S5 - E13.1 - Remembering SurfingMASH Co-Founder Stephen Harrison

Surfing the MASH Tsunami

On April 23, the global MASLD community lost one of its giants when SurfingMASH Co-founder Stephen Harrison passed away unexpectedly. Co-hosts Louise Campbell and Roger Green and guests Jeff McIntyre and Mike Betel each share a memory of Stephen.
Jeff McIntyre starts this conversation by remembering Stephen as a fellow Southerner and, in addition to his many professional accomplishments, a person who could cut through high-level discussions with a "pithy little West Texas saying" that would make a complex or abstract concept clear. Mike Betel starts his comments by talking about Stephen's older brother, Ken, who wrote personal messages back to every comment he could find on social media, which was a remarkable task in its own right. Mike discusses how often he heard Stephen speak and how many times he interviewed Stephen for various Fatty Liver Alliance posts or events. Mike concludes with a story about Stephen talking for five minutes while Mike's audio was malfunctioning and then doing a second take remarkably similar to the first. Louise discusses being on the podcast with Stephen for years and regrets that he will never cook her a deep-fried turkey. She recalls his hobby of building elaborate sand structures on the beach with his family while he ran around the world, putting a large dent in MASLD. Roger starts by describing the first time he saw Stephen at NASH-TAG 2019 and how his larger-than-life presence and exceptional energy suffused a room of 200 people. He continues by using a favorite "Harrisonism" about being thankful that they didn't stop after WD-39 because WD-40 was the 40th effort to create the product we know today, and comments that for Stephen as Principal Investigator, Rezdiffra was his WD-40. Finally, Roger says he "just lost it" when reading the Walt Whitman poem "O Captain, My Captain," which Scott Friedman posted on LinkedIn as a tribute to Stephen.

After the personal comments, Roger says that next week's episode will be a tribute to Stephen from some of his closest friends in the global MASLD community.