppress out of control immune responses. Since the worst damage from COVID-19 comes from an out of control immune reaction to the virus (not the virus itself) it at least stands to reason that it should help you if you get infected. I did a video about this about a week ago (see below). 

I dig into all of this a lot more in The Wedge. I offer up ten techniques that have worked for me to help control my autonomic nervous system in the face of all sorts of different stresses.  Some of those things are probably not going to be practical in the era of social distancing (sorry, I don’t think anyone is going to be able to head down to Peru to try shamanic plant medicine in the next few months). However at least half the book includes techniques you can adopt right now.  More importantly, it should help you adapt and get more out of just about any practice that you’re already doing.

I really wish I had the ability to release the book right now, but I’m stuck with an April 13, 2020 release date. However, I do have a few books on hand that I can sign and send to people in the United States through the post (assuming the post office remains open).  This is a link for how to get one. 

More important than that, please stay healthy. Wash your hands. And keep breathing. We might not be able to change the world right now, but we can help how we respond to it. 

ACX: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

I’m going to have to get into the weeds about audiobooks for a moment because they’re one of the most important tools that a writer has to make a steady living. And, unfortunately, in the last week some changes in the marketplace make it seem that some of the potential profits are going to get sucked away.

First the good.

When What Doesn’t Kill Us came out I made a sort of radical decision to skip the mainstream audio publishers to record and self-produce my own audiobook.  It turned out to be one of the smartest decisions that I ever made. I listed the book through ACX.com, a subdivision of Audible.com that caters to self-published authors. The advantage of self-publishing  was that I would earn a lot better royalty rate–40% where most mainstream publishing contracts are 12.5%.  ACX sends me checks every month, not every quarter, or every six months like most publishers do. It hasn’t made me rich, but audiobooks account for about 50% of what I make today.Not only that, but ACX had an offer that sweetened the deal. It was something called “Bounties”.  Bounties are essentially a reward for bringing new customers into Audible and they are a big part to why Audible has been able to corner the audiobook market.  The way it worked was that for every customer who downloaded my book first on Audible, and then maintained their subscription for 61 days, they would give me $50.Over the last year and a half I’ve earned 533 bounties for a total of $26,650. Yeah. That’s pretty good money.Overall I’ve been ecstatic about my experience with ACX.com. It’s given me real access to publishing profits, a steady income and allows me to reach an audience who print doesn’t appeal to.  Not only that, but I got to read the audiobook myself. ACX also ran a few promotions on behalf of “What Doesn’t Kill Us” that made it the number one book on the planet for two days.

Because they’ve been so awesome, I’ve gone to the mat for ACX. I’ve told all of my friends who are writing books to do everything they can to hold onto their audio rights and self publish through ACX. I’ve told them to turn down large advances if the publisher wanted to keep them. I’ve been annoying. The audiobook market is that good. But ACX just announce a change to its policies that is going to make it a little worse for authors.

And now the bad

A few days ago ACX sent me an email that they were going altering the Bounty program by increasing the payment to $75 for each new customer.  More money. Yay. That sounded great at first.

But then I read the fine print

.The new terms make it so that instead of earning a bounty if your book is the first one a new customer listens to, you will only earn the money if they use a referral link that you supply and market on social media separately from your main marketing push.

What’s worse?  If you go to your Amazon page audiobooks are still listed as “$0.00” for a free trial. That’s the same exact offer that writers are being asked to push through separate channels.  So you’re now in competition against your main book page to earn a bounty.Look at it this way: let’s say you score a major media spot on NPR, or a hit podcast, on TV or a viral YouTube video. I always mention on air that I have a great audiobook that I recorded myself–which drives people right to my Amazon page. I would say something along the lines of “If you like the dulcet sounds of my voice, you can pick up the Audiobook on Amazon”.With the old system, you’d earn a $50 Bounty if some of those listeners got excited enough to start up subscriptions to Audible because of your interview.  Now, those same listeners will go right to the Amazon page and the author gets cut out. Same goes for word of mouth. If someone tells their friends that you audiobook was amazing and subscribes to audible because of that you still get zero dollars.You only earn the bounty if someone types in a URL that looks like this:

https://www.audible.com/pd/B01N5NNZF8/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-077506&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_077506_rh_us

And even IF they do that, there’s no tangible advantage to the customer.  They don’t get a discount that is unique to your media appearance. They don’t get a couple extra free months. Nothing.Instead of playing towards the strengths of authors, the new Bounty program plays to the strengths of people with huge social media followings only.  So if you’re a person with a 100,000 Twitter followers and another 50,000 people on Instagram, then you might come out ahead–but not necessarily because they still lose out on people who come through amazon.com.If you’re not a social media expert, who understands the ins and outs of A/B testing campaigns, and constantly produces clickbait posts to increase your following, you’re definitely going to lose out.

…and the Ugly

Here’s the thing about ACX. When they started out they positioned themselves as allies to authors–democratizing they way that people access and listen to audiobooks.  In the first few years they offered 70% royalties to their self-published authors.Of course it was risky in the beginning–and authors had to do most of the heavy lifting. Authors have to self-produce the audiobook, which takes time and in many cases around $6500 to record. Still, it was an amazing opportunity and authors around the country helped Audible corner the market for Audiobooks. Now, when you think “audiobook” you think “audible”.   There aren’t a lot of other places that people go to pick them up.Once they had market dominance ACX and Audible started changing their terms.  A few years ago they brought the 70% royalty rate down to 50%. A couple years later they brought that number down to 40%.   Mind you, Audible isn’t doing more work here, they’re just giving authors a worse deal because they’re the biggest player in the market. Authors are giving up 60% of their money simply to access distribution.Now they’re also taking out the rewards from the bounty system.This is a pretty classic story of what happens with monopolies. At first a tech giant woos creative people to adopt and start using their platform with good terms for everyone. They look like heroes and disruptors, and they tell the people who build them up to trust them to steward a bright future. Then, one day, it turns out that all those people who helped build up that company are now just cogs in a machine that the company controls.  The profits stay at the top and the people who made that company great are just grist for the mill.So now I’m on the lookout for other opportunities. It’s clear that Audible shouldn’t be the only marketplace for self-published books. Eventually a new player will have to enter into the market with offers that woo people like me back to a more equitable service.__

This, of course is pretty bad news for freelancers, but there are a few ways to fight back. I recently started offering an online video course teaching some of the tricks that I use to negotiate better contracts, and grow my freelancing business from nothing to becoming a New York Times bestselling author.  It might be useful for you.

 Check it out.

TEDx-CU: How the Environment Shapes Human Blology

In May 2017, I took the stage at TEDx-CU and asked whether the comforts of the modern age  have made us weaker? Watch the video by clicking the link above.   Or

click here

to see it on YouTube.

Listen to the "What Doesn't Kill US" audiobook

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What Doesn’t Kill Us: How Freezing water, Extreme Altitude and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength

is officially out as an audiobook on Audible, Amazon, iBooks. It has been featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday and in Men’s Journal and debuted at the #112 spot on Amazon in January 2017.  I recorded the audiobook myself with the help of Marcello Lessa, one of the top audio engineers in the Denver area.  It runs just shy of 10 hours and is exactly the sort of inspiration that you need to reach your highest potential.  Come with me on an evolutionary journey to understand how the comforts of the modern age are making us weak, and what we can do to get a little of our ancestral strength back. Download your copy today: Audible iBooks Amazon

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Here is what some of the early reviewers are saying:Climbing a mountain in nothing but a pair of shorts seems idiotic to most, but for Wim Hof and his companions, it’s just another day. When investigative journalist and anthropologist Carney heard about Hof’s mind boggling methods and claims that he could “hack” the human body, he knew he had to venture to Poland to expose this fraud. But in just a few days, Hof changed Carney’s mind, and so began a friendship and a new adventure. Carney now chronicles his journey to push himself mentally and physically using Wim Hof’s method of cold exposure, breath-holding, and meditation to tap into our primal selves. Our ancestors survived harsh conditions without modern technology, while we live in comfortable bubbles with little to struggle against and wonder how they survived.The question is,

What happens when we push our bodies to the limit?

Carney calls on evolutionary biology and other modern scientific disciplines to explore and explain Hof’s unconventional methods. Fresh and exciting, this book has wide appeal for readers interested in health, sports, self-improvement, and extreme challenges.―

Booklist

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“Damn fun and extremely well-researched,

What Doesn’t Kill Us

is a great addition to the canon of high performance literature!”―

Steven Kotler, New York Times bestselling author of Abundance and The Rise of Superman

“As a Navy SEAL, you live by the mantra, ‘what doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger.’ We would hear this phrase and repeat it, but we never had any proof that it was factual. Yet through comprehensive study, ScottCarney has brilliantly documented how engaging in environmental conditioning, breathing, meditation, and other techniques can actually make us physically and mentally stronger.

What Doesn’t Kill Us

is a fascinating book that will captivate all who read it and that will be of immense value to those in the military, those who are active in sports, and those who seek an alternate means of developing greater mental and physical strength.”

―Don D. Mann, New York Times bestselling author, Inside SEAL Team SIX

What Doesn't Kill Us: the Trailer

For the last four years I’ve been investigating the limits of human endurance in harsh environments. After all, our ancestors crossed frozen mountain ranges and endless ocean miles without a whisper of modern technology. So why can’t you? This trailer is just a taste of the incredible journey that took me to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro without a shirt, meditating on the banks of snowy rivers in Poland and into the training gyms of top athletes, all to understand what makes us human. Available everywhere January 17, 2017.

Find your copy at Amazon

Here’s what early readers are saying:

“The further we get from the harsh environmental conditions that once threatened our existence, the more we need them. I see this every weekend at a Spartan Race somewhere in the world. Millions of otherwise sane people line up to suffer and push themselves to their physical limits, and it feels good. What Doesn’t Kill Us is a fascinating investigation into the innate urge that drives people like these, and reveals how some have managed to use environmental conditioning to accomplish truly extraordinary things.”

— Joe DeSena, founder, Spartan Race 

“As a Navy SEAL, you live by the mantra, ‘what doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger.’ We would hear this phrase and repeat it, but we never had any proof that it was factual. Yet through comprehensive study, Scott Carney has brilliantly documented how engaging in environmental conditioning, breathing, meditation, and other techniques can actually make us physically and mentally stronger. What Doesn’t Kill Us is a fascinating book that will captivate all who read it and that will be of immense value to those in the military, those who are active in sports, and those who seek an alternate means of developing greater mental and physical strength.”— Don D. Mann, New York Times bestselling author of Inside SEAL Team SIX

Amazon –Barnes & Noble–Books-a-million–IndieBound–iBooks

If you're willing to buy a kidney, you're willing...

What would happen if the United States legalized the sale of human organs? Economists will note the seductive market logic: with regulation, proponents of legalization suggest the organ shortage will disappear, the market will arrive at a fair price for human tissue and new laws will regulate away criminal elements.

For argument’s sake, let’s assume that the U.S. would be able to create its own equitable system. What would happen in the rest of the world? Whether we like it or not, we live in the era of globalization, and if the U.S. legalizes the market for body parts, there is no reason to think that international economies won’t play a role in how a patient decides to procure transplant organs.

According to the National Foundation for Transplants, a kidney transplant costs about $260,000. In the illegal organ markets in India, Egypt and Pakistan, the same procedure rings in at just shy of $20,000 — certified organ included.

Immunosuppressant drugs have come so far that a broker can arrange a transplant in as little as 30 days. The only thing stopping the typical American transplant patient from going abroad and buying an organ is the difficulty of making contact with a broker and the threat of what might happen if they get caught.

In the real world, kidneys don’t have a fixed price. Instead, the market for human body parts is a lot like the one for used cars: They’re only worth what someone is willing to sell them for. In the age of cheap international travel, where state-of-the-art hospitals abut the most impoverished slums on earth, hundreds of thousands of people are available and willing to sell their flesh for pennies on the dollar. Some of these areas are so well known among organ traffickers and brokers that they’ve earned the name “kidneyvilles” for their plentiful supply of willing “donors.”

Between 2006 and 2010, I made India my home while researching the global trade in human body parts. India is notable in the organ trafficking world because of its advanced hospitals and plentiful supply of extreme poverty. In 2004, after a tsunami ripped across South Asia and slammed into the eastern coast of the country, hundreds of thousands of people wound up in refugee camps. These desperately poor people had few options for work or making a livelihood, a perfect opportunity for organ brokers. It was a buyer’s market, and everyone sold.

Typically, the brokers promised $2,000 per organ, but only delivered the advance, always finding one excuse or another not to pay the rest of the money. Even so, husbands sold their kidneys and then pressured their wives to sell theirs. The price for a kidney fell to as low as $600.

When I visited one camp called Ernavoor outside the bustling metropolis of Chennai, I met 80 women with foot long scars across their abdomens. These were not the equitable arrangements that proponents of organ markets advocate for. This was a symptom of extreme poverty. Of course, none of the people in that camp could ever expect to receive an organ should one of their own fail. The one rule with organ markets is that human tissue always moves up — and never down — the social hierarchy.

Still, that was an illegal market. What would happen if the trade were well regulated abroad? To answer this, it’s helpful to review what happened in the market for human surrogate babies. In the U.S., it is legal to pay a woman to carry a child, so long as the money is called “compensation” and not coercion. Even so, an American surrogate might cost as much as $100,000 in such arrangements.

Once the market was clearly defined in America, other countries, with looser definitions of human rights, fought for their share of the market. In 2002, India became the go-to destination for procuring a budget surrogate womb. To the surprise of no one, the Indian industry soon began to cut corners. Women were housed under lock and key in houses known to the press as “baby factories.” Because U.S. patient demanded to know the condition of their child during the entire course of the pregnancy, surrogates became virtual slaves under the doctor’s perpetual surveillance.

The factories multiplied and soon tens of thousands of international customers reasoned that if it was legal to hire a surrogate at home, why not save money abroad? In some cases, when a pregnancy didn’t go as planned and the doctor had to choose between the life of an unborn surrogate baby and the life of mother, the mother did not always survive. Late last year, India finally outlawed surrogacy tourism after non-stop incidents and official inquiries into the surrogates’ wellbeing. Now the commercial surrogacy boomseems to be moving to Cambodia where regulations are still loose.

Still, the rise of surrogacy scandals is a warning about what might happen if we legalize organ sales in America. Even if the trade appears to work at home, there is no way to ensure that American customers won’t look for better deals abroad. We cannot solve our own organ shortage by exploiting the poor and helpless people on the other side of the world.

Explore these other perspectives from the Washington Post’s In Theory blog which, this week was talking about government compensation for organ donors. 

Sally Satel: Generosity won’t fix our shortage of organs for transplants

Francis Delmonico and Alexander Capron: Our body parts shouldn’t be for sale

Scott Sumner: The moral case for paying kidney donors

Benjamin Humphreys: Will lab-grown kidneys fix our transplant waiting lists?

Josh Morrison: It’s time to treat organ donors with the respect they deserve

A Look Behind the Scenes at WordRates

Here’s some big news in the wide world of WordRates. In the last month or so there has been a ton of work going on behind the scenes figuring out how to best structure the project. Here’s a quick update: WordRates is now an LLC in Colorado. We’ve brought on the Rao Law Group to handle the legal side of things. The website is being put together by the Colorado-based design company Lime9web, in conjunction with Umar Ilyas of eJuicy Solutions in Islamabad.

We have a group of 9 mentors who have signed up to tackle PitchLab. Together they’ve published more than a dozen books and contribute to the top publications in America includingVanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, Bloomberg-BusinessWeek, the New Yorker, Atlantic and Conde Nast Traveler.

We are still in the very early stages of design and managing the back end of the site. But here’s some very rough sketches of what the site will actually look like when you start to use it. I’ll start posting more refined designs as we get them ready

Here is roughly what you will see when you log onto wordrates.com:

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 Individual reviews of editors and magazines will lead to a page that is laid out like this: 

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And every member will have their own profile: 

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Our Collective Problem

For 40 years the business of translating one language to another was controlled by the AIIC, a group of professional freelance translators who worked for governments, the United Nations and every business you could imagine. They set fair rates for their services and standards for the quality of their work, but weren’t technically employed by the AIIC.  They were part of the gig economy and they made their livings as independent contractors.

In 1994 a group of businesses complained to the Federal Trade Commission arguing that freelance translators had no right to determine what fair pay was for themselves. They argued to the FTC that freelancers were independent businesses  and that setting a minimum standard for their labor was the the same as operating a cartel. In the dull legalese of the day the FTC ruled in their favor saying, “We find that respondents price-fixing practices and market allocation rules are per se unlawful agreements in restraint of trade and a violation of the FTC Act.” After that companies no longer had to be held back by the tyranny of paying a living wage to their skilled workers. Instead, translators were forced to slash their prices against one another in an all out race to the bottom.  The result was that today translators don’t make nearly what they once did.

No one predicted that self-employment would be the new employment standard for the millennium. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics the number of self-employed people has gone up by half since the ruling.  As millions of people join the “sharing economy” or have to freelance their way into a job, the rights of freelancers are more important now than they ever were.

Being self-employed has some major advantages–creative control, setting your own hours and being your own boss–but there are also a lot of disadvantages, too. We pay twice the social security taxes–the so-called “self-employment tax” means we pay the employers share as well as our own–and we have no protections for minimum earnings.  When you’re a freelancer your work is your commodity, and like all commodities, its value fluctuates with the market.

While there have been some brave attempts to organize freelancers since the FTC ruling. The Freelancer’s Union, whose founder Sarah Horowitz won a MacArthur Genius award,  the sheer numbers of independent workers under its banner to negotiate for slightly better deals on health care. However barring that one incremental victory, no one advocates for freelancers. And no union can legally bargain collectively on our behalf without running afoul of the Federal Trade Commission.

All of this is to say: this is exactly why I’m attempting to change the way freelancer writers and journalists do business. Since it is illegal to actually negotiate as a group for better wages and contracts, the only real option that writers have to affect the market for their stories is to bargain individually, but on a massive scale. Wordrates & Pitchlab is not a union. But if it works the way I hope that it will, it will use the power of information sharing to make the market for words a little bit more fair. While we can’t set a minimum rate for our work, we can allow and agent to negotiate for higher rates on our behalf. It’s perfectly legal to turn down a contract if the publication wants to weaken your claim to copyright.  And, instead of competing against each other for lower and lower rates, we turn the scales on the industry to make publications compete against each other.

As of right now Wordrates is 62% of the way to is goal of $6500 and has 18 days to go.  We have 113 backers, which means 113 writers who are eager to fight for better pay, contribute market information and mentor each other to become better negotiators.  However, since Kickstarter is all-or-nothing funding it means that we need to actually reach the goal if we want to see it built.   So please share it on Facebook and Twitter and tell your friends in the media that if they want to see a living wage for writers, this might be the best way to achieve it.

Should Writers Dream of Being Middle Class?

I have the audacity to believe that writers should be able to make a middle class living. I began writing about the difficulties that writers have negotiating for the value of their work amidst increasingly hostile market conditions back in January. I asked “How much are words worth?” and since then I’ve received almost a hundred emails from writers around the country who are fed up with their inability to make a living off.

This in part explains why the first three days of the Kickstarter campaign to create a new platform for writers to share market information and pitch stories have been so amazing.  As of right now when I’m typing this blog post Wordrates and Pitch Lab is 29% funded!

Screen Shot 2015-04-27 at 8.49.52 AM

I’m incredibly grateful to the community of writers and journalists out there who see this as a worthwhile project, and your continuing efforts to get the word out about it.  Even so, there is still a lot of work left to do to get over the finish line. We just need $4,590 more so that I can hire a web designer to start banging out the code.  However, since Kickstarter is all-or-nothing funding, if I’m even one dollar short the campaign will fail and all the pledges will go unfulfilled.

So, If you haven’t pledged yet, please consider it. Even a modest donation of $25 will get you a six months of membership and access to editorial contact information and inside market data.  There are a lot of other cool rewards, too.  If you have already pledged there are other things you can do to help out. Fundraising campaigns like these live and die by social media so please keep tweeting and posting updates on Facebook.  Post about it on Reddit (r/writing might be a good place), Digg and get your local writers groups involved.

Share this link (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/767033302/wordrates-and-pitchlab-fixing-journalism-since-mid) and maybe one day the dream of writers making a middle class living will be one step closer to reality.

Help Kickstart Wordrates & Pitchlab

I am proud to announce that this morning I’m going to do more than just write about the problems in the publishing industry. I’m going to do something about them. I’m launching a Kickstarter campaign that I hope will shift the ways that writers think about and market their work. I’m only asking for enough money to design the website. Please share this widely and lets make some great journalism together.

Here’s a link to the project:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/767033302/wordrates-and-pitchlab-fixing-journalism-since-mid

For the Safety of Journalists

A few months ago the Dart Center for Trauma and Journalism gathered together some of the top media organizations in the world and hashed out principles for ethical conduct for freelancers and publications that operate in conflict zones. The guidelines are not legally binding, but they are an important first step in reforming the often-broken relationship between publications, journalists and the stories they both want to get into print. As I’ve written over the last year, bad contracts, kill fees and uncertain payments often push freelance writers to take additional risks in conflict zones that can either result in bad reporting, or sometimes even a journalist’s life.

The guidelines issue recommendations for medical training, protective gear, risk assessment as well as transparent payment policies, and credit. They also agree that publications should be responsible for ransom and evacuation of freelancers in the same way that they would be for their own employees. These guidelines are a huge step forward from the previous era where news organizations might simply disavow a freelance writer or photographer who got in trouble while on assignment.

So far there are 60 signatories to the document, but there are still a few notable exceptions that routinely have freelance writers operating in potentially dangerous areas. It’s time to urge The New York Times, National Public Radio, Conde Nast, Wenner Media, Atlantic Media, and American Public Media to stand up for the safety of the the people who put their lives in their name.

Like many non-binding documents, only time will tell if they signatories are ready to make this more than an on-paper commitment, but something they will act on during a crisis.  I have hope that they will.

I’ll post the complete guidelines and signatories below. Please share them.

FOR JOURNALISTS ON DANGEROUS ASSIGNMENTS:

1. Before setting out on any assignment in a conflict zone or any dangerous environment, journalists should have basic skills to care for themselves or injured colleagues.

2. We encourage all journalists to complete a recognized news industry first aid course, to carry a suitable first-aid kit and continue their training to stay up-to-date on standards of care and safety both physical and psychological. Before undertaking an assignment in such zones, journalists should seek adequate medical insurance covering them in a conflict zone or area of infectious disease.

3. Journalists in active war zones should be aware of the need and importance of having protective ballistic clothing, including armored jackets and helmets. Journalists operating in a conflict zone or dangerous environment should endeavor to complete an industry-recognized hostile environment course.

4. Journalists should work with colleagues on the ground and with news organizations to complete a careful risk assessment before traveling to any hostile or dangerous environment and measure the journalistic value of an assignment against the risks.

5. On assignment, journalists should plan and prepare in detail how they will operate including identifying routes, transport, contacts and a communications strategy with daily check-in routines with a colleague in the region or their editor. Whenever practical, journalists should take appropriate precautions to secure mobile and Internet communications from intrusion and tracking.

6. Journalists should work closely with their news organizations, the organization that has commissioned them, or their colleagues in the industry if acting independently, to understand the risks of any specific assignment. In doing so, they should seek and take into account the safety information and travel advice of professional colleagues, local contacts, embassies and security personnel. And, likewise, they should share safety information with colleagues to help prevent them harm.

7. Journalists should leave next of kin details with news organizations, ensuring that these named contacts have clear instructions and action plans in the case of injury, kidnap or death in the field.

FOR NEWS ORGANIZATIONS MAKING ASSIGNMENTS IN DANGEROUS PLACES:

1. Editors and news organizations recognize that local journalists and freelancers, including photographers and videographers, play an increasingly vital role in international coverage, particularly on dangerous stories.

2. Editors and news organizations should show the same concern for the welfare of local journalists and freelancers that they do for staffers.

3. News organizations and editors should endeavor to treat journalists and freelancers they use on a regular basis in a similar manner to the way they treat staffers when it comes to issues of safety training, first aid and other safety equipment, and responsibility in the event of injury or kidnap.

4. Editors and news organizations should be aware of, and factor in, the additional costs of training, insurance and safety equipment in war zones.  They should clearly delineate before an assignment what a freelancer will be paid and what expenses will be covered.

5. Editors and news organizations should recognize the importance of prompt payment for freelancers. When setting assignments, news organizations should endeavor to provide agreed upon expenses in advance, or as soon as possible on completion of work, and pay for work done in as timely a manner as possible.

6. Editors and news organizations should ensure that all freelance journalists are given fair recognition in bylines and credits for the work they do both at the time the work is published or broadcast and if it is later submitted for awards, unless the news organization and the freelancer agree that crediting the journalist can compromise the safety of the freelancer and/or the freelancer’s family.

7. News organizations should not make an assignment with a freelancer in a conflict zone or dangerous environment unless the news organization is prepared to take the same responsibility for the freelancer’s wellbeing in the event of kidnap or injury as it would a staffer. News organizations have a moral responsibility to support journalists to whom they give assignments in dangerous areas, as long as the freelancer complies with the rules and instructions of the news organization.

In conclusion, we, the undersigned, encourage all staff and freelance journalists and the news organizations they work with to actively join in a shared commitment to safety and a new spirit of collegiality and concern.

SIGNATORY ORGANIZATIONS

Agence France Press

Al-Monitor

American Society of Journalists and Authors

Association of European Journalists (Bulgaria)

The Associated Press

Belarusian Association of Journalists

Blink

Bloomberg

British Broadcasting Corporation

Canadian Journalism Forum on Violence and Trauma

Center for Journalism and Public Ethics (Mexico)

Committee to Protect Journalists

Danish Union of Journalists

Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma

Ena News Agency

European Federation of Journalists

Foreign Correspondents’ Club (Hong Kong)

Foro de Periodismo Argentino

Frontline Club

Frontline Freelance Register

The Frontliner (Albania)

Global Journalist Security

GlobalPost

The GroundTruth Project

Guardian News and Media Group

International Center for Journalists

International News Safety Institute

International Press Institute

International Women’s Media Foundation

James W. Foley Legacy Foundation

Journalistic Freedoms Observatory (Iraq)

Journalists in Danger (Kazakhstan)

Mashable

McClatchy DC

Miami Herald

National Press Club

National Press Photographers Association

National Union of Journalists-Philippines

NewsweekNOS News (Netherlands)

Online News Association

Overseas Press Club of America

Overseas Press Club Foundation

PBS FrontlinePress Emblem Campaign (Switzerland)

Public Radio International’s The World

Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues

Reporters Without Borders

Reuters

Rory Peck TrustSecurity First (UK)

Society of Professional Journalists

Storyhunter

Trauma Training for Journalists

Union of Journalists in Israel

USA TodayVideo News (Japan)

Words After War

Zuma Press

News organizations, journalist associations or advocacy groups interested in joining these guidelines should contact David Rohde, david.rohde@thomsonreuters.com.

– See more at: http://dartcenter.org/content/global-safety-principles-and-practices#sthash.vC9z1SrJ.dpuf

Why "Cult" is the Wrong Word

The early 1960s saw a flourishing of fringe religious groups that the press had no other word for than “cults”. It was a simpler time, and the word was meant to describe religious movements that didn’t easily fit into the established religions. The word encompassed hippies experimenting with alternative ideologies, Christian evangelicals, crystal energy healers, and back to the earth types who, might be a little odd, but basically harmless. It was hard to identify exactly what a cult was, except that there were millions of people searching for a personal connection with God. Then, in 1969 everything changed when followers of Charles Mason murdered Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of the director Roman Polanski. They coated the walls in her blood and inked the words “Helter Skelter” above the crime scene. Nine years later 800 followers of the People’s Temple killed a US congressman in Guyana and then took their own lives with cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.

After that bloody introduction the world took a new perspective on the word “cult”.  Cults weren’t harmless. They were dangerous.  They stole people from their families, brainwashed them with false ideologies and sometimes even took their lives. Today, the word brings to mind the Branch-Davidians in Waco, Texas and the exploitive practices of the Church of Scientology. There is a burgeoning field of anti-cult literature, support groups for former cult members and exit counselors whose main job is to bring people out of these groups and back to their families. It is clear that many of these groups prey on their members, take their money, and often leave them in dire straights with no one to turn to except for their charismatic leader.

When I began researching “A Death on Diamond Mountain,” it was the word on everyone’s lips. Ian Thorson’s family spent tens of thousands of dollars on exit counselors to get him out of what they called a “dangerous cult”.  The press called Michael Roach a cult leader dozens of times. One article, by the New York Times, even had some of Roach’s closest devotees using the word to describe their own practice. And yet, I have resisted calling Diamond Mountain a cult.  People have wanted to know why.

One review on NPR put it succinctly: “It’s hard to read Death on Diamond Mountain and not reach a definite verdict: Cult! But Carney lets this and other questions linger to the end.” Another written by Matthew Remski, a former Roach follower,  charges that I don’t go deep enough into anti-cult literature nor did I devote endless pages Roach’s own profound narcism.

But there is a reason that I don’t slap the “cult” label on Diamond Mountain. It would have just been too easy. Using the word would allow my readers to think of it as something wholly alien to their own religious experience. We all know that cults are inherently crazy, and once we hear the word we begin to distance ourselves from them. We become voyeurs, not participants in the story.  It’s a pejorative term that allows us to not see ourselves in the so-called “cult members.”

We forget that every great religion on earth started as a cult.  The beliefs of early Christianity were no less irrational or steeped in divine explanations that what Roach teaches at Diamond Mountain. The Cult of Mary has tens of millions of followers. The origin story of Mormonism includes golden tablets written by god and discovered by Joseph Smith in Palmyra New York. Smith was even tarred and feathered as he tried to spread the word of his new faith. The Hindu cosmology suggests that the universe sits on the back of a giant tortuous, who in turn is standing on the back of a giant turtle.  Who is to say that one irrational belief is more valid than another?

As I see it, the main difference between a cult and a religion is time. I’ve even make a formula:

Cult + Time = Religion

The great religions of the world are no more free of tragic, and even murderous, events than the cults of our age.  Christians in Salem Massachusetts burned witches at the stake.  The great Aztec faith prospered on human sacrifices. Islam has jihad and, as I recount in my book, even Buddhism had its holy wars. One monastery was happy to destroyed another one when some arcane and esoteric message was on the line.

We use the word “cult” to distance ourselves from what we think of as irrational beliefs in order to not take a good look at ourselves. Of course, many of these groups are sometimes dangerous. Many leaders use spiritual explanations in order to take advantage of their followers. And as my book lays out, Diamond Mountain is extremely problematic. But I won’t call it a cult. Doing so would let my readers off the hook from seeing how every spiritual journey holds the potential for danger.

Tantric Obsession

On Wednesday the Rubin Museum invited me to have a conversation with David Vago, a neuroscientist at Harvard University, to speak about tantric obsession and how spiritual bliss can sometimes go terribly wrong. It was a fascinating discussion in an amazing venue. Here are a few highlights.

The Enlightenment Trap

In March of 2006, Emily O’Conner was sure that she was on the cusp of enlightenment. We had spent the last seven days on a silent meditation retreat together in the holy city in India for Buddhists called Bodh Gaya. I was the director of her abroad program, and Emily was my student. Late in the night she filled her journal with a scrawl about what she had learned in the silence. She wrote that contemplating her own death was the key to deeper spiritual realizations. A few paragraphs later she wrote the words, “I’m scared that I will have this realization and go crazy.” Then, on the last page, in a paragraph all by itself, she penned her last words — a final resolution to her spiritual progress: “I am a Bodhisattva.”

When she was done writing she wrapped a shawl around her face, stood on the ledge of the three-story building, and jumped. One of the other students on the program found her body an hour later.

In Tibetan Buddhism a Bodhisattva is a fully realized being whose deep spiritual insights have opened the door to Nirvana. However, rather than stepping though the threshold, Bodhisattvas pledge to remain on earth to help other people to the same realizations. In a way, you could think of a Bodhisattva as a sort of god that exists beyond the realm of life and death. Almost three millennia earlier, in a spot less than a mile from where Emily took her own life, the man who would become known as the Buddha had a similar realization. He spent the remaining time he had on earth translating his knowledge to a growing community of followers.

I have often struggled with the apparent contradiction of how these spiritual lessons can be so profoundly beneficial for millions of people while at the same time be so profoundly damaging for a few. Indeed, even in the time of the Buddha, some of his followers pursuit of spiritual perfection ended in suicide. In the vinaya, early Buddhist writings recorded in Pali, there is a story of when Buddha asked his monks to meditate on the inevitable decay of their own bodies. He instructed them to sit in graveyards and watch bodies decay (a version of this practice called chod still exists in modern Tibetan Buddhism). Once he gave the lesson, the Buddha headed off into the mountains to mediate, trusting his flock to understand his commands. But the monks who followed the lesson were so overcome with insight that they committed suicide. Others implored a recluse monk namedMigalandika to slit their throats. When he returned, the Buddha put a stop to the carnage. The scholar Timothy Brook recently wrote that Migalandika’s story became canonized because it took aim “at the hopeless literalism that tends to arise when religious followers devise institutions they hope will enable them to live up to the ideals of an absent founder.”

This sort of literal interpretation in the face of metaphysical truths inflects the rhetoric of fundamentalists from ISIS to rogue American evangelicals. There’s no question in many of our minds that the world is more complex than the one defined by pure rationality. Science has its limitations, and any rational attempt at answering a moral question usually ends in a gray area, not in stark black or white. But people who can presume a direct connection to divine knowledge — either through textual fidelity or direct personal experience — don’t have ambiguities anymore.

The violent plague of Islamic fundamentalism in the Iraq and Syria has left hundreds of thousands of people dead in the name of an ultimate truth that is hidden from ordinary eyes. ISIS fighters carry out objectively heinous acts without a qualm to the moral order of the world they inhabit because their eyes are fixed on heaven.

In this way, the person who seeks enlightenment without regard to their own place in society risks falling into a similar disconnect that a jihadi does. A few turn violent, like the so-called “Bin Laden of Buddhism,” who encourages genocide against muslims in Burma. More frequently, the inward focus of eastern religions makes the struggle for ultimate knowledge personal, but even that turn can undermine the social order. Today the star yoga guru Bikram Choudhury appears to have rationalized his inappropriate sexual advances on his students through his spiritual insights. He now faces multiple sexual assault allegations. The same fate befell John Friend founder of Anusara Yoga a year ago and dozens of spiritual leaders from Osho toSogyal Rinpoche and Michael Roach before that. All claimed to be closer to a universal truth their their students. And they all took advantage of their power.

Of course, the danger doesn’t only lie in the teacher. Anyone searching for ultimate knowledge runs the risk of discovering their own fundamental laws of the universe. After she died, I began to research similar cases to Emily’s. I wanted to try to understand how someone could become overcome with potentially dangerous spiritual insights after a meditation retreat. To my surprise, examples proliferated. In a matter of weeks I collected six journals of people who took their own life or ended up in mental asylums. I spoke to directors of alternative universities who told me that every year they send students to mental health professionals after bad experiences on their meditation cushions. Moreover, I met Tibetan scholars who told me about a curious condition among inveterate meditators called “lung” that can drive people to the brink of insanity. The diagnosis of lung goes back centuries — long before meditation ever came to America. I interviewed a neuroscientist at Brown University who has collected hundreds of anecdotes from mediators whose progress was cut short when they began to lose touch with reality.

Raising the notion that meditation can occasionally be dangerous is not popular among practitioners. Most people correctly note that mindfulness has improved their quality of life. They point to studies that show all sorts of qualitative and quantitative improvements to cardiovascular function, memory, and even empathy. But, like all things in life, nothing is truly black and white. Meditation and spiritual inquiry can be beneficial, maybe even necessary, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t risks.

I can never know why Emily killed herself, but it strikes me as the sort of tragedy that people who are trying to live spiritual lives try to shy away from. It is undoubtedly worthwhile to search for spiritual insights.

We can uncover deep and hidden parts of our own psyches in the process and perhaps become better people. The problem begins when the search ends. Just like the monks in Migalandika’s time, Emily believed that she had reached a sort communion with a divine truth. Enlightenment was a destination that she could observe just like a natural law. And her insight meant that she was infallible. Her journey was complete. At that point, what would it matter if she took her own life?

Enlightenment, if it exists, may be a goal worth striving for, but it is not worth achieving. While we may never understand the ultimate clockwork that makes the universe work — whether it is the law of karma or grace from a benevolent God — one thing that we do know is that people who claim to understand ultimate knowledge most often don’t feel that they need to follow the same rules as everyone else.

Scott Carney (scottcarney.com) is a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. His book A Death on Diamond Mountain: A True Story of Obsession, Madness and the Path to Enlightenment comes out on March 17.

Editors weigh in on market pitching

A few weeks ago I posted about the relative merits of market versus silo pitching and the post kicked up a lot of conversation around the internet. Yesterday Lesley Evans Ogden reached out to a few editors to see what they thought of the practice. Her piece “Simultaneous Pitching: Views from the Other Side of the Desk” has responses from seven editors, including one that I have known for four or five years (who somehow got my name wrong).

Of course, there’s no reason for editors to like the fact that they might have to compete for particular ideas. So I was happily surprised to see how open most of them were to the fact that the notion that simultaneous pitching is just a fact of the industry. While one or two bristled at the idea that not every pitch they receive might be truly exclusive, they also grudgingly admitted that it could take weeks to even read an idea. One wrote  that the ten minutes that they have to dedicate to reading a pitch can be a burden to an already packed work day. This of course assumes that it isn’t a burden to freelancer to wait in some sort of queue, possibly weeks, for an up or down answer that should only take minutes. What happens to that freelancer if the editor says no? There are only 52 weeks in a year, how many chances can an idea get at bat before it is stale?

All the editors did seem to agree that even if a pitch does get accepted into a magazine, it usually changes as writer and editor work together. And, from this perspective, you could say that there is no such thing as multi-pitching, anyway, since the final product will always adapt to the specific publication.

Tracy Hyatt, Editor, WestworldBC Magazine, notes:

“Back when I started 15 years ago, it [simultaneous pitching] was a no-no because every publication wanted to have exclusive content… Nowadays, we’re seeing a lot of the content repeated all over the place. So you don’t really have any exclusivity on any content, or any ideas for that matter.”

It’s definitely a worthwhile read. It also seems to clear the way for an idea that I’ve been working on to transform the way that ideas get to the market. Keep an eye on this website. Big things are going to

An (almost) Deadly Journey on Diamond Mountain

In 2012 Ian Thorson and his wife Lama Christie McNally attempted to find spiritual perfection on a mountain top in Arizona. Only a few loyal followers knew where they were and the supply drops were increasingly sporadic. Water was scarce, but they collected what they could of it in a tarp and a plastic jug after a lucky snowfall. They lived there for almost a month before Christie and then Ian fell sick with dysentery. At first Ian was filled with rage by his plight–going as far as hitting himself on the head with a piece of hard plastic in the cave. They packed an emergency locator beacon and a cell phone with them, but Christie waited three days before she sent out a call for help. It was too late for Ian.

Two months after Ian Thorson died her the arms I traveled to Arizona to try to understand the world through his eyes. I wanted to know why she hadn’t pushed the button that would have saved his life earlier. I wanted to see the place where it happened and feel desolate climate of this part of the world. Most importantly, I wanted to see the cave where Ian spent the last month of his life.

The journey could have killed me.

People at Diamond Mountain all told me that even though they knew where the cave was, no one wanted to visit it. Bad things had happened there and no one wanted to tempt fate.  The sheriff Larry Noland implored me waive off my expedition. He tried to scare me with storiesof poisonous cacti, impossible heat, bears and rattlesnakes in every rocky crevasse. But I was adamant and convinced a local rancher to escort me at least part of the way.

It was only a mile and a half, but it was the hardest hike of my life.  It also turned out that Noland was right on almost every scary story that he told me. I heard rattle snakes, got stuck by a poisonous cacti. Luckily there were no bears.

What I did discover, though, was that McNally and Thorson spent their last days together in a small cave that offered magnificent views the retreat valley below, but very few amenities to support them. At one point the cave had been home to a Hohokom Indian who had stashed, but never recovered, a giant pot of grain on the dirt floor. I also learned that merely visiting the spot was dangerous enough to almost kill me. The rancher, Jerry, turned back after I pushed up a steep gravel slope. He was out of water and thought it too risky to continue.  I pushed on and found the cave. Getting back, however, was even more difficult than coming up.

This is a video I shot on my way back down. I think the pain in my voice explains much more than I ever could with with a keyboard.

This was the beginning of a project that would take me almost two years to complete. First with a story in Playboy magazine, and later as a book “A Death on Diamond Mountain“

Inside Pacific Standard Interview where I swear like...

A week or so ago Noah Davis, who writes a column for Pacific Standard called How Do You Make a Living, noticed the posts that I’d been doing about the broken model for freelance writing in this country. The series explores career paths as diverse as taxidermy to puzzle makers, but very few industries are as coercive or just plainly unfair as freelance writing.One thing, however, did surprise me when I read this interview. Apparently when someone asks me about the freelance business I can’t help but to swear like a sailor. It’s not something that I realize that I’m doing, but I guess this really does get under my skin.  Below are a few excerpts. Or hell, just read the full interview here.

When I first started writing, I did a lot for free. Even getting paid $0.10/word felt like a victory. That’s part of the problem, yes?

 “. . .We need to look at stories as works of art instead of as a raw commodity. Magazines, however, buy articles as commodities. The $2/word rate, which is the standard at most major magazines, is essentially saying that the war correspondent who went to Afghanistan, got shot at 500 times, and came back with this killer narrative should get paid the same amount as someone who sat down with Katy Perry for two hours and wrote something really bubbly. It’s a completely fucked up way to think about the value of writing.” 

So are the economics of writing going to keep getting worse?

This depends on writers getting a spine and standing up for their work. It’s already pretty clear that writers can’t make a living in the current system. It’s apparent that you can’t actually survive by getting paid $0.60/word or whatever people are getting paid on the Web these days. If you feel like it’s an honor to get published on MensJournal.com, NewYorker.com, or, hell, even the New Yorker, you’re not going to be able to put food on your plate. Honor doesn’t have any market value at the grocery store.

Fragile Freelancers and the Fate of Journalism

Earlier this month Project Word released a one-of-a-kind survey on the ways that freelance journalists make their livings. The 34-page report, titled “Untold Stories: A Survey of Freelance Investigative Reporters,” was part of a collaboration between 22 different journalism organizations and included responses from more than 200 investigative reporters. To no one’s surprise, the survey found that freelances are in in dire straights.Among the more shocking revelations were that:

• 44% of respondents said they were being paid less now than 5 years ago. 22% said that their income was half no than what it used to be.

• Inadequate support for investigative journalism has deprived the public of a minimum of nearly 600 stories that could have served the public good.

• 92% of 137 freelancers reported experiencing “anxiety on a daily basis over finances.

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The study lays out the plight of increasingly marginal freelancers in visceral detail, and peppers in writer’s own language for how they have struggled to make their livings.  Amidst bad contracts, limited reprint rights, declining pay, endless debt, and anxiety ultimately freelance investigative journalism is more charity than a career path.Here are my favorite three quotes:And since it pertains to the work I’ve been doing to crowdsource journalism rates.

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This also seems like a great idea:

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While it expertly lays out the plight of freelance reporters, the survey fails to suggest any innovative solutions. It calls for increased levels of external funding, streamlined grant processes and logistical support for in-depth reporting projects, but fails to take into account the increasingly predatory practices that publishers use to take advantage of freelance labor. It is true that some publications are struggling to make ends meet. However, even the publications who are almost literally rolling in giant piles of money continually fail to share their revenues with their writers.Take, for instance, this excerpt from

Mat Honan

‘s December piece in Wired titled “

Inside the Buzz-Fueled Media Startups Battling for Your Attention

” which explores how big media companies are adapting to new distribution models and reaping fortunes in the process. He points to the multi-billion dollar valuations of Vice, Vox and Buzzfeed and breaks down the reliable revenue streams at his own publication. One amazing infographic shows exactly how much money Wired made that issue:

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According to those numbers, the print issue that Honan’s article appeared in grossed a minimum of $2.7 million in December. While I don’t know exactly what web traffic Wired gets, it is likely that the magazine earned at least another million online. Compare that to what they paid their journalists. I checked out the masthead and started counting stories. The issue contained only 3 proper multi-page feature articles and 23 one to two page stories. All together the magazine barely published 20,000 words. Since Wired pays its writers $2-$3 per word, that means at the very most the magazine shelled out the equivalent of a single half-page of advertising on journalism. While Honan argues that the future of new media will depend on the quality of the articles that they write, it’s clear that publications do not value their writers enough to pay them fairly.

Instead of simply taking the story that magazine fortunes are declining at face value, it would have been more helpful for Project Word to hold publishers accountable for the precarious positions that they put their workers in. Solving writerly woes shouldn’t depend on charity from external funding institutions, but reforming the existing markets to include journalists in the proceeds of the business.

On his own part, Honan has since left Wired and gone on to become a bureau chief at Buzzfeed.

Why ISIS probably isn't selling organs

In the last few weeks disturbing reports surfaced out of Iraq that the stating that the Islamic militant group ISIS had expanded its terror operations to include organ trafficking. The reports originate from a lone official in the Iraqi embassy and reference dozens of bodies in mass graves missing their internal organs.  The story has since been reported everywhere from fringe new sources like the Jewish Press and the right-wing Freedom Center all the way to more respectable outlets like CNN. FOX news has jumped all over the organ harvesting story and repeated it in numerous reports. In the last week I’ve received two interview requests from major news organizations who were aware of my book The Red Market and wanted me to comment.

It’s true that there is a long history of organ theft  during times of war–most notably during the war in Kosovo and more recently Israel security forces in Palestine. I have no illusions that ISIS would be happy to get into the organ trafficking business if it meant that they could make a little money to support their ongoing terrorist operations. However, I just don’t believe that the reports are credible or that ISIS really has the infrastructure to make it work.

In the six years that I spent investigating organ trafficking networks the recipient and the donor were always in the same city when the operation took place. This usually meant that the recipient flew to India, Pakistan, China or Egypt and the donor was sourced from a prison or a nearby slum. Sometimes they were paid, sometimes they were kidnapped. Occasionally both the donor and the recipient would fly to a Caribbean Island or South Africa for the operation.  I never have heard of a single case of a kidney or heart being harvested in one country illegally and then being sent by air to another one.

The reason boils down to logistics. Transplants are highly coordinated affairs and require the cooperation from hospitals, ambulance services, laboratories, police, customs officials and other government agencies. Everything needs to be timed perfectly or the brief window of keeping the organ alive for transplant will pass.

In order to reduce the possibility of rejection n donor organ should be HLA matched to its recipient. This needs to be done in advance. In China death row and political prisoners are often tissue typed while incarcerated. Their executions are preformed on demand in order to facilitate transplants. It is still technically possible to dose someone with enough immune-supresant drugs that HLA matching is necessary, but turning off the recipient’s immune system carries other serious health risks. Non-matched transplants are really only ever done in times of extreme duress.

If you consider the reports from Iraq, the allegations of organ trafficking just seem, well, far fetched. Even if ISIS did want to get into the organ business, how would they coordinate the mass execution of prisoners with their intended recipients?  The reports say that ISIS killed more than a dozen doctors who refused to preform the operations. How many of the remaining surgeons in the city would be qualified? Some reports suggest that the organs are headed to Europe. So, now we’re asked to believe that somehow a flight from an ISIS controlled area isn’t considered suspicious. Can we imagine that a team of people from this plane being expedited through customs and to a European hospital with a package that says it’s a live organ?

Forget the fact that they could just as easily get a cheap and reliable illegal organ transplant in South Africa, Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil or India without going to a war zone, perhaps the recipient flies into Iraq, instead. If so, why do they need to harvest the kidneys from several prisoners at once?  Won’t one kidney do just fine?  Or, are we to assume that the business is to busy that there are twelve simultaneous transplants going on at the local bomb-blasted hospital? That’s a feat that even John’s Hopkins would find challenging.

Of course, it might be possible that one or two black market transplant are happening in ISIS controlled territory. But these wouldn’t be for-profit affairs. I can imagine that perhaps some ISIS commander or his family member might have kidney failure and they turn to their prisoners as a source of replacement body parts. It might indeed be possible to convince a doctor to preform the operation under duress. But to think that this is a reliable revenue stream is pure fantasy.

It is far more likely that the reports of mutilated bodies with organs torn out were actually the result of torture. The New York Times reports, there’s a video going around of an ISIS fighter removing the organ of an executed prisoner and then taking a bite. This is also a terrible and horrible thing. It’s just not organ trafficking.

Let me propose another narrative for why the media is so fascinated with this story. Perhaps people are so disturbed by the atrocities that ISIS is committing on a daily basis that we want to make them seem even more depraved then they are. It’s the same tendency that some people have to suggest that Hitler didn’t only perpetrate the Holocaust, but was also a warlock involved in evil occult practices. Wasn’t the holocaust bad enough? In the present day, what is worse than mad-dog boogeymen cutting out the organs of their helpless prisoners and selling them back to us? So yes, while ISIS is evil and responsible for some of the most reprehensible crimes I can imagine. I can’t imagine that they’re sophisticated enough to be successful in the organ business. At least, not yet.