The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America’s Blood Industry by Kathleen McLaughlin

Episode Date: February 24, 2023

Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America's Blood Industry by Kathleen McLaughlin A “haunting” (Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even) and deeply personal investigation of an underground for-profit medical industry and the American underclass it drains for blood and profit. Journalist Kathleen McLaughlin knew she’d found a treatment that worked on her rare autoimmune disorder. She had no idea it had been drawn from the veins of America’s most vulnerable. So begins McLaughlin’s ten-year investigation researching and reporting on the $20-billion-a year business she found at the other end of her medication, revealing an industry that targets America’s most economically vulnerable for immense profit. Assigned to work in China, McLaughlin hesitated to utilize that country’s scandal-plagued plasma supply—outbreaks throughout the 1990s and early 2000s struck thousands with blood-borne diseases as impoverished areas of the country were milked for blood with reckless abandon. Instead, McLaughlin becomes her own runner, hiding American plasma in her luggage during trips from the United States to China. She finishes the job, but never could get the plasma story out of her head. Suspicions become certainties when a source from the past, a visiting Chinese researcher, warns McLaughlin of troubling echoes between America’s domestic plasma supply chain and the one she’d seen spin out into chaos in China. Blood Money shares McLaughlin’s decade-long mission to learn the full story of where her medicine comes from. She travels the United States in search of the truth about human blood plasma and learns that twenty million Americans each year sell their plasma for profit—a human-derived commodity extracted inside our borders to be processed and packaged for retail across the globe. She investigates the thin evidence pharmaceutical companies have used to push plasma as a wonder drug for everything from COVID-19 to wrinkled skin. And she unearths an American economic crisis hidden in plain sight: single mothers, college students, laid-off Rust Belt auto workers, and a booming blood market at America’s southern border, where collection agencies target Mexican citizens willing to cross over and sell their plasma for substandard pay. McLaughlin’s findings push her to ask difficult questions about her own complicity in this wheel of exploitation, as both a patient in need and a customer who stands to benefit from the suffering of others. Blood Money weaves together McLaughlin’s personal battle to overcome illness as a working American with an electrifying exposé of capitalism run amok in a searing portrait that shows what happens when big business is allowed to feed unchecked on those least empowered to fight back. Kathleen McLaughlin is an award-winning journalist who reports and writes about the consequences of economic inequality around the world. A frequent contributor to The Washington Post and The Guardian, McLaughlin’s reporting has also appeared in The New York Times, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, The Economist, NPR, and more. She is a former Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT and has won multiple awards for her reporting on labor in China. Blood Money is her first book.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep in keep your hands arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks it's voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com why do i still have to do that for 13 years? People love it. I don't know why.

They run up to me and go, the chrisfoshow. And I'm like, call security. Anyway, guys, welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate you guys coming on. As always, we certainly appreciate you being on the show and listening. And, you know, sending us comments and great reviews on the chrisfoshow. And, of course, following us across YouTube.com, Fortress Chris Foss. LinkedIn.com, Fortress Chris Foss. The big LinkedIn course following us across YouTube.com, LinkedIn.com,

the big LinkedIn newsletter over there is killing it. The thing is exploding. Also, our big 130,000 LinkedIn group. Also, Goodreads.com, you can see everything we're reading and reviewing over there. As always, we have the most brilliant minds on the show, and none of them are me. I'm just the guy who,

I don't know, I host the show and say stupid, funny stuff stuff and the brilliant minds come on here and make you smarter that's why you listen to the show at least i hope so i don't know uh anyway uh we have kathleen mclaughlin on the show and she is uh the author of blood money the story of life death and profit inside the america's blood industry. She's got her new book coming out February 28th, 2023, and she's going to be talking to us about her insights, and you're going to find out some interesting stuff about what goes on. You know, there's some interesting thing going on with the metal community.

I don't know. That's what I've heard. She is an award-winning journalist who reports and writes about the consequences of economic inequality around the world. She's a frequent contributor to The Washington Post and The Guardian. Her reporting has also appeared in The New York Times, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, The Economist, NPR, and more. She's a former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and has won multiple awards for reporting on labor in China. This is her first book. Welcome to the show, Kathleen. How are you? I'm great, Chris. Thank you so much. I'm happy to

be here. There you go. And give us any dot coms, any websites you want people to find you on the interwebs. You can find me on Twitter. My handle is KEMC and I have a Substack newsletter with the same address. So it's substack.com backslash K-E-M-C. And I have a website with contact information at KathleenMcLaughlin.net. There you go, Kathleen McLaughlin. So let's get into your book. What motivated you to write this book? Well, this is, it started and remains a very personal story. I have, for the last 20

years, been off and on dependent on a medication that is made from parts of other people's blood plasma. So that's the kind of watery yellowish protein part of your blood that can be extracted from a whole blood. So I use a medication to control an autoimmune disease and the medication is made from other people's blood. So I've been fascinated for years wanting to know where all of this plasma comes from and why the United States is the largest producer of human blood plasma in the world. Really? Wow. Yeah, we are. We have a giant pool of plasma and it's directly related to the economic situation of a lot of Americans. So if you live, I would say, in the kind of all over the country, but especially if you live in places that have a lot of economic precarities, so places like maybe the

Rust Belt, the South, the Mountain West, all along the US Mexico border, places where people are struggling financially, you will have seen paid plasma centers where a person can go in and donate plasma and get a payment for doing so. And that's what this book is about, is who is donating all this plasma in exchange for money? Where is it going? And what does that say about us as a society? It's very interesting when i was a teenager and i was going through you know you're doing those teenage days and and pre-college you're you're doing that you know living on ramen and you know partying and drinking and living on ramen and uh you know and sometimes you're broke because you're you know a kid and stuff and i remember one

of my friends uh and i think he was going to college he said to me uh you know hey man i i raised you know some some cash going to the plasma thing you should go down there if you need some money and i was like hmm that doesn't work i mean kind of explained it to me and i was like and i'm gonna i'm kind of against needles and and uh i have like a law against needles and so uh so I hear you on that. I hate them too. And so he told me about it and I remember it was downtown in my city. And I remember he told me where it was and I drive by and I see this line going out the door and it,

it usually looks like some people that were struggling financially. And, and I was like, huh, well, I guess I got that as a backup if i ever need it uh and uh i never did it but i always anytime i ever pass one of those plasma centers i mean a lot of times i see a line the other day i actually drove by one and the lot was full of cars and i'm like what business

going on over there so uh let's so this is a process the plasma process that people use to donate their plasma, and they get paid for it. So if you're broke and you need some money, it almost sounds like it's become like those payday loan things where it's kind of preying maybe on people. Yeah, I mean, I sort of am a little bit ambivalent about the industry itself. So the industry itself definitely coalesces around parts of America where there are more people who need extra cash. There's absolutely no question about that. And in the same way that you see more dollar stores in places like this, or that you might see more pawn shops in places like this. These are kind of our symbols of economic hard times and economic precarity. And you can see these places and understand a lot about a city or a neighborhood or something like that. The part to me that does feel

exploitive and predatory about the industry is the way these payment systems are set up. So your friend may have told you this, but if you want to donate plasma, you can do it as often as twice a week for as long as you want. So if you're healthy and you pass all the health checks and you don't get a new tattoo, which can disqualify you or any number of things that can disqualify you, you can go and do this up to 104 times a year. The way the payment schemes are set up, there is not one standard payment per time. Instead, they're designed to incentivize people to go back as much as possible. So if you go eight times a month, you will earn an average more money per payment than if you just go one or two times a month. So you get more money per time if you go more frequently. Now, as a comparison, and I think

this is really interesting. So you can donate plasma at a for-profit paid plasma center up to 104 times a year. If you choose to donate plasma for no money through the Red Cross, which everyone knows the Red Cross, everyone loves the Red Cross. If you choose that route and go to the Red Cross, you are limited to doing it 13 times a year. There's 104 times versus 13 times. So it then makes you question, is the Red Cross being more protective of people's health and well-being? Are we asking people at these other centers to give too much? And that's one of my big questions here. And the science is still out. The jury is still out on if there are long term health consequences. Everyone in the industry will tell you, no, I've met plenty of people who quit doing it because they could feel it was taking a toll on their bodies. But you mentioned, and this is kind of interesting, too. You mentioned that you learned about this when you were in college. Can I ask where you went to college? What city you were in?

I didn't end up going to college. I started my first business and I was scheduled to go to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. And I was scheduled to go and my business was exploding. And I said, well, I'm going to put off college. But I had the first semester or whatever booked out and paid for and canceled. But yeah, I was in Salt Lake City. It was interesting. Salt Lake, yeah.

There are a lot of plasma centers in Salt Lake. Yeah, there used to be one downtown in the main center kind of by our house. And it seemed like a lot of homeless people were standing out front. Well, they, and I don't know how long ago this was, but I know in recent years, the industry has kind of screened out the poorest of the poor. So you have to have a residential address of your own in order to donate plasma at these places. So people who do live in like homeless shelters or who are unhoused are generally screened out of the process. And there, you know, I think there's a lot of ethical questions around that,

like, should people who don't have housing be allowed to make money this way? The other question would be, do people who don't have housing have more health problems that maybe they should be screened out and better protected in the process? But anymore, the thing that surprised me in reporting this book is a lot of the people who sell plasma are just like you said, college students. It's such a huge population. Really? I mean, you will find plasma centers in college towns all over the country and college towns that have big public universities. So not private universities where you might have kids from more

well-off families. One of the places I went to in the book was Rexburg, Idaho, which has a big Mormon university. It's Brigham Young University, Idaho. And they have selling plasma there is just like very run of the mill routine part of college kids lives. So, you know, people, kids will use it to pay for books. They'll use it to pay for groceries. For a lot of college students, it's, it's an easier ask in a lot of ways than getting a part time job. So if you can spend a total of like four hours a week donating plasma, rather than working 30 hours a week, it might be a better trade-off, you know, in going to school. The, the downside to all of this, of course, is I also met kids who did not feel well after donating plasma and continue to do it. Well,

it's, you know, for, and this is not, this isn't for everyone, this experience, but a lot of people who do it get fatigued. So after they donate, they feel very tired. Some people feel nauseous. And then that makes studying and going to class that much more difficult. So there is a physical aspect to it that it doesn't actually work for everyone. I talked to someone the other day who told me that they sold plasma in college and they had this increasing fatigue. Every time they did it, they got more tired until one day right after donating, they walked out to their car and passed out in the car. So we are, yeah, college students are big target of this industry and a big source of the plasma, big plasma pool in the United States.

And it makes sense if you think about it. You know, a lot of kids and you know this because you were obviously ready to go and chose to start a business instead, which probably seemed like a better financial path. College is expensive and we expect everyone to go and we expect everyone to be able to figure out how to pay for it. And it's not easy if you don't come from wealth. So my understanding of this business, and I never really thought of it as a business. I kind of thought of it as a business, but I figured it was going to help people like yourself, people that needed this for whatever reason to keep people alive. Kind of like when you donate blood and emergencies and stuff like that, you're like this, this helps fill the blood banks and stuff, but, but tell us, you know, kind of how this has really become more like a,

you know, a huge profitable industry, like a lot of our health sort of things have become in America. Yeah. I mean, it does help people like me and I want to be really clear about that. I depend on this stuff. I mean, you know, people who are donating plasma are actually saving lives. It's not a myth. It's not a lie. That is the truth. The issue is the same thing that has happened, as you said, with the rest of our healthcare system is that there are companies in the middle taking profits along the way. So there are only five countries in the world that allow paid plasma donation. The other four are much smaller than the United States. Well, it's because it is, you know, there are ethics, there are a lot of ethical concerns around coercing people to donate by paying them.

And that's the reason that we don't pay people for their kidneys. It's the reason we don't pay people for bone marrow. There's three things people can get paid for in America right now, three body parts, I guess, plasma, sperm, and eggs. So those are the three bodily pieces that we have decided can be commercially traded, that a person can get paid for by donating. Because we have made this decision, and I think the issue is not that we've made this decision, it's that we didn't think about it enough and make an active decision about it, it just kind of happened. But because we've made this decision, the United States is the world's biggest supplier of blood plasma. So Americans' plasma and the plasma collected in this country goes all over the world to other

countries, not just to Americans in need, but all over because we have been able to collect so much because we pay people. You know, it's interesting too, those other four countries, I don't know who they are, but they probably don't, you know, indentured servitude college students to 20 years or 30 years of college debt. They probably provide college. So there's an interesting thing there. You know, there's an ironic thing there that you're like, well, in America's number in the world by bleeding out its own citizens. It's bleak, right?

There's no other way. Just when you say it like that, it's true, and it's dark. It's very dark. Well, it's interesting to me. You know, we had a doctor on recently, and she's been it's very dark well it's it's interesting to me you know i i had a we had a doctor on recently and she's been a doctor for i think 30 or 40 years and she wrote a book on how to help people uh for basic things and basic questions that they have and and on the show she just stated the most darkest thing ever she's like yeah uh human beings in america become

you are our dollar symbol. You are seen how we can overbill you and how we can charge you and how we can make a lot of money. And we're paid, they're paid, you know, almost on a commission basis for how much money they can make off you. And you were seen as a number and not as a human being anymore, which is really sad that we've come to that. But, I mean, you talk about in the book, 20 million people in the U.S. sell their plasma. And why is that number not widely reported and talked about? Well, the number is an estimate. It's a guess. So that number is based on the amount of blood plasma that is collected annually in the United States

and then kind of working backwards to get to a guess about how many people it would take to come up with that. I can say after reporting this with confidence, millions of Americans have sold their plasma. I have no doubt about that. I think there's a couple of reasons that, first of all, the industry doesn't want to be noticed. The industry does very well by being very quiet. So the industry is not out there announcing we've got millions of people selling. They do much better by being quiet about it, right? Like a lot of industries that make their money kind of preying on people. The other piece to this that I think that I've come to understand in this reporting is that we have stigmatized selling plasma. And we have only stigmatized

it because it's linked to poverty. So if you think about it, I don't think it is the practice of plasma itself. Do you think about it? If you go to the Red Cross and donate blood, you're a hero. People think you're great if you donate blood. That's a really selfless thing to do. You're a great person. If you go to a paid plasma center and donate plasma, you're probably not going to tell people about it because there is a stigma around it. But the two actions are both altruistic. They're both generous. You're giving your parts of your body to other people. But a lot of people I interviewed for this book, they sold plasma and didn't tell their own families because they were worried. They were

worried primarily that family members would be worried about them doing this. And then secondarily, there's just a stigma around poverty in this country that people don't want to be associated with. I found that a lot of people who sell plasma are not poor. There's a lot of middle class people who do it for all number of reasons. So I mean, I met more than one person who was selling plasma to save money to pay for vacations. You know, I really things that we think of as just being very normal components of middle class life in this country, you will find people at the plasma center who are selling their blood to get those things. So it's not just about paying the rent or buying groceries. A lot of it is these kind of add-ons, these little joys in life that people are also trying to afford. But again, because of the stigma,

so if you're selling your plasma to pay for a vacation, are you going to tell all your friends that? Probably not. Probably not. Especially in the Instagram environment, you want them to pay. Exactly. Everybody's a millionaire on Instagram. Can you imagine on Instagram putting, like you put up a video of selling plasma and then your vacation that you got by doing that? I mean, no one would do that. It's just, we like these illusions

of people being rich, right? Yeah. My friend years ago, there used to be the thing, I think it was called Foursquare or Four, it was the thing where you would check in and be the mayor of towns and stuff. It was like an early social media thing. My friend wrote, no one ever checks in the

pawn shop, the methadone clinic, prison, the bail bondsman. They never click in. Absolutely not. Probably the methadone. No one ever checks into those places. They always check into, I don't know, going to Macy's or something. That's right. They're living the high life. You don't know going to macy's or something um and they're living the

the high life but yeah you don't see madonna hanging out at the plasma center doing instagram uploads um so you you went across the country and visited plasma centers and collected stories of donors uh you found incidences of marginalized communities on undocumented immigrants i think that's kind of another thing. Even poverty-stricken Flint, Michigan, which was struck with all sorts of horrific things, including their water supply. Tell us a little bit more about that journey. Yeah. I started looking at where these centers are clustered because I wanted to find out what was going on in these places that have an outsized number of plasma centers. I felt like maybe this would tell me something about these places.

I also wanted to choose places that were very different. So I went to Rexburg, Idaho, which is a small, almost entirely Mormon town. I believe it's 95% Mormon. Sounds about right. Yeah. And then I went, and 95% white. I went to Flint, which is majority black. And then I went to the borderlands to El Paso, Texas, which is, you know, I mean, I don't know if you've been to El Paso before, but it's almost connected

to Juarez across the border. So it operates almost as one community. And it is majority Latino. So these are three entirely different places with entirely different demographics. But they all have big percentages of their population selling plasma. So I kind of wanted to get into the reasons like how did these places become some of the hotspots? The borderlands are super interesting because, and I'm sure people can guess this, the reason that there are so many plasma centers that are concentrated on the US Mexico border is there are thousands of citizens of Mexico who come across for the day to sell their plasma, because it's actually a decent income for them. And there has been a big legal fight since the pandemic struck over whether or

not this constitutes labor, which is very interesting to me. So I would argue that actually selling plasma is labor, and we should consider it and compensate it that way. People, if we're going to pay people, we should be paying them fairly for their time and their contribution. There are two different branches of the U.S. government that were involved in a legal fight over whether or not selling plasma constitutes labor. The latest decision, I believe, reopened the border. And so Mexican citizens are, I mean, reopened the border to this practice. And so Mexican citizens are now allowed to come back in and do that. But at one point before the pandemic, the statistic that really sticks out to me is there were 10,000 Mexican citizens a week crossing over to sell plasma in

the US. Wow. Which is just like a massive number of people, right? Is there a reason the Mexican government doesn't allow? Does the Mexican government allow plasma? No, they don't allow paid plasma. So they're like most of the rest of the world. Mexico has banned payment for plasma donation. It's the international norm is not paying people for their plasma. So the countries like the United States and Hungary and Germany are the outliers in the world. Places like Mexico are

actually in line with recommendations from the UN about payment for plasma. So we're the outliers here. And people who live in Mexico along the border have an opportunity to come over and earn money here by doing it. So it's a very interesting, I mean, I find it all very ironic, right? There's always these political fights about the border and we have to crack down on the border, blah, blah, blah. But we want them to come over and harvest their plasma. Yeah. And then we, and then we also use them for you know our food and everything and people are always wondering in the last couple years our last two administrations have been pretty tight on immigration and uh and yet our food prices are going up people are complaining but then they're

like hey we don't want immigrants coming across the border and meanwhile our population is starting to decline marriages families are starting to decline. And, you know, we're starting to, you know, you look at what Japan and China are facing with the declining population. You know, we had, I forget the gentleman who, who was on the show, he wrote the book, One Billion Americans, under the argument that, you know, we need to open our borders and become, you know, more of a melting pot, like it was that made this nation great. And I would agree. Now, you have kind of interesting story and journey i would agree now um you you have kind of interesting story and journey because at one point you were assigned to work in china and you became like a basically not a drug mule but a blood i did yeah well i um so the reason i

got it i lived in china and worked as a journalist there for 15 years. And when I first moved there, I became aware because I was dependent on this medication made from human blood, I became aware very quickly that China had had an AIDS catastrophe that was created by a government scheme, what they called to build the plasma economy, which was to create a profit making scheme around the blood plasma of poor people, particularly in one province called Henan, which is kind of, I guess, the Ohio of China, if you want a comparison, it's very much, you know, it's middle America, middle China. So it's a lot of farmers, a lot of poor people at that time. And there were, we still don't have an official number because the government has pretty effectively covered that up. But the best estimate

I've seen is that there were between a million and well, upwards of a million people who were infected with HIV and AIDS through this plasma economy. And so I became really fascinated by this thing that was going on and had happened and was killing people in China, where the government started a program to harvest poor people's blood and sell it. And then it all went wrong because HIV entered the blood system and started killing people. And the whole time I was living there, I thought, God, plasma plasma economy it's so dystopian like that could only happen in china right and then i came back to the u.s and i met um a woman who had exposed this whole thing her name was wong shu ping she's a doctor from honan

province who worked in the blood plasma system there she was at the time i met her living in salt lake city working for the University of Utah as a researcher, she had fled China because she knew that she was going to get in trouble for her activism. And so we met, and I wanted to write about her and what had happened in China. She didn't give any interviews previously, she was pretty low key. So we met, I went and stayed with her for a few days in Salt Lake. And she said to me, I need to take you to see something. And so she drove me to one of the plasma centers in downtown Salt Lake City. And she basically said, you know, what happened in China is happening here,

and I don't trust it. So she kind of led me to this understanding that the US had created, and I think very accidentally created a plasma economy of its own. Now, I have to say, I do think it's much safer. I have very little concern about what happened in China happening here because the system is so really upgraded cleaning safety mechanisms. There's heat treatment that kills most viruses in blood now. Like our science is just a lot better on this stuff. But there is something about this churn and this constant need for bodies in the system that's very troubling. It's almost like that, you know, it's kind of like a presupposition to what was that uh green uh what was the soiling green

kind of like that's next oh my god next i'm just waiting for that to happen what do you say that because that has been on my mind while i was working sometimes i'm like wait we've already done soiling green haven't we yeah we're kind of we're kind of on that road uh talk to us a little bit about you talk in the book about china's blood black market that comes to Silicon Valley tech startups. What is that about? Well, this wasn't related to China. This is about there have been in recent years a number of different experiments and startups involving blood and this quest for eternal youth. And that's always big in Silicon Valley, right? These people who have made a ton of money there are looking for, you know,

perfect health, eternal youth, like, you know, want to turn back the clock 10 years. And I think it is just honestly, now I should say, straight up, there is, at this point, no science to show that any of this stuff works. But the idea perpetuates. And I think it's because and this is what I tried to get into in the book. We have this fascination as human beings, and we've had it for centuries, with the notion of consuming other people's blood can restore our health, right? So there, I think there is, you know, you look at vampire literature, and history of vampirism, and all of these different weird experiments. I went back to some experiments like five centuries ago, where they were infusing the blood of animals into women to try and restore their health. I think we've just always had this

absolute fascination with moving blood around. And where we're seeing the newest evolution of that playing out right now is Silicon Valley, where a lot of people have a lot of money and are very driven by this idea that they want to restore their youth. The thing that's amusing to me is I am one of the few people on the planet who actually does depend on other people's blood and it's not fun. It's not, you know, there's nothing glamorous about it. It's kind of a pain. There you go. You know, I was, I was Googling research here as you were talking and I was looking for the name of the movie star who had that cannibal thing.

And I just kind of Googled blood thing. I was looking for the army hammer and the stories there. And I just came across something. I did not expect Megan Fox and other celebrities are obsessed with blood drinking. Megan Fox and Michelle Kelly drink each other's blood. Yep. If that's not a red flag for all the...

Did they split up? Did they break up? I thought I read that recently. I don't know. There's some drama going on where he may have cheated or she said she may have cheated. Okay. And, you know, it's just the Kim Kardashian. I put a gun in my mouth.

It's that sort of nauseating stuff. But this is really like you look at people like that and celebrity culture is a big part of it as well. I mean, there was a big story when Kim Kardashian had a vampire facial, which is this thing that entails stabbing your entire face with little tiny needles and then injecting your own blood plasma back into it.

And it's supposed to restore youth. I mean, we just have this weird fascination with human blood, but it's nothing new. And this is what I tried to get to in the book. And the research that I was doing is this just, it's something in human nature that we're obsessed with blood and believe that it has these restorative properties. And there's very little science that it does, except on people like me who have a very rare illness, and then it does work. So, but again, it's not like my whole thing. You know, what I do is not glamorous. Medication makes me sick. It's got tons of icky side effects. I don't think that I look younger after I do it. I don't feel younger. It's just

this idea kind of perpetuates throughout history. And I really do think Silicon Valley is just the latest manifestation of that. Yeah. Megan Fox, Machine Gun Kelly drink each other's blood. Jack Parrick of True Blood, which is ironic, drinks his own blood on occasion. He drinks his own blood? Really? Yeah, yeah. How does he get it out? That is wild.

I miss that one. Yeah, I don't. I mean, I get upset if I get like a cut and it's the end of the world because I'm just like, oh, my God, a hangnail. A whore. You know what I mean? We just don't do bloodletting. And if I go to a movie and there's lots of blood i i'll get sick like i i just about pass out if they take my blood at the

at the thing which is the reason i avoid doctors like the plague julia fox if you're familiar with her she's uh she's a wackadoodle uh from hell uh creates art using her own blood that's my opinion uh and uh angela julie and billy bob thornton remember i remember when they didn't they have creates art using her own blood. That's my opinion. Angela Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton. I remember when they did. Didn't they have vials of each other's blood? Yeah. That should have been a sign to Brad Pitt.

Think about all the vampire movies. Those are some of the biggest movies we've ever had. Brad Pitt was in Interview with a Vampire. There's all these vampire movies and vampire books. And if you think about what the message usually is,

is these vampires are eating other people's blood so that they can be young forever and live forever. That's the central thing of it. Yeah. We're an interesting species, the human race. We're very weird because the other animals are not doing this with blood. Yeah. I give up.

I think it's actually quite fascinating. The blood thing. Someone asked me when I was working on this, like, Oh, isn't China aren't, you know, isn't blood really important in Chinese culture? Like, isn't that a big thing? And I was like, Oh, human culture that's not China that's all of us yeah I mean you you get around me with the needle man and you're gonna see somebody run faster than Forrest Gump in the movie when he when he takes off well I have to I mean I have to tell you it's kind of ironic because I get these infusions and I've just spent several years talking to people who and in infusion centers and I have probably at this point had 150 infusions of this plasma drug

I've never once watched the needle I cannot look at it or I will pass out yeah it's it's it's it's a I'm a big boob I mean that's usually what i am but i'm glad yeah yeah but it now is a lot of the this uh you talk in the book about how this is uh you know uh playing on single mothers college students later for us bell hall workers blooming blood booming blood market at the american south border uh And, but you talk about how sometimes it's being used as a wonder drug for everything from COVID-19 to wrinkled skin. Tell us a little bit about, I mean,

this is being, it sounds like this isn't always being used for people like yourself who really need it for, for purposes. Well, the wonder drug experiments usually fail. So during the height of COVID, before we had vaccines, this was pre vaccine,

medical researchers who were, you know, we, if you think about and I know a lot of people have blocked this out, but in the early days of the pandemic, we were desperate for anything. So researchers were really looking at any potential treatment, any potential like natural sort of vaccine. And they did a massive clinical trial of using the blood plasma of people who had had COVID and recovered. So they had antibodies, they use that substance to treat people with COVID and to see if it would make any difference. And this is something that has been used. It's called convalescent plasma. And it's been used throughout history with varying degrees of success on other illnesses. So you take the natural antibodies that someone has

developed to a virus, and you inject those antibodies into another person in the hope that it will help them fight the virus. The COVID-19 convalescent plasma trials in the end, and I believe, I want to say, I'd have to look it up, but I think they, it was a study of like 300,000 people. It was huge. They didn't show much success at all. So it basically didn't work, but it was again, one of these things where it was we were just throwing everything at the wall trying to figure out something with COVID. And the anti aging stuff. I mean, there's this vampire facial that they basically draw out your own plasma. So you go in and they extract your plasma from your body. And then they re-inject it under the superficial layers of your own face. And the idea

is, I mean, the idea is garbage science, if I can be blunt. There is no benefit from it. There is some benefit to microneedling skin because it can stimulate properties that can make your skin appear a little more youthful. But as far as injecting plasma into your skin, it doesn't do anything. So these experiments are generally things that seem like really cool ideas, and they get a lot of press, they get a lot of attention, but the reality is they don't really go anywhere for the most part. You know, there's been this ongoing thing for decades now with mouse studies where they stitch together mice and try and move the blood of young mice into old

mice to turn back the clock. Those usually end poorly with a lot of dead mice. So I don't think we want to be stitching humans together to do this. And then there was a startup several years ago that was actually moving young blood into older people to restore youth and vitality. The person who started this started clinics all over the U.S. that were shut down under an emergency order from the FDA because they came with so many potential health risks. Yeah, I can see the ability to exploit and, of course, money-making. Welcome to America, unbridled capitalism. We have so many problems. But it's interesting to me, I was watching a TikTok actually early this morning, and it was talking about how exploitive a lot of businesses that surround a military base are. And a lot of payday loans.

There might be a lot of these companies around there. A lot of loan companies, you know, there's loan sharks. You know, a lot of bail bondsmen, you know, interesting things. And, you know, they were kind of doing a joke about how around military bases there seems to be a lot of this sort of predatory, you could call it predatory, sort of things that kind of encourage bad choices from Americans that maybe, I don't know, maybe our military doesn't pay well. I think it probably should pay better. I think I always think that when you're putting your life on the line for the country, but it's interesting. There's a bit of this exploited sort of thing there. Yeah. I wonder too, with military bases, and this is a guess, but I wonder if it's too,

a lot of times people have spouses on base and there aren't a lot of work opportunities for their spouses. So you just have one income, even if you have a family of four, you might just have that one income. So that is interesting too, though, because the first time I ever heard of people selling plasma, this was 25 years ago. And I had gone to visit a friend who was living in Tacoma, Washington, and she and her husband, he was in the military and they lived in an apartment above a plasma center. And I was like, what is that? So she explained it to me, but that was the first time I'd ever heard of it. Yeah. It's interesting. Do you have any idea where you're able to get a roundabout figure on how much profit there is maybe in this industry, how much money is being

made or how big it is? Yeah. I think, I mean, it's billions in profit and I apologize. I'd have to look up the exact number, but it is highly profitable because it is a global business. So several of the companies that you see that are collecting plasma in the United States and also making medications that are sold around the world, they're not even based in the US. One of the major players is based in Spain. One of the major players is based in Spain. One of the major players is based in Australia. So this is a global business. It isn't just American companies, you know, exploiting or draining people's plasma and selling it everywhere. It's actually a global business.

There you go. Well, pretty interesting findings and pretty good exposure. Did you, were you able to get any, you know, top, these companies, maybe CEOs or anybody to interview with you? Or did they try to stay away from it all? What I did was, because I really, I tried to keep this book to a focus on the people who are affected by it, who never get any attention. So I really kept my focus to this book to the people who sell plasma, I was much more interested. You know, it's not a business book at all. This is a book about how we have become a country where there are millions of people who have had to sell their plasma. And so I really wanted to focus on their stories. I did at one point in Flint, Michigan,

get a chance to go inside a plasma center and see how it worked. And that was really illuminating and really interesting. And I think the people who work on the ground in these places are dedicated, super hardworking. You know, they seemed pretty like everyone I met there and I was pretending to interview for a job. So it was a little bit duplicit, maybe duplicitous of me, but that was the only way I could get inside. But the people who are working there seem like great people. There wasn't, I didn't find this kind of big, deep, dark, evil demon in all of it.

The real problem that struck me in all of this is just that we have allowed ourselves to become a society where a whole lot of people feel like they need to do this. They feel compelled to do it because they don't have many other good options. Yeah. Well, welcome to the dissolving over the last 40, 50 years of the middle class. Pretty much. Excuse me um that's it yeah i mean basically uh i forget what the term is but um you know it it neoliberalism uh and uh and kind of and it's not you can't blame it on one president there's an arc of it in in our country and of course the dissolving of the middle class and yeah and a lot of things that we've done you know trickle down economics didn't really work and it still doesn't work and somehow we retried it under i don't remember it was one

of the bushes maybe we retried it again we've been retrying it since reagan i think that's been the guiding principle since reagan we just don't call it that anymore and it's you know it trickled down to where people are not to use too heavy handed a metaphor, but trickling out blood to make up the difference. Yeah, it's interesting. We're, you know, it's very ironic. The country, we're bleeding out American citizens to, you know, make profits around the world and support stuff.

Welcome to America. So very insightful. And I think, you know, more of a light needs to be shined on the medical community. You know, I'm at a point now where I'm shopping for surgery for hernia and trying to get prices out of people. You know, I have insurance, but I really don't want to pay a lot of money to my insurance agency because it ends up in premiums to me. And, you know, I mean, if I make a wrong choice, especially if I go to a big hospital, the surgery can go from a few thousand, almost $10,000 to $100,000.

And you've got to really control it. And it's insane trying to get prices out of people. Will they tell you? Because I've never had any success with that. We'll see what happens the reach out has gone out but uh and i think people are surprised they're like you want you want what you want to quote your prices yeah i want to know what the fuck i'm going to pay well you have insurance we just bill them any other service like okay so you need to get your car fixed but

they refuse to tell you how much it's going to cost or like you need a new roof on your house but they absolutely won't tell you how much it's going to cost until it's done it's crazy you go to mcdonald's you order a big mac and you get like 50 bills from 50 different people in the food in the food chain and you're like what the fuck is this i didn't i didn't want to pay three hundred thousand dollars for a big mac it's just extraordinary and i think they're supposed to i think there was a law passed where they're supposed to be more honest and open or published, but I believe that's being delayed and circumvented as much as possible.

So it's interesting what's going on with the industry. I went through the same process with my dog. My dog recently had a giant cyst. And so I shopped out to several rural hospitals to see if I could get it done cheaper because it was a hanging cyst that was clearly probably not cancerous and could be easily removed but it was it was the size of a baseball i've been hidden under the giant fur she's a husky in her back leg and yeah i couldn't get people and everything was a scam where it was like

no we need to charge you a entry fee of coming to be examined. And I'm like, dude, you can give me a relative range. You can give me a range. And I even tested it by going to a couple doctors and paying their little entry fee. But they know it's a trap fee because they go, well, if you've done a sunk cost of paying 75 to 125 bucks to have us analyze your dog, you're probably going to throw more good money after bad. Of course. In your sunk costs. So it's a trap.

And, you know, they're always like, well, we need to come see you. But I mean, come on, man,

you can, you can give me a relative range. And what was interesting to me was I found a direct correlation between the initial inspection fee and the cost. And, and, and by doing that, you know, I was able to find, you know, half the

price sometimes of what it would cost to get the dog fixed. And, you know, my dog had the surgery, she's fine now. But I mean, the difference was between, you know, $1,000 and $2,000. And when I save by shopping around, and, you know, people don't realize that this has an impact to, you know, we've had authors on that talked about this it has an impact where i mean if you're someone who's going in the er every five seconds because you have an insurance policy that will will deal with that you know when you really have something you're going to have a problem with the insurance company is probably going to fight you which they do if you've watched uh well there's some movies that have exploited

they fought me once and my medication is thirteen thousand dollars a dose and i had to go without it for six months one time because the insurance company and it was a technicality they had lost the paperwork for from 20 years ago for my diagnosis and so i had to go re-go through the process and prove i had been diagnosed with this illness and there's no reason no one's taking this drug for kicks this is not a recreational I had to go re go through the process and prove I had been diagnosed with this illness. And there's no reason no one's taking this drug for kicks. This is not a recreational drug. This is not a fun.

Yeah. You know, like, Hey, I want to go have some fun. Needles shoved into me for hours a day. But I mean, they're, they are cutthroat. They're absolutely cutthroat. And we're at their mercy all the time. My sister has MS. She's in a care center and she's not getting better.

She's, you know, she's in the MS decline. She has the really disabling kind. And she is early on stages of dementia now. And she's not getting better. She's not dancing out of there anytime soon. And yet every, I think the frequency is every year. My mother has to prove that she's not getting better. And she's not, you know, she's not just, you know, doing gymnastics. I read somewhere once about something called medical trauma.

And it isn't the trauma of needles or anything else. It's this going through the bureaucracy of our medical system and our healthcare system is so traumatizing just because people like your mom have to go through this process every year to show that her daughter is really sick. That's fucked up. And if she doesn't respond in like 30 days or something, she'll lose everything. She'll lose her Medicare. And the reason she talks to me about it is because I may be inheriting, you know, taking care of my sister. And I don't mind, but I've looked at the paperwork and stuff. And she'll be like, look at this.

If I don't respond to this, she's like, you know, Chris, you got to know that if you don't respond to this mail, you know, proving this stuff and I'll read it. And sometimes they fight her and push back. And so, yeah, it's really interesting how, you know, we've, I don't know, it's interesting how these other countries seem to be a little bit better, but maybe not. Like I've read that sometimes in Canada, you know, maybe there's a little bit more freer system up there, although technically you pay through taxes, that sometimes you can wait years to get something you need and end up dying anyway. So it's a more slower system. Is it slower though? I wonder about that. Because I think with like the denials of claims

and the amount of paperwork that we have to go through, and even just getting a doctor. Like I live in Montana, right? Which is rural state. And it can take me six months to get an appointment with a neurologist. Yeah. They have doctors there?

No, I'm just kidding. Barely. Well, so I need to see a neurologist. Yeah. They have doctors there? Barely. Well, so I need to see a neurologist for this nerve disease. And the city that I live in, which is about 40,000 people, there's not a neurologist here. I have to drive two hours to another city to see one. Wow. You could go to that Yellowstone Ranch.

They have money over there. Don't even talk to me about that. I don't want to talk about those people. You can take it up with Kevin Costner. Anyway, it's been very insightful, Kathleen, to have you on the show. Give us your dot coms, wherever we want people to find you on the interwebs. Okay. Twitter, my handle is K-E-M-C. Substack, I have a newsletter with that same address, K-E-M-C.athleenmclaughlin.net is my website there you go uh check it out guys order up where refined books are sold february

28th 2023 it comes out blood money the story of life death and profit inside america's blood industry uh we need to have more discussions and talk to our politicians more about making the industry better for Americans and human beings, just more humanity. It's pretty crazy. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.

That should have us out.