SGU Episode 110

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SGU Episode 110
28th August 2007
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 109                      SGU 111
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
ML: Mike LaCelle
Quote of the Week
Thinking critically is a chore. It does not come naturally or easily. And if the fruits of such efforts are not carefully displayed to young minds, then they will not harvest them. Every school child must be implanted with the wonder of the atom, not the thrall of magic.
Perry DeAngelis
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Download Podcast
SGU Podcast archive
Forum Discussion

Introduction

You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Tuesday August 28^th 2007 and this is your host Steven Novella, president of the New England Skeptical Society. Joining me this evening are Bob Novella -

B: Hello.

S: Rebecca Watson -

R: Hi everyone.

S: Jay Novella -

J: Hi guys.

S: And Evan Bernstein.

E: Hey folks.

S: How is everyone this evening?

B: Crappy. Recovering.

S: Recovering. Yeah, so.

R: I think we've had better nights.

Perry DeAngelis Remembered (0.41)

S: This is our first show after the passing of our good friend Perry. As most listeners probably know by now, from our website and also last week's episode and also the word's been getting around in multiple other venues, Perry DeAngelis, one of the rogues, one of the members of our podcast, passed away on August 19^th, which of course was a very big blow to all of us, both personally and professionally as part of, he was a big part of the podcast. Definitely lent a unique voice and was a good complement to everyone else on the show. We were very pleased however, you know in a bittersweet sort of way, to receive the tremendous feedback from all of Perry's fans and a lot of our listeners.

B: That was amazing.

S: That was. We've had literally hundreds of comments and emails and posts on our forums - everyone giving their reflections and their thoughts about Perry. Many extremely heartfelt. First I want to say thank you to everyone who sent in their condolences to us. We definitely passed them on to his family and they greatly appreciated that. It also helped them to understand and appreciate what Perry meant to his fans and to quite a lot of people.

B: Yeah, Steve, I'm not sure exactly how much his family understood or appreciated exactly what he was doing.

S: Yeah.

B: I mean, you saw him more than the rest of us did. How aware was his family of this weekly podcast that Perry was doing. Was it really even on the radar for them?

S: Not very much for his parents. His sister, who is also a friend of ours, obviously knew what it was and listened to it. But a lot of the older generation basically just knew of it really only tangentially and didn't really understand what a big part it played in Perry's life.

B: And other people's lives.

S: Now, we've had a lot of questions of course about exactly what happened, and Perry always told me that I could basically tell everybody anything that they wanted to know about his medical condition, about what happened, and I have permission from his wife of course to not only access his medical information but to discuss it. I think it does help the part of the process of understanding and accepting what happened to Perry and actually helps in the grieving process to understand just factually what happened. The quick summary is that Perry, actually Perry was a pretty healthy guy up until about 8 or 9 years ago, even though Perry was big his whole life and did have some complications from that, he did have Type 2 diabetes, but 9 years ago he was a completely healthy, totally active guy without really any physical limitations. But then he started to get some really serious medical problems that we didn't know where they were coming from. He had two very serious illnesses that put him in the hospital for a long time, that were even potentially life threatening. One time he had, the first really serious illness he had was pericarditis, which is inflammation around the heart. And that led to fluid building up in the sack that surrounds the heart, the pericardium, basically squeezing in on the heart and keeping it from functioning.

B: It was actually named after him, was it?

S: (laughs) Right, Perry-carditis, yeah, he thought that was amusing. That was treated, these acute things were treated, but eventually it was discovered that Perry had a very serious chronic disease called scleroderma. Scleroderma is still a bit mysterious. It's a connective tissue disease. It's sort of an autoimmune disease, but not really. There may be some inflammatory component but it doesn't respond to immunosuppressive therapy like other autoimmune diseases might. It's basically untreatable. It's a proliferation of the connective tissue, the fibroblasts - those are the cells that lay in wait and then they might heal a cut, for example, by forming scar tissue. So essentially what happens is that scar tissue diffusely forms out of control in all the tissue. It was evident in Perry's skin as, over the last 8 years his fingers were somewhat curled up and he couldn't generally have a lot of use of his fingers because of the scleroderma of his skin. But it also happened on the inside - it was infecting his kidneys, his heart, his lungs, his esophagus. Thinking back, Perry really was progressively ill over the last 8 years. We always sort of knew that the scleroderma was there, that it was a progressive disease, it was incurable, but as he started to develop more and more shortness of breath and inability to really engage in a lot of physical activity, we were looking for other treatable things that might be contributing to it that we could do something about. In the final analysis, the underlying problem was the scleroderma, and it had caused too much damage to his heart and lungs. And then last week it just finally caught up with him. In a way, again, it's one of those things that I think down deep we kind of knew was inevitable, we saw it coming, but nothing really prepares you for this kind of thing happening. And we never gave up the hope that there would, that Perry would be stable for a little while longer, that there would be something that we could treat that would improve his function, that we would have him around -

E: Or spontaneous remission or some kind of -

S: Yeah, you know -

J: We were all actually surprised to find out it was actually the scleroderma. I mean when you told me, Steve, I was shocked. I always assumed that it was weight related.

B: I was surprised too. I was actually, it cheered me up a little bit, because for days prior to hearing about that, that detail, I was pretty down in that I felt like it was, his death was a preventable thing that I should have been on his case more about losing weight and wishing that he had taken his weight more seriously for the past 5 years or so and that if he had just done that, he would have had much more time. But when I found that he really had no choice, it was really not much he could have done, I mean his quality of life could have been better the past handful of years if he had lost weight, but there really wasn't, there was nothing he could have done to prevent that from happening. It was kind of reflected in the way he lived. Jay, didn't you say that when he kind of realized what was going on, that he really just tried to enjoy life more and do more of the things that he really enjoyed and stayed away from the things that were, the parts of life that are annoying, that he just had more fun when he saw that, was that accurate?

J: Well, Steve would know better than I, but I remember having conversations with Perry where he would basically say he's living his life the way he wants to. It was kind of the subtext was 'cos he knew that he didn't have a lot of time and he was doing everything in his power to just make himself happy.

R: And one of the big things that made him happy was doing this podcast, which I think is important to note is that that he kept at this for as long as he could.

S: He did. This was very important to him. He really cared about it a great deal. This was, I think, it gave his life a tremendous amount of meaning. Perry never let me forget that it was his idea to form the New England Skeptical Society, that -

(laughter)

B: It was, I remember.

S: It was. It was his inspiration. And through that fact he sort of took credit for everything that followed. Including the Skeptic's Guide -

(laughter)

S: I let him have that. Yes, if not for you who knows what would have happened this last whatever, it's been 11 now years of skeptical activism may never have occurred at all. It may never have occurred to me to do this. It would be interesting to know, to think of what I would be doing.

B: Steve, why don't you go into even a little more detail about how it actually came out. He was, we were going through the Skeptical Inquirer and in the back of the magazine they list local skeptical organizations and of course Perry was looking at this and he went right to Connecticut and he said "Wait, there's no skeptical organizations in Connecticut." And that's how I remember it came up.

S: Yeah, "we should form a skeptical organization."

J: Right.

S: "We should."

J: And this was 1995?

S: Yeah.

B: Was it '95? Woah.

E: '95.

S: And that was it. We soon became, we went from the Connecticut Skeptical Society to the New England Skeptical Society, because there was no skeptical organization in New England. Yeah, and Perry was really tireless and relentless. He really worked on this since then, since the beginning he never lacked giving his own time to this.

J: Steve, why don't you give a quick explanation about the first few years and what you guys were doing, what the organization was about.

S: For several years we really, when we started we had no clue, as you might imagine. None of us had ever run a non-profit organization before, we didn't know what the landscape was in the skeptical community, so we did the things we thought we should do. We held local meetings, and the first few meetings we didn't even know what we were doing, what we should do at the meetings, we just thought we should have them! And then we slowly settled into the kind of activities that a local skeptical group does - we had lectures, we did investigations, we -

B: We wrote articles, did the newsletter.

S: We wrote articles. The newsletter was sort of the focus back then, this was pre-podcasting.

B: Right.

S: The website was really an afterthought, kinda just attachment, it wasn't really the focus of what we were doing. The newsletter and the local -

B: Nah. And I did the website by the way. Woo-hoo!

S: That's right.

B: Lame HTML.

R: And I saw a really great picture of Perry where he's dressed like a wizard of some sort and he's standing in front of Jack -

S: Yeah.

R: Laying down on a table. Can you describe what happened there?

S: That was, we had a Psychic Unfair, where we ran like a psychic fair but we basically exposed a lot of different things that happen, and Perry did a psychic surgery. He did it pretty good. As good as any of the fakes do it. Of course Perry had to get the guru costume and made a very tremendous theatrical -

E: It was about showmanship.

S: Perry was all about the theatrics.

B: We have to get that picture out there, Steve.

S: We have a good picture of that, we'll definitely put some pictures up in the notes for this episode. So that's what we did for a lot of years and it was, in a way, really like earning our skeptical bones as it were, we kind of did the grunt work of just writing a lot of articles, doing as many investigations as we could, giving a lot of lectures. Last week's podcast, some people asked me what was that from. And they also asked me what's Perry's background and training. Well, first, that was a seminar that New England Skeptical Society was invited to give as part of a continuing education for science teachers, for public school science teachers in Connecticut. I believe that was through Southern Connecticut State University.

B: Yeah.

S: It was a day long, 8 hours of us giving lectures, and that piece that we had last week was one of Perry's parts of the lecture. And we may make other parts of that available. That's what that was from. Perry's background actually, Perry did not have an academic background but he just had a life-long interest and love affair with both science and also just the truth, just the no-nonsense what is the bottom line, what is the truth, and he relished sifting through the BS and the nonsense to try to get at what was really going on.

B: Steve, a quick memory just popped into my head: we were at my parents' house and my parents had this little chalk board display on the island in the kitchen. I remember Perry wrote in chalk on this little board, he wrote "question everything." And then of course I wanted to add underneath "Except this."

(laughter)

S: Right. Yes, I mean he was a basically self-taught skeptic and then he began to read the skeptical literature. Of course we've had countless countless conversations dissecting everything that we can get our hands on. Pretty much like the rest of us, we're just self-taught skeptics, it's just from doing it, living it for 12 years. As anyone who listens to the podcast on a regular basis could tell, Perry got very good at it, dissecting things and seeing where the BS was, and definitely became very adept at skeptical analysis. But that said, no formal training. I don't know that there is any formal training in skepticism, you know. There are pieces of it that we put together.

B: Right.

S: But there's no academic program of scientific skepticism, it's just knowing science, knowing logic, knowing self deception, knowing about human psychology.

R: A well functioning BS detector, which Perry had.

S: Yes. A functional BS detector, right.

14.14

S: We've had a great many emails and messages from our listeners. I wanted to read a couple of them. This one came in recently. It's a bit long but it's very touching and I think is, represents a lot of what the emails said. Some of the common themes that kept cropping up in the messages about Perry's passing were one that a lot of people were shocked at how emotionally they took Perry's loss, and they didn't realize how attached they had grown to him just from listening to him on the show. Of course what is i think very touching and very revealing of a couple of things - one is just generically the podcasting format is very intimate. A lot of people have commented about how they have felt that Perry and the rest of us really are like their friends that they invite into their car, their home or whatever once a week to listen to.

B: Yes, somebody had a nice quote, they said that it's like they're listening in on a friend's conversation and they're the quiet one. They're the one that's not talking.

S: A lot of people made that observation. The other thing is that Perry in particular, his personality came across so well on the podcast, that a lot of the observations people made about Perry, to those of us who knew him in person and for a long time were very very true. The listeners generally "got" Perry very well. So it kind of showed us that yeah, you know, Perry was able to convey what he really thought and felt about things and how he operated just from being himself on the show, that this wasn't, the show was not scripted, it is very spontaneous and it is very genuine and Perry, what you heard of Perry on this show was him. That's how Perry is.

E: Absolutely.

S: So I want to read this one email. This one is from Gabrielle Dietrich and she wrote:

"To my dearest rogues, know that you do not grieve alone for this fan grieves with you. I heard the news yesterday, a day which I will never forget. I looked at the title of the podcast 109 and all I could say was "no." I didn't want the title to be true, I didn't want to believe the news. I didn't want to be told it was true but I pushed play anyway. When I heard Steve confirm my worst fears, the tears burst forth from the pit of my being and poured out of me, I couldn't breathe. And I couldn't believe what I had heard. Perry's passing had to be a lie. This all had to be a lie. I lay down on my couch and cried with my fiance holding me till I couldn't cry any more. I got up and put on my best black shirt and mourned Perry's loss. I still feel like I need to do something in his honor. Perry was one of my heroes. All the rogues are my heroes and Rebecca is my shero. Your podcast opened my eyes to the lies I'd lived my life believing.

I had just finished a course in massage therapy and was convinced that alternative medicine held all the answers. I was sold on essential oils and the super healing powers they possessed. I knew that aliens existed and that most conspiracies had some truth to them. I knew that Sylvia Brown was an amazing woman who could talk to the dead and that Crossing Over with John Edwards was amazingly real and impossible to fake. I knew without a doubt that coral calcium was a wonder drug that would cure all known diseases. I knew all those things and I knew that I wanted to become a homeopathic naturopathic physician. This all thankfully changed when I tuned into your podcast. I started listening to it because I was hoping to find something that would make me laugh with its complete avoidance of reality. In my world pre-SGU, skeptics were just talking heads who made some bogus claim and doubted everything. In my post-SGU life, I am a skeptic. I have you all to thank for who I am today. Thank you every one of you, and thank you as well Perry.

One of the greatest moments of my life is when one of the rogues read my quote on the podcast, and in the end of my review I proclaimed "I take my news from the well-informed group well over my local news channels." I made that post on iTunes trying to thank you all for saving me from a path down the wrong road. I'd always planned on writing again letting you all know you saved me from my misplaced plans for a career in bogus healthcare but I didn't plan on telling you at a time such as this. I was awaiting Perry's triumphant return to SGU podcast with barely contained patience. I just knew he would be back and all would be right in the world. I lost a friend yesterday, or rather I discovered my loss yesterday. Perry may have been just a host, a rogue, a voice coming out of the speaker to some listeners but to me he was a close friend who I shared an hour with once a week talking science and news. At 24-years-old I didn't think I would be losing any of my friends for a long time to come. Fate is a cruel mistress and she played us all a very sad hand. I cannot think of Perry being gone without tears wanting to spill and I hope that this reaches all of the rogues in good health if not in good spirits. Thank you for all that you do and all that you have done, your work has saved me, it has changed me for the better. And lastly it allowed me to get to know one of the greatest men of our time, Perry DeAngelis. May the SGU continue to prove monkey superiority, may the rogues continue to be my weekly companions, and may your bacon always be healthy, all 40 pounds of it."

J: It's up to 40 pounds now?

R: Thank you, Gabe.

S/B: Yeah, thank you.

S: It was very touching, and of course it is exactly emails like that that helped us get through what was a very difficult week.

J: We're not even through it. It's not even close -

S: We're not even close to being through it, but surviving the first week was certainly the roughest, and it enabled us to sit down once again, all in front of our computers and do what is for all of us a very difficult show and of course to press on into the future. We greatly appreciate everyone who took the time to write us their feelings.

E: That's an incredible email -

S: Yeah.

E: - that we received. There are others like it. Very similar.

S: That was the most dramatic. That, and I chose to read that one because that is exactly what Perry always said he wanted to do - to take somebody who was going down the wrong path and turn them towards skepticism, "toward the light." That email is a vindication of everything Perry set out to do 12 years ago in forming the New England Skeptical Society and later doing the Skeptic's Guide podcast.

J: Do you think that we actually do have an effect, you know, it's one thing to do the show and say "we're preaching to the choir." The hard part is to be able to reach out and touch people and actually make a difference in their lives and I almost can't believe it, that we can do that. It really is, in the end, it is just a bunch of friends chatting to each other.

E: Yeah, we used to call it dinner table conversation - we go out to dinner, and this is it. We would have podcast shows over the dinner table. It wasn't a podcast at the time.

R: If only you guys had all carried around recorders with you.

B: Maybe we cursed a little more, but, that's okay.

S: Yeah.

R: No, it's just that Steve didn't edit it out during dinner.

S/E/J: Right.

S: I had no edit button back then!

R: But yeah, speaking as a godless heathen, it's really great to see what an impact that Perry had on people, because in my world-view he's gone, but there's this part of him that's going to live for a very long time in the impact he had on others. People can continue to hear him for years to come. There's something really cool about that.

S: Yeah, that's one of those sentiments that is so over-used that it's become a cliche and it's almost been spoiled and watered down, but it's actually literally true - that Perry does "live on" in all of us, certainly he is still inside my head. I mean, there are even, it's been very difficult in the last week or so not to be thinking to myself constantly what Perry would say or how he would respond to a certain situation.

J: Yeah, like what would he think of this whole week, you know?

S: I would love to talk to him about what he would think about everything that has happened, but he still definitely had an impact on all of us. A lot of us thought that Perry was always larger than life - his personality, his charisma. Again that came through on the show and that's sort of the impact that he had on all of us. It is very nice to hear that he had the same impact on so many other people through the podcast. Certainly there is a hundred or so episodes of Perry that we can always go back and listen to, that will exist into the foreseeable future, preserved, and that's a great thing. I'm so glad that we did this in the last couple of years for that reason, but also, perhaps less concretely, but Perry's impact on all the people who have listened to him and the influence he has had on their way of thinking is something else that will live on. And I agree, Rebecca, if your world-view is materialistic, that what more could you have, right?

News Items

Jerry Andrus Passed Away on 8/26 (time)

Skepchick.org: Not a good week for skepticism
JerryAndrus.org

HIV Denial paper published in PLoS Medicine (time)

Neurologica: HIV denial on the internet

Ben Stein is an Idiot (time)

Pharyngula: You have got to be kidding me

Science or Fiction ()

Question #1 A survey reveals that women, on average, are significantly more satisfied with their jobs than men.

Question #2 New study shows that men will choose romance over career success more often than women.

Question #3 Survey shows that married men do less housework than live-in boyfriends.

Skeptical Puzzle ()

Being set on the idea Of getting to this place He concocted a theory that would be a Controversy in science's face

He says our whole conception Of pre-history is wrong He insists his arguments are not a deception Rather a pursuit that is life-long

Three points in a row with one offset Is apparently the key To unlocking a secret that is a threat To how we understand our history

He believes the past is misunderstood That history has been systematically slaughtered But if we tried to see his revisionist history All our heads would be under water.

Last Week's puzzle:

I sure hate this delusional person Though hate may be a word too strong As I learn more, my opinion does worsen Perhaps I won't re-write this song

Micro set scams were just some of his wares He claims he is spiritual at heart A dozen or so of these blessings are shared Jesus could only hope to Master their art

From his website I read, as they humbly plead That they can lay hands and cure you of ills Just join them and pray, for you will see one day You've found their holy mountains and hills

For it was their king, that taught them these things They are simply swine to this pearl thrower A doctor, a reverend, and a knight, so he sings But it was yoga that made him a knower

Name the person.

Answer: Dr. George King, the Etherias Society Winner: Cethis

Skeptical Quote of the Week ()

Thinking critically is a chore. It does not come naturally or easily. And if the fruits of such efforts are not carefully displayed to young minds, then they will not harvest them. Every school child must be implanted with the wonder of the atom, not the thrall of magic

-Perry DeAngelis, 1963-2007, a skeptical philosopher and activist, and a good friend, of some considerable note.

S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by the New England Skeptical Society in association with the James Randi Educational Foundation. For more information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at www.theskepticsguide.org. Please send us your questions, suggestions, and other feedback; you can use the "Contact Us" page on our website, or you can send us an email to info@theskepticsguide.org'. 'Theorem' is produced by Kineto and is used with permission.

References