Dr. Targ - awesome stuff!

[SlightlyAbovePar]

What an awesome show! Really straight forward guy. Enjoyed the questions very much. Cleared up a lot of misconceptions I've had concerning remote viewing.

Thanks!

 

[lovebucket]

i agree, although i already 'knew' this would be a good one!!!!

 

[Angel of Ioren]

Anytime I listen to an episode like this, I defer to XKCD:

 

[mike]

I was enjoying the show until he made mention of his daughters experiment, presenting a cherry picked set of results

Elisabeth Fischer Targ (August 4, 1961 - July 18, 2002) was a psychiatrist specializing in psychic phenomena and the role of spirituality in health and healing. Targ famously produced a series of papers investigating the effects of prayer on AIDS patients, attempting to test the theory with a high degree of experimental rigor, with questionable results that eventually were not confirmed by a study published after her death.

Targ is probably best known for a 1998 study that claimed prayer improved outcomes for AIDS patients. A follow-up to a 1995 pilot study of twenty case control study patients with advanced AIDS, the study was highlighted as a powerful proof of the effectiveness of prayer due to a significant difference between the control and prayer groups, as well as the rigorous methodology used - employing randomization, control groups, and when published it was portrayed as a double-blinded trial.[3] Targ received nearly $1.5M in grant funds from the National Institutes of Health to test the effectiveness of prayer on AIDS and breast cancer patients.[4] However, in 2002 Wired columnist Po Bronson published an article discussing Targ, and discussing the methods and results of her study. While the study was running, the "triple cocktail" of antiretroviral drugs and protease inhibitors[5] had a revolutionary effect on the longevity of AIDS patients, including the study's subjects. As a result, the study was unblinded partway through and the results were dredged for a significant finding. After finding no significant difference in the scores for mortality rate (the study's original outcome measure), symptoms, quality of life, mood scores (which were actually worse for the groups prayed for) and CD4+ counts, the study's statistician found that there was a significant difference between the groups for hospital stays and doctor visits. After a suggestion from an outside doctor, the group also collected data on 23 different infections commonly found in AIDS patients, using retrospective review of the patients' charts, results which were also found to be significant. As a result, Bronson stated that the study could no longer be considered properly blinded, and was actually an example of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy when positive results are published while negative results are ignored. A peer reviewer of the study stated that had he known of the multiple attempts to find significance, the data would have required different calculations making it much less likely to have a positive result and therefore considered it a pilot study rather than a conclusive proof.[2] A later study listing Targ as an author was published in 2006, five years after her death. The study featured a much larger group of subjects (150 rather than 40), and concluded that the only difference between groups that received healing prayer and those that did not was that the group receiving prayer were more likely to guess they were the experimental subjects rather than the control group. There was no difference found between longevity, symptoms, or any other clinically meaningful outcome.[6]

Elisabeth Targ - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Herbert Benson of Harvard and a brigade of faithful collaborators assigned three Christian prayer groups to pray for 1800 patients undergoing coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery in six medical centers throughout the United States. Funded mainly by the John Templeton Foundation, which supports research at the religion–science interface, the $2.4 million study was touted as ‘the most intense investigation ever undertaken of whether prayer can help to heal illness.” (4)⇓It found that patients undergoing CABG surgery did no better when prayed for by strangers at a distance to them (intercessory prayer) than those who received no prayers. But 59% of those patients who were told they were definitely being prayed for developed complications, compared with 52% of those who had been told it was just a possibility, a statistically significant, if theologically disappointing, result. Benson et al. came to the objective conclusion that “Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.” (3)⇓

Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found.
And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/health/31pray.html?_r=0

Study Concludes Intercessory Prayer Doesn’t Work; Christians Twist the Results

 

[mike]

Proof #2 - Statistically analyze prayer
The fact is, God never answers any prayers. The entire idea that "God answers prayers" is an illusion created by human imagination.
How do we know that "answered prayers" are illusions? We simply perform scientific experiments. We ask a group of believers to pray for something and then we watch what happens. What we find, whenever we test the efficacy of prayer scientifically, is that prayer has zero effect:

• It does not matter who prays.
• It does not matter if we pray to God, Allah, Vishnu, Zeus, Ra or any other human god.
• It does not matter what we pray about.

If we perform scientific, double-blind tests on prayer, and if the prayers involve something concrete and measurable (for example, healing people with cancer), we know that there is zero effect from prayer. Every single "answered prayer" is nothing more than a coincidence. Both scientific experiments and your everyday observations of the world show this to be the case every single time.
For example, this article A prayer for health - The Boston Globesays:

• 
  One of the most scientifically rigorous studies yet, published earlier this month, found that the prayers of a distant congregation did not reduce the major complications or death rate in patients hospitalized for heart treatments.

And:

• 
  A review of 17 past studies of ''distant healing," published in 2003 by a British researcher, found no significant effect for prayer or other healing methods.

This article from March, 2006 discusses the fact that the same conclusion was reached in another study:

• 
  In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.

In this article http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/opinion/11lawrence.html?ex=1302408000&en=643ff6eac0f51086&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rsswe find an amazing quote where theologians and religious leaders declare that prayer has no actual effect:

• 
  Religious leaders will breathe a sigh of relief at the news that so-called intercessory prayer is medically ineffective. In a large and much touted scientific study, one group of patients was told that strangers would pray for them, a second group was told strangers might or might not pray for them, and a third group was not prayed for at all. The $2.4 million study found that the strangers' prayers did not help patients' recovery.

This is a remarkable example of "positive spin" -- religious leaders are "breathing a sigh of relief" because prayer has been shown to be meaningless. The fact that prayer is a total waste of time does not matter to them. It does not matter that all of Jesus' promises about prayer in the Bible have been proven completely false.
A peer-reviewed scientific study published in 2001 did indicate that prayer works. According to this article:

• 
  "On October 2, 2001, the New York Times reported that researchers at prestigious Columbia University Medical Center in New York had discovered something quite extraordinary. Using virtually foolproof scientific methods the researchers had demonstrated that infertile women who were prayed for by Christian prayer groups became pregnant twice as often as those who did not have people praying for them. The study was published in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine. Even the researchers were shocked. The study's results could only be described as miraculous."

This study was later proven to be completely fraudulent. However, everyone who cut out the original article in the NYTimes and posted it on their refrigerators still has that article as "proof" that prayer works.
This article entitled A prayer before dying uncovers another case where a "scientific study" of prayer is unmasked as fraudulent.
It's not just prayer that is ineffective. Not even a hopeful attitude helps. According to this article:

• 
  A positive attitude does not improve the chances of surviving cancer and doctors who encourage patients to keep up hope may be burdening them, according to the results of research released Monday.

The dictionary defines the word "superstition" in this way:

• • 
    An irrational belief that an object, action, or circumstance not logically related to a course of events influences its outcome. [

ref

• 
  ]

The belief in prayer is a superstition. It has been proven scientifically over and over again. When a prayer appears to be answered, it is a coincidence. Quite simply, prayer has absolutely no effect on the outcome of any event. The "power of prayer" is actually "the power of coincidence."
Therefore, as in Proof #1, one of two things must be happening:

• God is imaginary.
• God does exist, but he never answers prayers. Unfortunately, God is defined by the Bible to be a prayer-answering being. The contradiction between the reality of God and the definition of God proves that God is imaginary.

Prayer does not work because God is completely imaginary.
God is Imaginary - 50 simple proofs

 

[Angel of Ioren]

I especially enjoyed all the Yuri Geller talk - that guy is a complete fraud. The only thing Targ's studies of Geller proved is that Targ is not a very good magician.

 

[mike]

Yeah i have to say when he tells us his daughters results show it works, but fails to also tell us the later results

Targ famously produced a series of papers investigating the effects of prayer on AIDS patients, attempting to test the theory with a high degree of experimental rigor, with questionable results that eventually were not confirmed by a study published after her death

Then he becomes unreliable in my book as a witness

Sicher-Targ distant healing report - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com

 

[mike]

WHAT TOO FEW PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT TARG'S FAMOUS AIDS STUDY

That her study had been unblinded and then "reblinded" to scour for data that confirmed the thesis - and the Western Journal of Medicine did not know this fact when it decided to publish.

Her famous study was not, as its reputation suggests, designed to measure the number of AIDS-related illnesses. Targ and Fred Sicher had targeted their study to measure mortality but were caught off-guard by triple-drug anti-retroviral therapy, which became common practice one month into the six-month trial. When biostatistician Dan Moore broke the randomization code to unblind the data, it told them nothing - since only one patient had died, the data was meaningless.

Moore brought Targ and Sicher into his office and showed him the data on his computer. Moore thought this new triple-drug therapy was nothing short of a medical miracle, the triumph of science. It was saving lives! But Targ and Sicher didn't want to see it that way. Targ asked him to crunch the numbers on the secondary scores - one a measure of HIV physical symptoms, the other a measure of quality of life. These came out inconclusive; the treatment group didn't score better than the control. Not what they wanted to find. In dismay, Targ called her father. He calmed her down, told her to keep looking. She had Moore run the mood state scores. These came out worse - the treatment group was in more psychological stress than the control group. Same for CD4+ counts. Targ flew down to Santa Fe to attend a conference at a Buddhist retreat run by her godmother. When she called back to Moore's office, Sicher answered. Moore was crunching the last data they had, hospital stays and doctor visits. "Looks like we have statistical significance!" Moore announced. Sicher told Targ, who turned and yelled out to her friends and the conference.

Bingo.

Later that week, Moore met with an AIDS physician at California Pacific Medical Center. This doctor thought distant healing was bogus but agreed to give advice. He remarked that the length of hospital stays wasn't very meaningful. Patients with health insurance tend to stay in hospitals longer than uninsured ones. He pointed Moore to an important AIDS paper that had been recently published. It defined the 23 illnesses associated with AIDS. He told Moore they ought to have been measuring the occurrence of these illnesses all along. Moore took this list to Targ and Sicher. There was only one problem. They hadn't collected this data.

They gathered the medical charts and gave them to their assistant to black out the names of the patients. This done, Targ and Sicher began poring over the charts again, noting the data they hadn't previously collected. Since Sicher had interviewed many of these patients (up to three times), Moore worried Sicher could recognize them just by the dates they came to the hospital and what they were treated for. Sicher admitted he could (there were only 40). He had also seen which group each patient was assigned to, treatment or control, but he swore he didn't remember and maintained he was therefore impartial. (Sicher remembers this differently. He insists he couldn't recognize the patients from their charts and never knew which group each was in.) Targ told her boyfriend she was worried about Sicher's impartiality, but she took him at his word, even though Sicher was an ardent believer in distant healing, by his own frequent admission. He had put up the money himself for the pilot study ($7,500), had paid for the blood tests. He had a vested interest in the outcome.

This isn't what science means by double-blind. The data may all be legitimate, but it's not good form. Statisticians call this the sharpshooter's fallacy - spraying bullets randomly, then drawing a target circle around a cluster. When Targ and Sicher wrote the paper that made her famous, they let the reader assume that all along their study had been designed to measure the 23 AIDS-related illnesses - even though they're careful never to say so. They never mentioned that this was the last in a long list of endpoints they looked at, or that it was data collected after an unblinding.

I learned all this from Dan Moore and confirmed it with Mark Comings. Moore seemed unaware how explosive his version of the story was. "I was always troubled over the sifting it took for the data to hold together," he said. "I think Fred and Elisabeth missed the real story, which was the difference between medical science and alternative medicine. Triple-drug therapy was literally saving lives. We were only looking at secondary things."

With this information, I reread the paper with an awe for how carefully they chose their words. Only with the benefit of this hindsight do holes emerge, ones that had been clouded by the scientific language and statistical commentary.

David Spiegel, who runs the PsychoSocial Research Lab at Stanford, was the primary reviewer of Targ's paper for the Western Journal of Medicine. Targ's work, he said, deserved its reputation as the best-designed study measuring distant healing. Then I told him about the procedural flaws.

"I'm even more troubled by the multiple endpoints than the unblinding," he said with increasing concern. "It's a little post hoc. Normally, we accept the standard that a finding must have less than a 1-in-20 chance of randomly occurring. When you're on your third or fourth attempt, it's much more likely a 1-in-20 event will occur, so the standard has to be higher. You divide the alpha by the number of attempts, thus 1 in 60, 1 in 80, et cetera. There was no indication of this recast standard."

Spiegel continued: "It does change her work considerably. It puts it into more of an exploratory study, rather than a confirmatory study. It would be wrong to say it'd been proven."


Age was a confounding variable. Most of the 20 participants were in their mid-twenties to early thirties, but four were older. Three in their late thirties, and one in his sixties. Those oldest four patients died. They were all in the control group.

In other words, the study provided fairly convincing evidence that if you had AIDS back in the mid-1990s, the older you were the more likely you were to die.

Wired 10.12: A Prayer Before Dying=

Very sad story and my heart goes out to Russell, it really does

 

[mike]

in this real-life story is that Elizabeth Targ, a famous researcher on the healing power of prayer, became ill during the course of one of her studies on prayer and, despite being prayed for by hundreds of people, died

WERE THE HEALERS SHE BELIEVED IN ANY HELP?

They tried. Word of Targ's illness had spread worldwide. Web sites kept track of her progress and made it seem that she would survive. Healing circles everywhere prayed for her. On Wednesday nights on a hill above Silicon Valley, friends and followers gathered in prayer. Many had never met Targ, but they knew her work and thought of her as their patron saint. They had fought off death themselves, or they had lost loved ones, and had felt the power of prayer in their own battles.

Her bedroom turned into a circus. Healers from everywhere showed up wanting to help. It was rarely peaceful and quiet. There was Phillip Scott, a Lakota sun dancer who burned sage; Nicolai Levashov, a Russian psychic who waved his hands; Harriet Bienfield, an acupuncturist with rare Chinese herbs; Desda Zuckerman, an energy worker who used techniques inspired by the ancient methods of the Miwok peoples. The reverend Rosalyn Bruyere phoned often, trying to get on Targ's schedule. And, of course, there was her father, Russell, urging her to meditate, calm her mind, go to that place.

Targ tried. She didn't believe that any particular one of these healers had the power to cure her, but she believed in the general notion that her life was in the hands of a mystical force. She knew her medical doctors had practically no chance of saving her life. We are optimistic beings - we choose to live - and our hope has to vest in something.

In the future, there may be a breakthrough in screening procedures and chemotherapy regimes so that brain cancer is somehow treatable. But that future is no help today. To science, Targ is just a data point. On the value of her life, on the possibility of saving it, science faded into a mute bystander. So she put her faith in these healers, and some tried to take advantage of it.

One was a man who claims to be the last existing Druid. Targ felt he really had a gift. Now she needed him. But he was stuck in France, recently deported. He offered to help if she would clear up his INS problems; then he wanted Comings to get him a job at the NSA in counterterrorism. Then he called again; this time, he offered to help for free, if Targ would convince another family to pay him $250,000 to save their dying loved one.

Nicolai Levashov urged Targ not to have radiation. He argued that it was killing her healthy brain cells. The radiation was painful; it left purple burns on her scalp. She dreaded the late-morning sessions. Levashov insisted he had been able to stop the cancer telepathically and isolate it inside a membrane. An MRI showed the tentacles had retreated; this was almost certainly due to the radiation, but Levashov claimed credit for it. His words finally won her over. One morning, she woke up and announced, "That's it. I'm not going to submit myself to the fire-breathing dragons." She picked up the phone, called the radiology department, and told them, "I feel like you're burning me at the stake!" She stopped going.

A week later, the pain worsened, and she checked herself into the hospital. Now admitted, Targ would receive radiation whether she liked it or not. So one morning, the orderly arrived at her room to wheel her to radiology. Targ was wearing a Viking hat over a gold foil wig and waving a staff that had once belonged to an African shaman. She pronounced, "I am going to slay the dragons!"

The orderly didn't recognize her. "Who are you?"

"I am a psychiatrist on the staff of this hospital!" she stated proudly.

Why did she join the circus? As the cancer progressed, Targ felt increasingly guilty that she was letting the movement down. Forget the year and a half most people get. Her charts told her she had only months. To send all the healers away would signal the end of hope.

So she let the circus go on, even though its zaniness brought chaos rather than peace. She ate her miserable macrobiotic gruel, and she meditated as best she could despite the excruciating pain. There was a poster on the wall in her hospital room on how to go about adopting a baby. She read it in tears, knowing even if she survived they would never let her adopt. So she and Comings decided to get a puppy. And they had the wedding exactly as planned.

On May 4, she and 150 of the Bay Area's parapsychology royalty converged in Tiburon, on waterfront land owned by the Audubon Society. She could barely walk down the aisle. She'd had a craniotomy and was missing her hair. Her wedding dress had to be refit twice because she'd lost so much weight. The left side of her face was not working properly. Yet she sat nobly and beamed. When most people get married, there's a part of the ceremony about always sticking together, for better or for worse. Targ's worse was already upon her. There would be no honeymoon. Making a lifetime commitment in the face of that tragedy left no eyes dry.

Back at the hospital, she wore her ring proudly.

She had one friend with whom she let her guard down, let herself be a normal dying person. When her friend walked into the room, they would both burst into tears.

"What are we going to do!?" they cried.

"I'm craving chocolate," Targ once confessed to her friend. "Sneak me some?"

"Why? Jesus, if you've only got four weeks, don't make it torture. Enjoy what you can."

"I don't want them to know." She was supposed to be macrobiotic.

Her friend became angry. There was too much pressure on Targ to be that poster girl. Targ didn't think of it that way. She was a doctor. She knew her bounds: When someone is about to lose a loved one, never deny them their faith.

 

[ALPHA ROMEO UNIFORM]

Enjoyed the show very professional and Dr Targ demonstrated what excellent researchers are needed in this field and great interview Gene and Chris.

I be purchasing Dr Targ new book add to the others he has written and also don't forget Gene's Sci-fi books .

 

[Rizla]

Excellent show, one of the most interesting since Moseley died. I have a lot of questions about Targ and Swann and their research and so on, but these are fascinating stories and if even 10% of them are true the subject will still be fascinating. Thanks!

 

[SRL+]

I wonder how Gene faired at the casino?

 

[wwkirk]

I enjoyed the show. I especially liked the discussion of Ingo Swann. I was glad to see he didn't place stock in some of Swann's more outlandish claims.

I also liked the Patty Hearst discussion.

 

[starise]

I downloaded the Targ esp app and played with it a little bit.

According to it I have real potential. I question the use of color in the app. Why use color? In using colored blocks you can statistically determine A.) The percentage of people who like a certain color B.) determine how many times rounded off that any given number of people will hit a certain color and C.) Determine where to place the pictures accordingly in order to get a desired result.

I believe that we have an innate sense about us that can in some cases determine an outcome in some situations. Why do some people "feel" a certain way in some places that are haunted? What kind of antennae did they use to come up with this feeling? If we are souls with bodies then it would only stand to reason that there are perceptions outside of the physical that we possess. Honing these skills is something I think Targ and others have discovered or have begun to tap into.

Like anything though there are questions about it and it isn't a perfect system IMO. There are percentages of success, not total success....sounds a lot like some other things doesn't it?

In other books I have read on the subject, one in particular that dealt with the early days of remote viewing , there were some elements that were anything but scientific used to get results. I say this because of some of the kinds of people used and skills relied on. The program seemed to become much more scientific later on. I'm not wholly convinced that a messenger isn't involved in some of these cases.

When we are talking about out of body that involves altered states which means your normal perceptions have the potential to be fooled , how can we be sure of anything but the results?

Most abilities, specifically mental sharpness and reflex, are usually enhanced by extreme focus and concentration. I can understand relaxing and unloading stress in order to get better results, but I have a difficult time in seeing a connection to "letting it all go" mentally in order to get a better result. I would think the opposite would be true here....maybe I misunderstood.

Mike , prayer specifically, at least from a Christian perspective, is not to get some thing but to accept something. In the Lords prayer for instance, " Thy kingdom come THY will be done". I think God does answer prayers the way we want sometimes but not always. He either may or may not decide to answer any given prayer with yours or my wishes. There have been miraculous answers to peoples prayers at best and at worst there is an inner peace in prayer and I think this is what Targ was trying to say. Imagine what the world would be like if God answered EVERY prayer. Probably the prayers that cause the most bitterness are the prayers to save a loved one. But we are all headed for the Funeral parlor sooner or later. No it doesn't always make sense but we can't see how well they might be doing on the other side. I know you probably think its all a bunch of crock and that's your choice in the matter.......just giving you another perspective.

 

[Polterwurst]

Ever since I heard of Drs Puthoff and Targ and the SRI experiments, I wanted to riddle them with questions about that. Of course, I never really hoped that I would get to ask them, but here we go. Loved it.

@ Angelo: it wouldn't surprise me if some companies are using RV to try and make money. But as with some police officers working with psychics, I think, they'd never admit it because of the ridicule factor. Plus, the results might not be that optimal all the time. Other than that, I'm quite hopeful that capitalism isn't that ruthlessly profit-oriented. It's still made of individuals. Some of them might even have morals.

@ mike: Why drag god into it? I don't see why the results of the prayer experiments should mean that there is some divine call-center answering the calls of the faithful. Instead, they might just be another indication that consciousness influences the body all the time (as the placebo and nocebo effects seem to indicate for example). Only in this case it's not your own body you are influencing but that of someone else. These esoteric sounding notions of "spirit healing" or "sending energy" seem quite unscientific at first glance, but I think the results definitely show that there's good reason for further research.

 

[Randall]

I'm sorry to have to say, but for me personally, the conspicuous lack of verifiable scientific evidence for the metal bending claim casts suspicion on everything else. Unlike remote viewing claims that are dependent on statistical probabilities to foster belief, bending metal is a physical, measurable event that can be observed under controlled real-time conditions by independent scientists and skeptics. So where is that evidence? Why hasn't he won the James Randi Million Dollar Challenge? If it's as easy as having a "spoon bending party" then there should be all kinds of scientific evidence by now and we should all be able to prove it to ourselves without much effort. But we have neither. All we have are more claims designed to sell books and seminars.

 

[RobDel]

I'm sorry to have to say, but for me personally, the conspicuous lack of verifiable scientific evidence for the metal bending claim casts suspicion on everything else. Unlike remote viewing claims that are dependent on statistical probabilities to foster belief, bending metal is a physical, measurable event that can be observed under controlled real-time conditions by independent scientists and skeptics. So where is that evidence? Why hasn't he won the James Randi Million Dollar Challenge? If it's as easy as having a "spoon bending party" then there should be all kinds of scientific evidence by now and we should all be able to prove it to ourselves without much effort. But we have neither. All we have are more claims designed to sell books and seminars.

I agree. I have to wonder why he wouldn't document anything on video. Statistical data is one thing, but a physical phenomena like bending the head of a spoon? Gives us proof! Great show though.

 

[TalkingMeatSuit]

Couldn't agree more - this was a great show. Good job G+C!!

 

[jase]

Really good show. Congratulations for getting such a good guest and for asking good questions.

 

[nameless]

This was a great guest however I feel that we would have all benefited from some more probing and testing questioning particularly as a majority of people have yet to be convinced, persuaded or enlightened by the topic. Although its not the guest or the presenters job to elucidate or educate, it is of benefit to enquiring minds to raise factors or views which are contested or are contentious if only to settle argument and put peoples sides across.

In the past Gene and Chris have always been fair with guests, giving them the benefit to present themselves. In the past in-depth probing and questioning helped the guest to explore their views more and helped to represent the audience and their variety of views. Thus we get to see a position from multiple view points, we end up with a "super position" an all rounded view. This has been the edge the Paracast usually has over the the more "nut riding" sycophantic and careless radio jocks. It was the same edge that The Biedney once gave the show, the willingness to rustle a few feathers and not cow tow.

I understand that as hosts you may not want to burn bridges but thats the beauty of listener questions, we can do your dirty work for you as our views are not representative of the show directly. So why not make use of them if they are particularly relevant.

Its ironic that my question was passed up again particularly as Dr Targ opened the show with an exposition on "the Diamond Net of Indra", a topic of interest to paranormal study and one I phrased in a question which was passed over when I raised it weeks before to another guest! Anhoo thats all beside the point. Gene and Chris put out a first rate show professionally and succinctly for no money.