SGU Episode 44
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| SGU Episode 44 |
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| May 24th 2006 |
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| (brief caption for the episode icon) |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
R: Rebecca Watson |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Guest |
JR: James Randi |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| Forum Discussion |
Introduction
You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Friday, May 19, 2006. This is your host, Steven Novella, President of the New England Skeptical Society. With me today are Rebecca Watson...
R: Hello, everybody.
S: Bob Novella...
B: Happy Randi day.
S: And Evan Bernstein.
E: Likewise.
S: And what Bob and Evan are referring to is the fact that coming up very shortly, we have our second interview with James Randi, so we'll get to that very quickly. First, just a couple of quick news items.
News Items
Human-Monkey Love (00:49)
Chinese Mirage (05:42)
Interview with James Randi (09:38)
S: Joining us now is James Randi. Randi, welcome back to the Skeptics' Guide.
JR: A pleasure to be here.
S: Now, Randi needs no introduction, but I'm gonna introduce him anyway. He is a renowned skeptical investigator and educator, began his career as a professional magician performing under the name of "The Amazing Randi", and now he runs the James Randi Educational Foundation, and you can visit his website at www.randi.org. The JREF also administers the famous Million Dollar Psychic Challenge, which we spoke about extensively on Randi's last visit to The Skeptics' Guide. Randi also has published numerous books, including The Faith Healers, The Mask of Nostradamus, Flim-Flam, and many others, with more in the works. So, again, Randi, welcome back to The Skeptics' Guide; it's always a pleasure speaking with you.
JR: Well, it's good to be here, but I must say, you don't spell my name, you see. Many people try to reach me on www dot randy, R-A-N-D-Y, which is not correct; it's R-A-N-D-I.
S: OK. (chuckles)
R: It's a good point.
S: So, just to get it out of the way, since we spoke to you last time, you've had some health problems, and I know that all of your fans want to hear how you're doing.
JR: Well, doing very well; I must say I just came back from the gym workout that I do three days a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday at the local hospital. I have pedaled my way around the world at least a couple of times without moving an inch, and I've rowed myself across the Atlantic Ocean without moving. It's quite effective, I must say. All kinds of whirly-gig equipment there, and constant blood pressure and heart-rate monitoring. It's very thorough and I'm sort of halfway through that three-month session. Now—
S: It's basically cardiac rehab; is that what you're doing?
JR: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
S: And what happened, exactly?
JR: Well, what happened. Let's go back to the beginning. I was born at the age of—
(laughter)
JR: At a very early age. Let's say that. 1928, to be exact. Very good year. Yes, I... right after TAM 4, after all the festivities had wound up and everything, I came back to Florida here, and couple of days after that, I felt a tightness in my chest, which I recognized, having had heart problems before, anginas, and I went out to the local hospital, collapsed at the hospital, went into emergency, and spent a few weeks under morphine. Morphine is my great friend; it's my new friend altogether. And woke up having had a double bypass, which rather slows you down, to say the least. But it was very highly successful. There were complications; I had to have my gall bladder out three days after the bypass, which is relatively minor. But they did punch a few holes in me. As I said on the web page not too long ago, when I got a first good look at my chest in the mirror, I found that I looked like a piece of parchment that Indiana Jones might have taken while searching for the lost treasure of Babylon. Little Xs all over it, and interesting incision which starts behind my left knee and goes up to my abdomen. I don't know how they had to go all that way—
S: Well, that's where they harvested the vein, I guess, apparently.
JR: Yes, they harvested the vein. Yes.
R: They took the scenic route.
JR: I could have given them a handful.
S: But the angina's cleared up; your symptoms have cleared up and you're doing well, it sounds like.
JR: Oh yeah. No, I'm coming along very well. I've got certain blood pressure things that I've gotta look at, and I'm on minor medication; only four pills a day, and one of the fellows at the gym was telling me today he takes sixteen pills a day, so I feel only one quarter as bad as he does.
S: (laughs) Right. Let me ask you a question: while you were in the hospital during this entire experience, were you ever offered any alternative medicine modality, such as prayer or therapeutic touch or aromatherapy or anything like that?
JR: Well, judging from the recent reports on how badly prayer fails, I'm very grateful to the millions upon millions of people all around the world who didn't pray for me—
R: (laughs) It worked.
JR: —because that obviously helped me somewhat.
S: I did not pray for you, so you're welcome.
JR: There you go. Thank you very much!
(laughter)
JR: Now, Linda—Linda in our office here, the indefatigable Linda—I mean, she is—there's no way of tiring this woman—she wanted to pull a little bit of a gag, but some friends deterred her from doing—she wanted to have a—when I woke up, on one of those occasions in the hospital, they wanted to have a nurse doing reiki on me.
(laughter)
JR: Or someone dressed as a nurse, at least. And they sort of drew the line at that; said no, I would probably rise from my bed of pain with the tubes down my throat and everything else and all the electrodes attached and strangle her, you know?
(laughter)
S: Now, for the listeners, reiki is just a Japanese form of therapeutic touch, where they manipulate your energy field.
JR: (sarcastically) Yeah, right.
S: I'm sad to say that some nurses at Yale are enamored of reiki; they offered it to me a couple of times.
E: Wow.
S: I declined, of course.
R: Wait, are you sure that's what they were offering you when they asked if you wanted therapeutic touch?
JR: Oh, oh, I never thought of that.
S: Maybe I should have reconsidered.
(laughter)
S: I'll have to follow up and find out. So, yeah; it's terrible that in mainstream American hospitals there's this sort of creeping pseudoscience that is justified by the hospitals on the basis that, "well, this is what our patients want, so why shouldn't we give it to them?" And it's good marketing. You know?
JR: Yeah, how about blood-letting? If I go in there and I want to be bled, you know, I wonder if they would do that?
R: Well, they should have respect for your beliefs.
E: Or have your humors balanced.
S: If they could bill you for it, they probably would do it.
JR: Yeah, that's my good humor and my bad humor.
(laughter)
Faith Healers (15:53)
S: Now, we didn't talk last time about one of your favorite topics—that's faith healing, and I notice in your most recent issue of "Swift" online, which is basically your online newsletter on the R-A-N-D-I.org website, you talk about—or it might have been the last issue, that you talk about your recent evaluation of a faith healer.
JR: What was his name?
S: I think it was... Benny Hinn! Benny Hinn.
JR: Benny Hinn. Benny Hinn. Yes, Benny Hinn, the fellow who is probably the leading figure in faith healing these days, who got his comeuppance a few times. Certainly in Denmark, he got his comeuppance; they revealed his methodology and interviewed a number of people he had apparently healed who had turned out not to be healed. Oh, great surprise right there. But Benny Hinn was not around at the time I wrote my book The Faith Healers, so he didn't even get mentioned in there. As a matter of fact, I sort of put Benny Hinn in business because I put out of business several of the major faith healers, like Peter Popoff, for example. And Benny Hinn stepped into that void. He picked up everybody that had abandoned Popoff, because these people never abandon faith healing, they simply go to a different faith healer.
B: Isn't Popoff doing the rounds again?
JR: Oh yeah. No, he's very active again. Yeah. He's very active; he changed the name of his ministry from Peter Popoff Ministries to People United for Christ, and how can we fight that?
E: Right.
R: No, everybody loves Christ. I think.
E: Or they should.
R: And Ernie—Ernie Angley is back as well, Randi; we talked about that I think a few weeks ago.
JR: (exaggerated) Praise Jay-sus!
R: (laughs)
JR: You know, I attended, along with Paul Kurtz and Barry Carr years ago, I actually went out to Akron, Ohio and I sat in the front row of one of the meetings that he held in the church there; his church. Believe me, the rugs were as thick as the lawn on the best golf course. I think that rug had to be mowed twice a week. It was a luxuriously—he had a wonderful orchestra and a superb choir, and then this awful-looking man who looks like he's really been stuffed into a silk shirt. And he's wearing corsets; you can tell that he's wearing corsets of some kind to hold it all in.
B: Oh, my God.
E: Oh, wow.
R: And doesn't he have—does he have a thick, luxurious rug somewhere else other than his floor? (giggles)
JR: Yeah, that—believe me, that rug—what I said to Kurtz was, and Kurtz kept on shushing me; you know, Kurtz was like that—I told him, I said, "hey, if he took that thing off, threw it on the floor and said, 'be healed', it would walk up—it would run away and it would probably reproduce itself in the corner." That is the worst-looking rug; he never turns his head in a hurry, because he may leave the rug behind, you see.
R: Right. Can't go out in a stiff wind.
JR: Oh, it's awful looking. Yeah. So, anyway, we visited Ernest Angley.
S: Now, getting back to Benny Hinn, you said... so what is his shtick? What are his methods?
JR: It's the same old thing. Same old thing. As a matter of fact, we did... my first opportunity to really talk about it—BBC called me and asked me if I would go up to Toronto and get in disguise appropriately as Adam Gerson, which means wearing a red wig, dyeing my beard temporarily red, and putting in black contact lenses, which I did. I went up to Toronto, and they gave me all kinds of strange identification to hang around my neck—so many cards that none of the guards even looked at me, 'cause I was festooned with all kinds of ID. And here I was, in Toronto, at the... Madison Square—not Madison Square, pardon me—Maple Leaf Gardens—I'm sorry; wrong city. And—which is a huge place—and the place was jammed to the ceiling; there was no room for anybody. They had people up and down the aisles and they had a crowd out on the street estimated at over 1500 people who couldn't get in, and they were just clamoring at the outside doors. So it was a great success for Benny Hinn.
But, we caught Benny Hinn. We got him really good. We got into the counting area, with the money, with the coin sorters, and they were sorting the checks and putting them into big boxes and such. And the cash and everything else. We got into the counting area; we even interviewed some of the people there, and they gave away an awful lot of secrets. We found them rehearsing the audience that was coming up on stage; rehearsing them on the stairs leading up to where the video cameras were on how to fall down, and that they would be protected and such as they fell; they would have catchers right there, and they even rehearsed them, right on the stairway leading up to the stage. And we found there was a roped-off area on the main floor at the back where all wheelchairs were kept, especially if they were wheelchairs that were customized. That means that this person doesn't rise from that chair under any circumstances, and they kept all those people back there.
And right in the middle of the whole thing, a young couple who had a child in their arms; a child about, I'd say eight to ten; very hard to say; dressed in an exercise suit. The child was drooling and crying out—I don't know what the problem was, but it was an obvious neurological difficulty. And they rushed right through the security guards, pushed them aside bodily, and rushed up and got on the stage. And Benny Hinn invited them up, naturally. Now there was nothing being broadcast live; this was all being videotaped for future use, and I can assure that section of the tape did not hit the airwaves.
S: Right.
JR: Later on. But they broke right through; they got up on the stage, and the husband yelled at Benny Hinn; he said, "we followed you through four or five cities now, and we're trying to get on the stage and they wouldn't let us on the stage. I want you to heal my son!" And Benny Hinn was very cool; he took the kid in his arms and he hushed the audience and he looks heavenwards, with the light on him appropriately, of course, and he said something to the effect, "Sweet Jesus, heal this child, in your own time. Heal him now, if you wish, or tomorrow, or next week. Whenever you wish, Good Lord", you know, that kind of thing.
E: Outrageous.
JR: "Because all the wisdom is in your hands." And then he gave the child back, still screaming and drooling, to the parents. Two security guards hustled them offstage, and literally dragged them down the stairs—they were trying not to go, so they were being led away willy-nilly, which is an interesting expression, not many people know the meaning of; it means "willing or not willing"—and they got them down into the aisle. And we saw them, and we videotaped them being dragged down the hall and being pushed out of the pad-locked doors into the street and the door slammed after them. Meanwhile, Hinn was singing away and the orchestra started up and all this kind of thing. That was never used on the BBC program because Benny Hinn's lawyers reminded the BBC that they had lawyers up the gazoo; they were all over the place, and he had better be very careful—they had better be very careful if they tried to sue him. So they didn't and the program was completely whitewashed and it finally got on the air but it was nothing. Absolutely nothing.
S: Really? So the BBC News let themselves be intimidated by a huckster like that?
JR: Oh, this was not the BBC News; this was a BBC program of some kind or other. I've forgotten; I've got it in my videotape library, but it's hard to look that sort of thing up because you grit your teeth a lot while you're watching the thing. But Hinn was seated in front of the camera, very calmly; he knew that he had the thing under control and that they were not going to use any of that footage.
S: That's terrible. And of course, the desperate parents; I mean, you know, obviously if you have a child who's neurologically devastated, that is... it is an incredibly devastating thing, so you could understand the parents' desperation. And they were just given the bum's rush, because he knew that he couldn't heal this—
JR: That's right.
S: —gave the appearance of healing them.
JR: That's right. He didn't want anything like that happening. Now, we actually went across the street after this event and we sat in a coffee shop across the street. This was about 20 minutes before the crowd let out. We had to fight our way through the people who were blocking traffic on the street trying to get in. And we went to the coffee place across the street, sat down at the back, and we happened to sit right beside a table where there was a... um... rather large lady seated there with tears streaming down her face and a handkerchief to her eyes, and she was being talked to by her feminine companion there, and we overheard the conversation. And she was saying, "but I've followed him over 11 cities; all over the United States and Canada. I don't have any more money. I can't get up on the stage. And we need healing. We need healing" and she was sobbing away. And her woman friend took her by the hand and said, "but dear, you haven't given everything that you have, have you? Because he said that God wants you to give everything, as far as you possibly can. You've still got the CDs; you've still got those investments. You've really gotta reach deeper, dear."
B: Wow.
JR: This was so incr—and the woman was saying, "But I can't; I haven't anything to leave the children. I've cashed in the CDs—" and she was going on and on. We just moved our table; we couldn't take it any longer.
E: Oh, my God.
S: Heartless, heartless.
E: Evil.
JR: Yes, evil. It's not just heartless; it's evil.
S: It is.
R: How do you—do you think that there's any way to save people from that kind of ignorance?
JR: Yeah, educate them. But they have to be educated before they go there; before they fall into this trap of believing this crap. They have to be educated—education—hey, that's why I call it the James Randi Educational Foundation; we try to be educational, if we possibly can. Educating people is not all that easy, be we sure as hell try.
S: And you're absolutely right; you do have to get to people before they fall prey, because once they're a true believer; once they're in the clutches, the psychological mechanisms are just too powerful—
JR: Yes.
S: It's very hard for people to admit that level—that they've been duped to that degree.
JR: Right. And I just answered somebody on e-mail yesterday; the usual thing, which I really hate to put out—his wife has completely fallen for a faith healer and has reached into the bank account and pretty well stripped that out to send all this money off to him. And the man said, "how do I convince her of it?" He said, "I led her to your page and she just kept on shaking her head and turning away from it and saying, 'no, that's the Devil at work; that's the Devil at work.'" And I just told him, I said, "frankly, I think you should give up. There is no way that you can convince the true believer. The true believer will ignore all evidence to the contrary because it's comforting to believe what he or she chooses to believe. And she's going to have to learn on her own, but I don't think there's anything you can do." I hate to tell people. That's ridiculous. There should be a way, but I don't know what the way is. I really don't.
B: The first thing that he should do, I believe, is limit—is prevent any access of—prevent her from accessing all of their finances.
S: Yeah, just hide the money.
B: I mean, oh my God, I would make sure she couldn't get a dime unless I was involved. That'd be the first thing I would do.
JR: Yeah, well, what can you do? What can you do?
R: Yeah, I mean, protecting yourself is easier than protecting your loved one.
E: You can't cure it; you can only put in blocks and preventative measures as best as possible.
JR: Absolutely right.
Patenting/Licensing Pseudoscience (27:48)
S: So, Randi, to change topics a little bit, you've also written recently about the federal patent office, the U.S. Patent Office. This is an issue that crops up now and again. They are in the habit of granting patents to so-called inventions that are totally pseudoscientific. And you've had some entries on your—on Swift recently about that as well.
JR: Yes, I have, and I perhaps came down pretty hard on the U.S. Patent Office. I now get people within the Patent Office are writing me, saying, "well, we just don't have the personnel." Why don't you have the personnel? I'm paying taxes for it. I would like you to have the personnel, please. Why make excuses like this? I don't think that's a valid excuse at all. Get the people in there, if you have so many inventions pouring in there. Of course, there's also this business of being politically correct; you don't want to really refuse anybody. And one of the habits that they have, apparently, is just to grant a patent just to shut somebody up. That's not the purpose of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Not at all. I object strongly to this, to get rid of people by simply giving them a patent. Because that gives them the authority—a false authority, but the apparent authority, that this thing has been approved by the U.S. government, by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. "They wouldn't give it a patent if it weren't the real thing." Oh, get outta here.
R: Right.
S: That's right, and we see that in licensing and regulation in general, that the government sees regulation, whether it's licensing or giving a patent or whatever, as a means of regulating an industry and they do not see it, necessarily, as endorsement of legitimacy, any kind of, like, scientific validity. Unfortunately, the public does see it as a stamp of scientific legitimacy.
JR: Yes.
S: So the same is true, for example, when you license homeopaths and license acupuncturists.
JR: Or even psychics.
S: Yeah, or whatever, license psychics; I mean, there's really no end to it. And then the psychic or the homeopath or whatever can say that "I'm a licensed practitioner; licensed by the state; I've passed some kind of regulation, therefore there must be some legitimacy to it". But that assumption is completely false. And the same holds true of the patent office. The makers of crank and fraudulent devices prominently display the fact that their technology is patented. The patent office says that there's two criteria that you need to have in order to be patented: your invention has to be new; there's gotta be something novel about it, and it cannot be so obvious that, you know... an obvious application or extension of existing technology; there's gotta be something innovative about it. But that's it. They do not have the criteria that it has to work, or even theoretically be able to work.
E: Do they even hold fast to that second criteria? I would question that.
R: Well, that's just it; they're overloaded with so many patents that things slip through the cracks, and they get to the point where—
B: Well, they're—being obvious is a judgment call, so that's very hard to quantify; you know, obvious-ness. So, you know, I think they might try to make sure that it's not an obvious application, but... it's a judgment call.
E: But the peanut butter and jelly sandwich? I mean, you know, that's pretty obvious to me.
JR: Yep, that has been patented, and I think it's... isn't it Dunkin' Donuts that owns it now? I think it's Dunkin' Donuts. (voices overlapping) I made one the other day in my home but I had to close the curtains on the window there, to eat it in silence, and I didn't answer the phone during that time, in case somebody was spying on me. Yes.
B: I owe them lots of royalties, I guess.
JR: Yeah.
R: (chuckles) Well, there is... there's a potential solution, if you check out the most recent issue of Swift, a very helpful young woman wrote in to Randi about... (chuckles) there's a peer review process that they're looking into where the applications would be—basically, they would go through, you know, a peer-review process before they hit the actual patent application office. And that could really help cut down on the number of crap applications that make it through.
JR: That's probably true, Rebecca, but one point I must make here, that Butterworth—that was his name, he was the former Attorney General of the state of Florida—what I wrote to him, and I used to lecture for his safe in law squad, the gypsy contingent people there, on the latest scams that these people were pulling. I would go out to Tallahassee once a year and lecture for his group. I haven't been invited since; I don't know why. And he said—when I suggested that they license psychics, but that the psychics had to pass a written test and a practical test of what they claimed they could do. And he said, "oh no, that wouldn't work because it's impossible to test psychics." Get outta here!
R: Ugh.
S: Right.
JR: You can test counterfeit money; you can test a doctor, a plumber, a masseur; you can... any of these people you can test; you can find out if they know what they're talking about. But he seemed... what he did was reflecting what the psychics told him. "Oh no, we can't be tested." "Oh really? OK, I'll tell Mr. Randi that then."
S: Yeah.
JR: Incredible.
S: Which is true of these things in general, that the profession being regulated gets to decide what the criteria are for licensure. So psychics get to decide what you need to have to be licensed as a psychic.
JR: Exactly.
S: It just becomes a means of protecting a monopoly in the end.
JR: Yes, indeed, and that's very dangerous. I'm all for psychics being licensed, but I want to know that they will pass certain tests. And of course, they don't like that at all.
S: Right, 'cause none of them could pass it.
JR: Of course.
S: If it were the kind of test that would be meaningful, you know. It certainly wouldn't be unreasonable to require that somebody prove that they have psychic ability before they are licensed by the state to sell their services to the public.
JR: Right. Services or a product.
S: That's right. Services or product. That's right.
The Amaz!ng Meeting 4 (34:28)
S: So... what's in store for The Amaz!ng Meeting next year coming up? Who do you have lined up for that?
JR: Well, you know, we were very late with it because of my illness, and Linda and Jeff Wagg have done sterling efforts, and Hal Bidlack, have been getting people together, and quite frankly, I'm not too aware... I spoke to Scientific American—to John Rennie at Scientific American the other day, and he's trying to put us in touch with Alan Alda. But Alan Alda has now taken on a couple of more series, apparently, and—
E: Oh, wow.
JR: —is very, very busy. He—Scientific American—what is it—Frontiers, I think it was called—
S: Yeah.
JR: —program is now finished... for Scientific American, as a broadcast. They'll probably be repeating the shows, I would hope. But Alan Alda is very, very busy now, and I don't know whether we can depend on getting him, but I am asking John Rennie, the editor of Scientific American—
B: He's great.
E: He is great.
JR: —after all, the next Amaz!ng Meeting will be on science and the media. And that certainly is his forte. Scientific American, I must tell you, in my opinion, is the only media bulwark that we have, aside from PBS—NOVA and similar programs—the only bulwark we have against the nonsense. It's the only official one we have.
S: That's true, and he's spoken for our group, and I've talked to him about this, that when it comes to mainstream science journals, Scientific American is the only one that sees it as part of its mission confronting pseudoscience, or educating the public about pseudoscience.
JR: Indeed.
S: Other science journals either pander, like Discover magazine, which is another sort of popularist magazine, at times even panders to pseudoscience, or they just see it as not part of their job; they just completely ignore the topic... completely.
JR: I must tell you, in passing, that Michael Shermer does this wonderful column for Scientific American, of course—
B: Oh, yeah.
JR: We're all very grateful for that. I almost got that contract, though. As a matter of fact, John Rennie had consulted with me, and it was pretty well set that I was going to do the "Skeptical American" in Scientific American. And it fell through at the last minute when they sold the whole shebang, all of Scientific American, to a German publisher. And the German publisher issued new rules saying that only Ph.Ds could write articles that would be published in Scientific American.
R: Oh, my God. Really?
JR: Which would have left Scientific American without Martin Gardner; he has a couple of Ph.Ds, but they're not in science.
R: Oh, wow.
JR: And they're not even in mathematics. So he would've been left out. They had to have a Ph.D in that specialty before they could write—Now this is a German attitude, you know; a very correct German attitude, you know. (German accent) You vill do this.
(chuckles)
JR: But, nonetheless, they had to go along with it, and so I lost out on that. But I'm so glad that Shermer was able to get in there, because of course, he has the degrees that are essential—
S: Right.
R: He does do a very good job with it, too.
JR: Oh, he does.
S: Yeah. It's an excellent column. "Skeptic" is just simply the name of the column.
JR: Yeah.
Other Pseudoscience (46:38)
The Da Vinci Code (51:17)
JREF Podcast (59:39)
S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by the New England Skeptical Society. For information on this and other podcasts, 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.
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