Overtime – Episode #608: Ross Douthat, Rikki Schlott, Piers Morgan

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series, Real Time with Bill Moore.

Okay.

We are another time.

I was just offering, well, I'll say,

we've already given away two of the items.

Would you like the P-tape?

Would you like the trunk penis punk?

I guess I got to step off stage and call my wife.

Would you like the receipt from Milania?

How about that?

Thank you.

All right, so where are the...

Okay, here we are.

Cracker Barrel recently announced a new plant-based fake meat option.

Really?

At their restaurants.

As a vegan.

Oh, this is for you.

You're a vegan.

I'm a pescatarian, but I'm...

I know that that's somewhere that we might have a lot of people.

So you just kill fish.

That's fine.

Yes, he just killed fish.

No, I think there's no fine.

It's true.

You gotta have some trade-offs.

I get it.

You're gonna have ethics in the vegan game.

Their motto, a little murder.

As a pescatarian, I'll change that too.

Do you think America will ever be ready for a meatless future?

You know,

I don't like the veganism that is like evangelizing it to other people.

I don't believe in mandating it, but I do believe that with technology and also with our environmental constraints and

how much land and water and resources go into meat and our growing population at the same time, that a shift that way organically I think is a healthy and probably inevitable thing.

Well,

certainly we eat too much meat.

Yeah, definitely.

The inconvenient truth about meat, I think, is that although it's a disaster for the planet and certainly not good for the animals who get killed,

it may not be bad for us.

Depending on who you are, what your composition is, how much you eat.

But

there is just not definitive science, as we were talking about, really about almost everything.

Did you ever see a happy vegan?

Ever.

Yes.

yes seriously they're always always hangry aren't they

no that is not true they see you eating a steak stop it stop it that is true what it is they just want a steak no that is not true but what we need what we need is the

the kevin costner character in yellowstone when he has a little uh romantic entanglement with an animal rights activist he gives her a long speech about how the process of agricultural turbines kills immense numbers of voles and mice and so on.

Anyway, I can't deliver that speech, but that's what

you need.

So it's about crossfires of production versus taking an animal, rearing it, and then allowing it to be used for its entire lifespan.

Also, factory farming.

It's one thing

to eat meat.

It's another thing to torture animals on the way.

That is not necessary.

People didn't used to do that 100 years ago.

There wasn't factory farming.

It's more than 90% of the meat that we consume from supermarkets.

I only eat meat from an animal that died of natural causes.

causes

resting comfortably after a long illness at Cedar Simon.

Those are the only animals.

If Trump

appears,

if Trump had not blown up at you after learning about your negative comments of it, would you still be open to being his friend?

Yeah, you interviewed Trump recently down at Mar-a-Lago.

I did four months ago, yeah.

Yeah, and he walked up.

If I'd known he had the nuclear football sitting there, I know.

He's probably not gone.

It was quite funny because the interview was quite fractious in parts, and then he would be quite friendly and then quite fractious.

Because he'd been sent a whole load of things I'd said about him just before the interview.

And he called me up to his office, and it was like meeting Al Pacino and the godfather.

He had this bit of paper, and he was like, You called me a mob boss.

You called me a gangster.

You said I should never run for office again.

Why should I do this effing interview?

Well, he had it on a piece of paper.

Someone had sent.

You know who used to do that?

Yeah.

At the end, Frank Sinantra.

Really?

He would have a list of the things that

he was too old to remember who he hated.

Really?

So they were, I'm not kidding about this.

He would put down this broad, this stupid broad,

you know, and then he would just, it was the same thing.

It was quite funny.

The way I turned it around was he'd, I said to him, look, it's not all going to be bad.

I was trying to save the interview.

And he said, well, what do you mean?

I said, well, I want to talk about your hole in one last week at golf.

He went, Oh, it was a great shot.

I went, I know, I know.

I said,

I said, Have you seen the interview with Ernie Else at the Palm Beach Gazette, whatever it was?

And he'd just come out.

I said, Ernie?

Ernie gave an interview because he played with him.

He said, No, what did he say?

I said, He said you were the best presidential golfer he'd ever played with.

He said it was a brilliant shot.

It was a five-iron into the wind, bang, bang, straight in the hole.

He said it was fantastic.

He went, All right, I'll do the interview.

And that is Donald Manny.

And that is all you need to know about Donald Trump.

No one has always overthought Donald Trump.

He is a sick man.

He has this disease called malignant narcissism.

It's really in the book of crazy.

I mean, and he's got the worst case of it.

That explains Putin.

It explains why he doesn't anything bad about the KKK.

Whoever likes him, he will automatically like you.

I remember he said it in the campaign.

Putin said I was brilliant.

I think I'll take the compliment.

That's it.

Putin said I was brilliant.

Done.

Ross, why is Lyme disease ignored by the media and medical establishment despite nearly half a million Americans being diagnosed each year?

Would you say it's a silent epidemic?

Well, I think we kind of.

I mean, you know, Lyme patients actually tend to complain a lot, so it's not completely

silent.

It's not silent at all.

It's just not well

researched and treated, and we don't know very much.

Right, and we were, you know, we were talking about all the limits of modern medicine.

But the thing that you have to keep in mind in defense of all those doctors who saw me and couldn't diagnose me is it sounds really weird, right?

You're telling me, you know, you were bitten by a tick and it gave you this condition, and it doesn't follow any particular patterns, and one day your foot hurts, and the next day your chest hurts, and the next day you're gagging up your breakfast.

It sounds a little weird.

And there's also a cycle that happens with these kinds kinds with when you're a person who has an experience like this, right, and you realize that you have a problem that the system

can't fix, right?

You get tugged into weird places.

And suddenly you're saying, well,

if the people outside the establishment are right about Lyme disease, about how to treat chronic Lyme disease, maybe they're right about chemtrails.

Maybe they're right about Bigfoot.

And the next time you see your doctor, you start talking to him about Bigfoot, and he's like, oh, another Lyme Lyme disease patient with a Bigfoot obsession, right?

No, no, no.

It's a terrible analogy.

It is.

I'm sorry, but the human body is still a mystery.

We're still at the infancy of understanding it.

You know, they don't know why Tylenol works.

They don't know why anesthesia works.

Well, they know Tylenol would never get approved by the FDA today.

Why?

It's too, isn't it too carcinogenic?

It's too, this is why.

Yeah, it's...

Isn't it over-the-counter in the U.S., but not other countries, though.

Tylenol?

Tylenol is, I think, that's the only thing that's

going to refrain from

displaying ignorance and let people take their Tylenol.

I'm just saying.

There's definitely something.

I don't know.

Yeah, there's definitely something.

It's one of those things.

It's one of those things.

Do your own research.

I'm amazed.

Big Tylenol.

I mean, you look so healthy after so much antibiotics.

That amazes me.

Because, I mean, antibiotics, I'm very glad they exist in this world I mean before antibiotics you could die from a splinter

now we're almost going to enter a phase of history where we may not have antibiotics because we've overused them so much

but they do incredible damage when you're on it oh yeah again like any medicine there is a no no and lots of did you have antibiotic i was i was incredibly i was incredibly lucky i had very

i took i didn't just take antibiotics for six years at various points i was taking like 12 pills a day 15 pills a day, and I never had, you know, a lot of people, their, you know, pals can't handle it.

And this is, you know, again, one of the many reasons people struggle with these illnesses is because if you have to take antibiotics for months or years, it just becomes something that people just, yeah, absolutely can't handle.

But this is the weird irony of Lyme disease is that we're used to a world where People are worried about doctors over-prescribing antibiotics.

Before I got Lyme disease, I was like, oh, doctors, they'll give you an antibiotic for anything.

And then you have Lyme disease, they give you two weeks of antibiotics, and you're like, begging.

You're like, could I just have one more week of antibiotics?

And you're like, no, absolutely, absolutely not.

What are you crazy?

You're going to be dealing doxycycline behind the hospital.

I know you are.

Well, I'm just glad, as I said before, I'm going to reiterate.

That's the headline tonight for me.

I'm so glad you're back and you're healthy, and that's what I'm important.

And I give the credit to Jesus.

Amen, brother.

Thank you very much.

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