Ep. #523: David Ropeik, Andrew Zimmern

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Start the clock.

Thank you very much. All right, please.
Please, this is...

Welcome to Fucking Ridiculous with Bomar.

It's surreal time is what we're renaming this show. I don't know if you've heard about this.
I'm going to talk to you because you're the only people here.

But there is a bug going around. Everybody has the sniffles.
It's got everybody on edge. This country went from zero to crazy in about three seconds this week, and it is Friday the 13th now.

There's a pandemic. The markets are in free fall in general.
and Trump is president. So let's hope we don't run into a spate of bad luck.

You may notice the sound is a little different because we're trying to be on the safe side here. And people don't want to come around me.
I could be the carrier. Everybody's fucking nervous,

especially stoners.

Every time I cough, I'm like, is that the weed or the virus?

I learned my lesson.

with getting stoned during a pandemic because I got really baked last night and I ate all the emergency food I had hoarded.

But you know, we've never really seen anything like this, right, people? I mean, where everything stops. We've had economic problems and slowdowns.
Now, are we being overly cautious?

Yes, but appropriately so. We don't really know what this is yet.
So everything

is getting canceling. Sporting events, I was supposed to be in Vegas tonight.
Sorry, can't be there.

They canceled the gay pride parade here in LA, and they said, stay at least six feet away when you talk to the hand. That's the other advice, you see.

And, you know, so I'm for all this. Masks, absolutely.
I was in 7-Eleven today. Two guys were wearing masks.
They were robbing it, but same,

it helped.

Washing hands, oh, for fuck's sake, I have washed my hands more times than when I murdered that guy. I'm telling you.

Social distancing, yes, I'm all for that. Arm's length, no shaking hands, don't lean in when you talk.
What I call how people should behave anyway. You know what?

If you're a hand-pumping close talker,

don't worry about me. I've already been avoiding you.

There's a new trend in Europe where they're, instead of hand shaking, they're tapping on the elbow. Why? Why touch it all? What's the point of touching someone when you meet them?

To verify they're not a ghost?

Could we try to just get through this without doing stupid shit, you know, to make it worse? Did we have to have a run on toilet paper? I'm almost out.

I was sitting today going, Jesus, if only Fox News had a print edition.

And also, you know, don't stereotype Asian people. I mean, it doesn't, it started in China.
It has nothing to do with that. I hear people calling it the Wuhan flu.
This is a little insensitive.

It's like calling herpes Coachella surprise, you know?

That's my message here. Just don't do stupid shit to make it worse.
You know what's up? All the businesses are closed in America, except

gun sales. So American, I'll shoot the virus.

Get off my porch, you fucking virus, or I'll blow your...

What do you got in there? I'll blow it out.

We don't do smart stuff in this country. Disneyland announced today that they were closing down.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow. It's open today.
Because ask any doctor, that's how you do it. When there's an outbreak, you get everybody together for one last whiff.

So, you know, just be logical. Follow the CDC's recommendations.
Avoid crowds. Wash your hands.
Don't elect a moron president. These are simple things.

Big laugh at home on that one.

Shut the fuck up.

Ass kissers.

But yeah, there's a new protocol in place because Trump, whenever he talks, things get worse. So it's called Operation Shut the Fuck Up.

Because, you know, Trump, he was in the Rose Garden today, and he's lost if he can't brag about the stock market. He's like a porn star whose dick fell off.
He's got nothing.

And also, he's been exposed, exposing himself constantly to people who have the virus. The Brazilian dude and the guy at the CPAC and the congressman, he needs to be quarantined.
Lock him up.

Lock him up. Lock him up.

And so he made this speech the other night, you know, and there's, as we know, two Trumps. There's Rally Trump when he's speaking in public and teleprompter Trump.
That's what you get.

You got two choices, rally Trump, teleprompter Trump. You got Barker at a race riot

or Safari Animal who's been shot with the tranquilizer dart, because that's what he looks like when he's talking to the teleprompter. I was watching this.

I was like, I cannot believe this clown is sitting at the same desk where Clinton used to get blown. All right, ladies and gentlemen, not that there's really ladies and gentlemen here.

We got a great show. Tim Miller, Edward Luce, and Liz Smith are here, and a little later we'll be speaking with bizarre food eater Andrew Zimmern.
Okay, first up

teleporting here. He is a former Harvard instructor of risk communication and risk psychology and author of How Risky Is It Really? Can you guess why we booked him? David Ropik.

Okay.

Thank you so much.

David, how are you?

I'm fine. Yes, you are.
I'm hinted that I'm not there so that I could not shake hands with you in person.

You know what? I want to tell people, you were perfectly fine with getting on the plane. We said, you know what, we've done satellite before.
Maybe this is a good time to do it, to set an example.

But tell me first about that. Like, you're the guy.
This is why I wanted to have you on tonight, because the title of your book is so perfect. How risky is it? Getting on a plane, how risky is it?

The air doesn't transport this stuff, so it's just surfaces that you touch and you touch them in the airports. So the flying out isn't any different than that.

But we hear about, oh, people aren't flying, and that feeds our kind of emotional relationship to risk. It's a perfect example of what this whole conversation, I hope, will be about.

You said perfectly in your monologue, quote you, we don't do smart stuff in this country. When there's a risk around, we don't do smart stuff.

We don't use the prefrontal cortex, the reasoning part of our brain. Don't touch your head! Yeah, right.

Wait.

By the way, I've been introduced a lot of times. This is the first time there was a reference to oral sex in the Oval Office, and the introduction lead-in to me.
Thank you.

No, no, no.

The serious point is, and coronavirus is a great teaching moment for this.

We are hardwired to use our emotions more than reason all the time, but especially when it comes to keeping ourselves safe.

So, what happens is we get one or two or three quick facts, and we have to do this quick in case the threat is like right there, right?

And then we run them through a lot of subconscious emotional filters: our personal circumstances, are we healthy, are we old, our age, our gender, all those things, and a set of instincts that we all share that make some risks feel scarier and some risks feel less scarier.

So, imagine like a bunch of stained glass windows, right?

So we're here, we have a few facts, we're looking through all this dark color, right? And from that we're supposed to be objective on the other side with statistics and evidence.

It's not how we do it. We end up, as a result, being more afraid than we need to, like now, or sometimes less afraid than we should be, like with influenza.

But Doc, you know, the stained glass window is a bad analogy because a lot of people look at that and think that's the answer. And they pray.
And they pray

for exactly, hang a second, they pray, a lot of people suggest about religion for exactly this psychology. So one of the things that coronavirus is scary about is that it's new.

Everybody says, yeah, it's new, it's scary. Why is that scary? New is a new cell phone is not scary.
New is not knowing.

And not knowing means we don't know what we need to know to protect ourselves from. And not seeing.

Isn't that it?

We don't know about it and we can't quite see it.

And we can't quite control our own safety because we don't know how to keep ourselves safe. Talk about seeing.

It's like driving down the road if you can get going at any speed in Los Angeles and your eyes are closed. That's scary, right?

So we turn, in fact, to religion and many other things, masks, toilet paper. They're all the same.
For a sense of control, when we don't have personal control, we look for it in other ways.

Wait, masks and toilet paper are the same? Yeah, and sorry, Church. I'm glad I don't live with you.
Islam, right, yeah, right.

But you get it, right? No, whenever I hear about this kind of stuff, I always think of my little dog, Chico, because, you know, he loves to eat the end of my cereal in the bowl when I put it down.

But if I leave the spoon in the bowl,

that is a risk he will not take.

He loves that cereal, but he will not go near the bowl if there's a fucking spoon in it. Yet when I pull in the driveway, he runs right in front of the car.

Two words. People

are not good at assessing risk. That's your right?

Yeah. Well, dogs, I've had several dogs, they're awesome.
They're great teachers about this because they're totally in the moment.

They're taking the cues from absolutely only the evidence in front of them, not yesterday, not tomorrow, not all these characteristics that make risk feel like

control. Well, yeah.

Okay, so,

you know, the panic I feel is making things worse than the actual

disease. What? I see you gesturing.
Yeah, you know, that's absolutely spot on. Two things.
First of all, panic is when the zombies are attacking us or the wrong person gets elected, right?

Panic is society run amok. We're not panicking when we buy toilet paper.

It may look silly, we're not doing smart things, like you said, but we're looking for a sense of control, and that's instinctive precaution. It doesn't match the facts.
That's what I'm saying.

This whole conversation is our fears are what we're going on, not just the evidence alone. But we're not

panicking, excuse me. But what we are

doing when we overreact is sometimes we're creating other risks. So let me be very specific here.

There are people who are more worried about this than they need to be,

and that worry suppresses their immune system and makes them more vulnerable to getting the thing they're worried about. Yep, yeah.

If you lose sleep, if you have stress, those are terrible factors for your immune system.

Exactly. You know, the only analogy I could think about this time is when AIDS hit, which is not exactly analogous, but people were panicked.

And I do remember a period when we didn't know much about it, and people thought they were saying, maybe it could go airborne.

And that made people freak out.

Exactly. It was the not knowing.
You said it again. And the not knowing leaves us feeling like, I don't know how to protect myself.
I was putting the mic on for this.

And I I was telling the guy in the studio that when I was a reporter in Boston in the 80s, I worked for a union and they wouldn't let me touch any of the gear until it was time to mic up an AIDS patient and they were scared.

So I did the micing up because I wasn't. When you don't know what you need to know to protect yourself, you're more afraid.

But if I may, to broaden the conversation, that's only one of these several characteristics that make us more or less afraid. We're more afraid of man-made risks than natural risks.

We're more afraid of a risk that's now than later. That's climate change.
That's why we're not as afraid as we should be of climate change, right?

This language of risk perception psychology that I wrote about and that we're talking about, this is just one example.

So

I feel like our general posture as a nation has become one of fragile people.

If we were a hardier people who weren't afraid of everything to begin with, you know, kids can't walk to school on their own like they did when I was a kid. I mean, kids cannot be left alone.

That's a free-range child. That's verboten these days.
I feel like we would be in a better place to handle this because we're already so anxious about stuff that we shouldn't be anxious about.

Don't you think that's a part of it?

It is a part of it and it's called in the scientific literature the social amplification of risk, which basically means that how we hear about things which aren't always perfectly factual and accurate and they go through our feelings lead us to perceive that risk in ways where we do other things that are bad to us, like teaching our kids that it's a scary world with this, with drills in school that you're going to be shot, the statistical risk of which is infinitesimal.

The messages that we're sending each other that crime is bad here and oh my god, the sky is falling in every which way, like coronavirus is now.

Make no mistake, the risk is real and serious and we should acknowledge that, feeds a general sense of what George Gerbner at the University of Pennsylvania, who's passed away, used to call the mean world syndrome.

If all we hear about is that the sky is falling, we walk around ducking. What did he pass away from?

Being old. No.

Not important, Doc. Not important.
Let me ask you one last question.

I brought this up last week, and I hope it's somewhat true, which is that I feel like they, they being mean the authorities, so we don't know quite exactly who's doing the talking, but the information we get, tend to, when there's a crisis lurching,

they they tend to tell us it's going to be worse so that when it's not as bad we go oh good that wasn't as bad it's it's better to be pleasantly surprised you know

the examples I gave were Y2K was going to be horrible at the turn of the century. And then there was the BP oil spill, which was going to be horrible.
And the fires of Kuwait.

Remember after the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein lit all the oil wells on fire in Kuwait, and that was going to be years in the making, and it was eight months before they put it out.

Do you think that's the same thing here? They're telling us it's going to be worse so that when it's not as bad, we're pleasantly surprised. It's part of it.
But there are two sides of it.

So let me start on the other side first and get back to your side.

A lot of people in power don't like the fact that people are more afraid than they need to be and are what they call, you call, panicking, white and toilet paper, right?

They try to control that with the don't panic message. God, how many times have we heard that from all the people at the very top? Well, you don't hear it from the reasonable people at the CDC.

You don't hear it from the reasonable people at the WHO.

They understand the importance of respecting our feelings, not trying to control them and telling people, hey, you should feel like I want you to feel, which sounds like I want you to feel like that so you can go buy stocks and be happy and I won't take any grief for this.

It's disrespectful to tell people how they feel. The health people don't do that, but what what they do is what you said.

There's worse coming, and there is. That's a way to put things in perspective now when they get worse, so they won't freak us out even more.

And this talk about this is like the normal flu, that's not comparing the two diseases. They're different.

But it is a way of saying, let's put in perspective that we've lived through something like this before, so it doesn't feel as new, which makes it feel scarier. Okay, thank you.

You put a lot in perspective. I appreciate that.

Stop touching your head. Thank you, David, and let's meet our pal.
That's right.

Okay.

Hey.

Hi, everybody.

Don't even think about touching me. All right.
He is a contributor to the bulwark and former communications director of Jeb Bush's 2016 presidential campaign. Tim Miller with us for the first time.

Hey, Tim.

She's a Democratic strategist and former senior advisor to Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Liz Smith, Smith, how you doing?

And he's the U.S. national editor for the Financial Times.
Edward Luce is right over here. Great to see you.

All right, there's no overtime tonight because, well, you know,

why kid ourselves?

So I have never seen events move faster than during this week.

As I said before, we are off, or maybe I didn't, so let me say it now. We are off next week.

We were going to take, we had a hiatus week week scheduled in about two weeks, but we said let's do it next week since everyone's freaking out and we want to see where this goes.

I hope we will be back the week after that.

It could be that you're our last panel for a while. No pressure.

Good thing we have a steady hand at the wheel. Thank you.

Oh, you mean Trump? I thought it was a shot at me.

I thought it was so, yeah.

So I have two questions because I saw today that there was no food in the store here. You know, there's literally lines at the that's for bread, which I guess would be a bread line.
You know, like

that can't be good for a politician. So given that, and everything is canceled, and no one's going out, and no one's going to work, and no one's buying anything, how can we avoid a depression?

And how can the Democrats possibly lose this election? Don't answer the second one.

Avoid a depression,

you need a huge stimulus. You need Trump to agree to a big injection of cash to people who need it in the economy, preferably directly.
As George W.

Bush did in 2008, mail people checks, get it to people who are not. But we had no money in the till because we gave it all to tax cuts.
No, money's now cheaper than it's ever been. You can borrow

1% for 30 years. So the Treasury can borrow for pretty much nothing.
It's kind of negligent not to in these circumstances. We're going to have two quarters of deep contraction at minimum.

And the way to assuage that is just mail money to people, but particularly to people who don't have jobs for whom a payroll tax cut means nothing. It bypasses them altogether.

Well,

hopefully I'm right about this, but I think that the big question has always been, Joe Biden, how is he going to turn people out against Donald Trump, right? Donald Trump is great at riling people up.

But right now, people want Bourne. They want SAFE.
They want their grandpa there, you know, telling them it's all going to be okay. And he did,

Howard Stern said this week, he said, you know, Joe Biden should go out there and just pretend he's president already. And then Biden did it the next day, and it was the right thing to do.

Yeah, and in front of all of us.

We want to see that. We want to see a shadow president because we don't have a real one.
Fauci, just like the president of the United States. When you hear him speak, that's the president.

When you hear Trump speak, you go buy canned goods at Trader Joe's. Yeah.

The thing I liked about Biden's speech was he didn't have a whole line of people effusively praising the sun god for the rain and the sun. You know, he just went out there.
Right.

He kind of talked about what we should do. It seemed basically competent.
And

that's an upgrade. But honestly, if the Democrats can't win on this message of...

You know, we know we're not supposed to say to the Trump people, you're stupid, but okay, don't. But just how about you've been had.
Right. Well, we can say that to Mike Pence, though.

Yeah, yeah, I think so. And I think that it is a massive indictment.
Like,

let's look at, we want to talk about stupid. So

Donald Trump guts the pandemic, you know, group in the White House. Right.
Then we get a global pandemic.

Then he denies that it's coming here.

Then when it comes here, he puts in charge of the handling of it Mike Pence, a guy who doesn't believe that cigarettes cause cancer, a guy who doesn't believe in climate science, science, a guy who oversaw the worst HIV outbreak in recent memory, right?

And that doesn't inspire confidence. That's stupid.
And I really do think that what the American people will want is, you know, Joe Biden might not send a thrill up your leg.

You know, he might not have a crowd of...

tens of thousands of people screaming his name, but you know he's going to surround himself with the best people. You know he's going to be hyper-confident.

The thing with the pandemic is as terrible as Trump has been, unless you're in

some of these marginalized groups, unless you're a refugee trying to get in the country, unless you're an immigrant that's being caged,

90% of the country hasn't really been affected in their day-to-day life by his idiocy. Right.
Like Ukraine,

Mueller, none of that stuff. Nobody woke up and changed the way they lived their life.

And they actually got richer. Yeah,

right. Their 401ks are doing that.
All the liberals are, I hate Trump and yes, but yes, you got richer. He made you rich.

All of a sudden, that starts to make them think, you know, maybe it is the media and the liberals that are crazy. Everything seems to be fine.
The economy's fine. Excited.

But

79% of Republicans say the government has done a good job, because of course they do. Because it just doesn't get into the government.
That 79% isn't that great, actually. That's a losing number.

79%

in this crisis, where this moron has done what he has done.

If only 79% of Republicans. I mean, check it in a week.
Check it in a week. But yeah, yeah it should be 95%

his approval rating went down 0.5 percent in the crisis so I mean on a scale of mrs goebels

being most loyal because she gave the six kids cyanide calculus

rather than live in a world without national socialism that's most most loyal i would say yeah okay to the average Republican voter who likes Trump but could be peeled away.

How much will this crisis peel away of

the Republican voter? Because to me, you seem very happy about this number. Well, look, this is frightening to me.

95%, by the way, of Republicans think the economic conditions are very good. Good or very good.

So I'm actually working on this with a group of folks who are looking at trying to get Republicans to support Biden and the general, and you're really only looking at basically 4 to 8 percent that you need to peel off.

You don't even need to get close to Mrs. Goebbels.

She can stay. Ingram can stay.
The people that wear the red hats can all stay.

To win the election, you know, he only won by 70,000 votes across three states, right? So the question is, there were a record number of people in 2016 who hated both of them. Yeah.

I think Liz might have been one of them. I was one of them.
So two of them are here.

Trump.

Three of them are here.

You all hated Hillary.

I do not. I don't have Hayden Levin.
Okay, sorry. I don't want to project.
But

Trump won those voters like 70 to 20, right? So if those people that didn't like him last time don't vote for him, that's all you you need.

Okay, so it was primary day again, and Biden won five of the six, right? Yeah.

Bernie won North Dakota, which shouldn't even be a state. You know, I've said this many times, but it

pisses me off that there are two Dakotas. The Dakota Territory has four senators.
Yeah.

And California has

two. with 40 million people.
There's more people in the state named Dakota

than there are in the Dakota. Okay, anyway, so

I was about to say Fargo with them helped produce the movie, you know, Tom Daschell. There's some good things that came out of the Dakotas.

All right. The point is that Biden, the point is Biden is kicking ass.
Yeah. Right? I mean, is Bernie being selfish and staying in? There's going to be a debate Sunday.

They moved it to Washington, and there it's no live audience, barely two live candidates.

What are they debating about at this point? Why are we having this exercise? Because I feel it could only hurt Uncle Joe, which plainly, look, I know he can do the job, but he is

Little Coco himself. He threatened this, you know, a construction worker.
His big go-to is, you want to fight? Who's 78? And every time there's an argument, it's like, you want to take it outside?

I love that moment. I love the fact that he goes.
He's passionate and he's just passionate. Passionate is one thing, but challenging people to fight.
But it's always... It's like Reudrage.
It's wrong.

But that's why people like Joe Biden. And you know what? Because he threatens fighting? No.

But you know what? He's not polished, right?

Not every word comes out correctly. No.
You know, he doesn't always say the right state that he's in.

Or the right wife.

He thought his sister was his wife. Let me tell you something.
Obama has a big stick. I love that comment.

He meant to say, speaks softly and carries a big stick.

But he said, let me tell you, I know this man. He has a big stick.

You can't be better than that. It's

entertaining. It's entertaining.

He sounds like a guy who's just always coming to from being knocked out. He should be rubbing the back of his head.

He was underestimated every step of this process. I underestimated him.

And I think I thought, okay, well, he wouldn't excite people. He expanded the electorate more than Bernie Sanders ever did.
You know,

the turnout of youth voters is lower than it was in 2016 as his share of the electorate.

And you know, I heard all over TV on Tuesday from liberals saying, you know, we need the young people to come out in the fall. We should plan on them not coming out because they never do.

Now, look, I'm not knocking them. First of all, half of them voted in 2008.
This is the same number that baby boomers voted in in 1976. It's not about this generation, it's about being young.

When you're young, you got people to fuck and drinks to try, you're just not into voting. They've been trying to rock the vote for 30 years.
It does not want to be rocked. It won't be rocked.

We have to plan for winning without the young, because they don't show up and they won't. And the ones who would be insulted about that are not watching this.

You're not watching.

You're doing jello shots, even with the virus. You don't care about them.
They're watching their high, though. They forgot to

vote.

But that's nihilism. And this is the thing.
We could get them to turn out if we give them a reason to. This is the most important.

I know every election cycle, we say it's the most important election cycle. And this one really is.
It really is. We're in the middle of a global panic.

But they're not, if they don't come out for the primary and vote for their big hero, Bernie Sanders, why? But that's wrong, though. He wasn't their big hero.
And the problem is...

Bernie Sanders is not their big hero?

No, sure, in that group, but he fed the media a bill of goods, and the media took it hook, line, and stinker that he was going to expand the electorate, that he was the sexy candidate who's going to do this.

He didn't do any of that.

He never expanded his coalition beyond 2016. And part of the reason why he did so well in 2016 was that a lot of people just were sick of the Clintons.
They didn't took any benefit of that.

And they were a few Bernie voters. And I think there's a self-defeating message he had, which is the system is rigged.
And a lot of them, I asked them, are you going to vote?

They think, what's the point? It's all fixed. So there was a self-cancelling thing there amongst the Bernie crowd that you see on Twitter.
The fix is in.

You see it on Twitter. Yeah.

It is bullshit. I just think the answer is all completely bullshit.
It is bullshit.

That's it. The people that respond on the tweets are the people that vote, right? There was this supposedly this man behind the curtain of all these other

younger Bernie voters, but they didn't exist.

Like the same people that are shitposting at me and Liz anytime we say something nice about a neoliberal or a conservative or Mitt Romney, like those people that are saying, please clap to me in my Twitter feed, like that's it.

That's all of them. So you mentioned the ass kissing, which I thought was great for me because I have a little bit here to do about it.

We have given out a couple of times this. It's called the Ass Kisser of the Month Award.
There was a time, I mean, there's many times we've seen this.

Hope Hicks once said, President Trump ⁇ I love this quote. We gave it to her the first one.

President Trump has a magnetic personality and exudes positive energy, which is infectious to those around him.

I thought that was particularly apropos of this week when he's actually infectious to those around him.

Congressman Diane Black once said, thank you, President Trump, for allowing us to have you as your president.

But,

and the, who's Stephanie Grisham? Is she the

press secretary now? She was talking about General Kelly, his former chief of staff, and said General Kelly was unequipped to handle the genius that is our president.

That's a real quote from here in North Korea. So this week we're giving it to Mike Pence.
Show the clip. This is some of what Mike Pence was saying today.

This day should be an inspiration to every American

because, thanks to your leadership from early on, throughout this process, Mr. President, you've put the health of America first.
Mr.

President, you have forged a seamless partnership, but it's all a result of you tasking us with bringing together. And together, as you've said many times, together we'll get through this.

It's just fucking unbelievable. So, anyway, this week's Askisser of the Month goes to Mike Pence.

Here are some of the other things he said that weren't in the speech. He said, President Trump is in such amazing shape.
Scientists now believe Kentucky fried chicken is good for you.

He said, President Trump can make women orgasm just by liking their tweets. Wow.

His body creates no waste. Trump's once-a-year excretion produces a perfect Cadbury egg.

Sometimes when Jared and Ivanka are having sex, they both pretend the other is Donald Trump.

It's amazing. Katy Perry's baby, his.

And they wrote it. They don't write it.
It's amazing how they're not even good audience for their own shout. Fuck you.

The CDC is testing his semen as a vaccine for coronavirus.

His nickname for the rock is Little Miss Bitch Tits.

He is an incredibly generous lover, both because of his concern for her pleasure and because he always leaves a tip. All right.

He is a four-time James Beard award-winning chef who hosts MSNBC's new series, What's Eating America, airing at 9 on Sunday. Andrew Zimmern, Andrew.

Andrew.

Thank you.

Thank you so much. How are you feeling? In good health? Fantastic.
All right, don't be shouting, because spit could come out of your mouth.

But when I heard about a virus that started from someone eating a weird animal, I thought there's only one person to get here. Get me the head of Andrew Zimmerman.
Yeah. Yeah.

And any regrets about your life's work?

No.

I'm just kidding. As someone said, no, as someone said to me earlier today,

because it brings up a couple of really important issues, I think the first one is I'm a cultural explorer. Yes,

not a culinary enabler. I learned that in rehab.

And

I think the, you know, we practice culinary ethnocentrism and culinary racism and have in this country for centuries. You know, Chinese restaurant syndrome in the 70s, the MSG complaints.

And despite the fact there's more MSG in a can of, you know, Campbell soup than there is in any Chinese dish in a restaurant in America, a lot of people seem to want to point fingers and make blame in places that it isn't.

I think your first guest, the risk-reward guy, was talking about that a little bit. And I think it's just extremely unfair.
Playing the blame game does no one any good.

I think that playing the dignity and respect card, the most powerful drug that we have, is where we need to

exist.

I take. But yeah, I've eaten a lot of weird stuff in my life.
Yes, you have.

I may have the antibody to the virus. You might

You might be patient zero. I don't know.

But I take your point, that it's the Chinese certainly have no monopoly on putting weird stuff in their mouth. There's something about the human being that will just put anything in their mouth.
Yes.

I don't understand

this, but our digestive systems, I think, spoil us. They're almost too good.

You can almost eat anything.

Culturally, we've actually advanced more than we we have physiologically, right? So what you have to remember is a couple of things.

We've only eaten for pleasure for a very short amount of the human existence, right? And in that pleasure-seeking, I mean, look at how unfair and grossly incorrect it is.

With 25% of American children going hungry at night, 24, 23%, actually, depending on who you look at, and 24% of Americans going hungry, we sit there and applaud at the Nathan's hot dog eating contest.

I mean, I like hot dogs as much as the next guy, but watching someone shove 60 of them in his mouth in two minutes while there are children going hungry in America at night, something is wrong with that.

We have a perverse love affair with gimmick eating and gimmick foods and, you know, this, you know, pizza fried inside a burger, wrapped inside a burrito, dusted with Cheetos.

We're killing ourselves with our food.

I think there are bigger issues at play here, but you're definitely on to something because psychologically we seem to have this desire to put anything into our mouth that's new.

And over the last 25 years, as food has become become this incredible new sort of rock in American culture, I think it's gotten worse.

You like hot dog? I love hot dogs.

Okay.

Well, I'm not the next guy.

If it's as much as the next guy. But I take your point.
And

the other reason I wanted to have you on is because hearing you talk, you sound like a lot like things I've said over the last 20 years. And I feel like I've been very lonely.

You know, food has been a little leit motif ever since I've been on TV, even really before that, since the 90s.

I've talked about the fact that, for example, I've complained many times that until very recently, I had never been to a doctor, no matter for what, whoever said to me when seeking whatever the cure was,

what do you eat? It's the main thing that affects our health. And they don't ask us, what do you eat?

I could go through a list of Bill Maherisms when it comes to food that I sit there at home and cheer on.

We both feel the same way about sugar. We both feel the same way about the diets that we're putting into our systems.

And I think it's extremely apropos right now in what with the pandemic that we are enduring right now. The fact of the matter is that we're killing ourselves with our diet.

We're spending one and a half trillion dollars a year on the four big food-related diseases, right? So we know that in general, the American diet is not good for us.

The American breakfast, that thing at Denny's with the two eggs, four French toasts, three pancakes, gallon of syrup, scoop of ice cream, you know, all that kind of stuff.

It's just not good for us, right? We need to be eating less meat, more vegetables, eating in a more nutritious way.

But eating well in America has become a class issue, and we're being taken advantage of.

There is such a thing as what I call culinary lawn darts, and it's called corn syrup, it's called processed sugar, where people are making money off of it.

They're pushing it on to Americans, and we have addicted people to fat and sugar and salt and other things in a way that is criminal.

I mean,

when they say

that this disease is especially dangerous to people who are elderly or with underlying conditions.

Well, the comorbidity issue, diabetes, pulmonary, cardiopulmonary, these are all the diseases that come from poor diets. And obesity.
That's correct. Right.

That's a lot of what the underlying conditions are. People are not in good health

to begin with. And it's very hard to have a health system that functions even in good times if the people won't put a little skin in the game.
That's exactly right.

But people are making money off of it. Big pharmacy.

The doctors, the hospitals, all of that. You know, it's that follow-the-money thing.
You said something very interesting about no one ever asking you about

what you've been eating.

That's in Western medicine. In Eastern medicine,

when I'm in the Far East, I always

go to

see a doctor, and it is the first thing they ask. In fact, they interrogate you about it, and in fact, what they give you,

they don't send you to a drugstore with a prescription.

If they feel that there's something out of whack with you, you get natural homeopathic medicines, things that we ingest that are actually good for us, that our body responds to.

We kind of have it a little bit backwards in this country. They interrogate you.
Yes. Like

what do you have for breakfast? How often? When? I had a doctor in Hong Hong Kong follow me out the office and across the street because he knew what I did for a living.

And he caught me, he told me, I shouldn't have this, I shouldn't have this, I shouldn't have this. And then he caught me eating it 15 seconds later across the street.
It's a true story.

I'm not a great patient.

Are you sure that was about food? Yes. Okay.

Well, I just want to say,

to me, the three S's to get through this. Sugar, stress, sleep.
Get a lot of sleep. Don't have sugar.

What was the other one?

Stress. Stress.
And don't stress. Turn off the fucking TV.
I've watched the news all week. I get it.
We're in trouble. I don't need to see it every two minutes.

And I think it's, I've been sleeping better because of it. Because I mean, they're going to get it or not.

But that's the whole point, like, is that with the president, right? With Donald Trump, is, you know, you always talk about how the president's role is commander-in-chief.

You know, sometimes the president's role has got to be comforter in chief.

And I appreciated the points you were making earlier about panic, because sometimes the panic can be worse than some of the underlying things.

And like when like Trader Joe's are turning into Lord of the Fly situations, it's really bad.

Yeah, you know, me also, what he's not capable of, and my earnest thought on this, what he's not capable of and what we need from him and from a president right now is to explain to people that you're not not going, you're not not having an audience here.

You're not not going to a concert you want to go to because you're going to get sick, right? Me and Liz, it doesn't matter if we're going to get sick, right?

You're on the board. It doesn't matter if I'm on the edge.

I'm feeling really bad now. The reason why you don't go.
Are you 80?

People 80 have a

five out of six chance of surviving. Which, you know, if that was poker, you'd go, I'm all in on that.

But it's also one bullet in a Russian roulette game, which you wouldn't want to do. And that's why this should be the president called

communal sacrifice. We are all all doing this for each other.
That's the reason why you're not going out because you don't want the 80-year-old to get sick. No, you don't.

And he's not capable of making that broader communal sacrifice case. But wait till it affects our food system and our delivery of that food system.

Because if you take away math and music, you may get punched in the face, but you take away bread, you take away rice, and that's the stuff revolution is made of.

That's the stuff where there's blood in the streets.

And I think there's going to be a big comeuppance if this thing continues to go on and we find that our food delivery system, people who cook our food, make our food, immigrants, an unresolved problem, immigration reform in this country is going to circle back like a boomerang on us.

We talked about this in What's Eating America and our president.

In Wuhan, they didn't run out of food. In China, it's medicine supplies that matters more.
But can I just say I'm 51? I know I look older.

And my biggest. Only because you're so sophisticated.

Look old. The accent unjustly

puts points in the IQ. I'm 37.

It's amazing how sophisticated I am. I have, which won't surprise you, as a sort of greater sacrifice for the neighborhood and the community, I've given up going to the gym until the end of the year.

I think we should all do that.

Well,

I think countries go through periods where there's a party and then the party ends. We had the gay 90s.
Who remembers the gay 90s? There was the...

No, no, we're talking about the 1890s. I get it, because you're gay.

The 1890s was that kind of time. And then there was the Roaring 20s.
And we had the Go-Go 80s, and we had the disco 70s. And then parties end.

When the AIDS came around, the party fucking ended in a big hurry. And now the party's over.

It's on the party between the recession and now.

I got on a party. I kept waiting for it, and it never happened.
You don't think we've been on a party for a long time,

since we recovered from the last recession, and now with the Trump era? It was starting to get there. We're starting to get there, but it was never like the Roaring 20s.

You know, I was expecting a little more.

I think because of how slow it happened, maybe it didn't feel the same way as like the 90s dot-com boom.

You know, maybe it didn't feel like, oh my gosh, we're throwing around money now because it was such a gradual thing.

I also think America sees things happen in other countries and things that'll never happen to us. We see terrorism was like, that's what for other countries to go through.
And then we were the people

who had terrorism that is, and we were the people who saw other people wearing masks. Wearing masks.
We're never going to be the masked people. And now we're the masked people.

Everything is, we're going to be the people. We should learn that right away.
Help out over there, and then...

Listen, the countries that have been handling this well, like Singapore and Taiwan,

doing it very calmly. They've been through the drill before with SARS and stuff, but

they haven't been declaring national prayer days.

They haven't been sort of calling for religious sort of expectation. They've been doing it very sort of calmly, expertly.
People trust the government there. Maybe they shouldn't.
Maybe they shouldn't.

But at times, like, and normally I wouldn't want to live in Singapore, but if there's an epidemic,

they're official. I would.
I think I'd prefer to be there. Yeah, they're very official.
But in Britain or America.

Well, I also think a country cannot eat its seed corn as we have been doing in so many different ways. I don't mean just economically, I mean educationally.

You can't get stupider and stupider and stupider and expect there not to be a reckoning at some point.

People just, I mean, Trump has his head up his ass, but the whole country has had its head up his ass for a very long time. I mean, it's got to bite it.

But that's the point, is this could be the point of reckoning. And maybe we needed to get to the brink, a brink of a crisis, for people to finally fucking get smarter.

I always thought that, you know, there's this theory that Trump won because people were going through such hard times and that they wanted somebody to shake it up.

I've always kind of felt like that was wrong. And like the reason why Trump won is because people were starting to get comfortable and they were like, screw it.

Let's go with the racist game show host and like see how it goes.

And I mean,

I don't want to diminish. Like, I think there were certain communities where they were going through hard times where Trump did well, like in West Virginia and such.

But he won on the backs of a lot of country club folks, really.

Can I dispute that a little bit? That life expectancy has been declining in America.

That there is a sort of big middle-class problem that's beyond just the gamble on a racist game show host, which is definitely there. But there is a bigger economic middle squeeze going on.

It's been going on a long time.

And so that's real.

Trump is not the answer to it.

Yeah, but if you look at food, and I I see everything through that lens, this has become a country where eating well is a class privilege, and so many other things have become a class privilege.

And while I don't disagree with you at all, because I think you're on to something, I think we've marginalized so many people,

and I do hope and pray that this is that wake-up call. So you were talking, oh, sorry, can I move on? Oh, no, please.
Talking about the class thing as a Brit, I sort of see the class lens a little bit

of people eating hot dogs and deep-fried pizza and and stuff. My neighborhood in Georgetown, D.C., there's been a run on fennel and pellegrino.
Yes. It's the other end of the class spectrum.
Yes.

It means very different food habits.

There are two food Americas. There are two food Americas in this country, and that's a horror show.
Right.

Well, since I don't know exactly when I'll be seeing you again, I just want to end on this note.

The virus does not want to kill you. Viruses don't.
It's like burning down your own house. Then you die.

The virus, you know, it's like the mafia doesn't want the store that they're like skimming from to go out of business. They just want to wet their beak a little.

So make friends with the virus. No, I'm just saying you'll probably be okay.
All right, that's time for new rules, everybody. New rules.

Okay, new rules. Don't listen to the Iranian cleric who says you can cure the coronavirus by coating your anus with violet leaf oil.

Number one, it doesn't work, although it makes the sheets smell terrific.

And number two, you're going to get a lot of unwelcome sexual attention from bees.

Also not true is the Facebook post that claims cocaine kills the coronavirus, although I definitely prefer that cure over an ass full of bees.

New roll, Joe Biden has to stop smiling in a way that makes it look like he's already had a stroke.

Look, just make it until November, then you can have all the strokes you want.

New roll, stop saying Mike Bloomberg will be remembered for spending half a billion dollars and only winning American Samoa. He dropped out ten days ago, we already forgot him.

This is a picture of Robert Durst.

Neural, instead of serving me a thick milkshake with a paper straw, just dump it on the ground and tell me to go fuck myself.

Neural, people on social media have to stop acting like the argument is over and you've won because you typed out the word period. Trump is the greatest president ever, period.

Evolution is fake news because Jesus wrote a dinosaur. Period.

Well, okay, but allow me to retort. Did you graduate from high school? Question mark.

And finally, new rule: if you hate all the things that good liberals are supposed to hate, like environmental destruction, exploited labor, greed, gluttony, and disease, you need to join me in calling for an end to cruise ships.

And instead of the 30-day pause that President Trump announced today in a pledge to keep this great and important industry going,

let's take this opportunity to push the entire disgusting business out to sea and give it the Viking funeral it so richly deserves.

If there is a silver lining to pandemics, it's that they force society to rethink traditions like shaking hands, sharing a dessert, making out with the dog.

And yes,

even passing a joint.

Well, to that list, we should add cruise ships. Cruise ships are what happens when someone asks, what if my hotel could sink?

Let's not forget, cruise ships were terrible before Corona.

Calling a cruise ship a floating petri dish was kind of funny the first 300 times some gross disease swept through the cabins, but it's not that funny anymore because Petri dishes are small and controllable and stay locked in a lab where they can't hurt anybody.

Cruise ships, on the other hand, are large and quite difficult to control, which is why they keep crashing into things like docks

and rocks

and each other.

And that lack of control extends to the interior of the ship as well. If you're a virus looking for a host, a cruise ship is like Spring Break, Mardi Gras, and Las Vegas all rolled into one.

You're going to get laid.

But unlike Vegas, what happens on a cruise ship does not stay on a cruise ship. When the coronavirus started infecting cruise ships, all the other viruses were like, who's the new guy?

Now there's a lot of blame to go around for letting this cat out of the bag, but until two weeks ago, the largest outbreak outside China, over 700 people, was on a cruise ship.

Then the Grand Princess off San Francisco became the second one. I remember when guys in San Francisco would be thrilled when the fleet came in.
Not anymore.

These ships have simply gotten out of hand. Look at this thing.
That's not a cruise ship, it's a Death Star.

Vacation. Looks like a floating housing project.

Royal Caribbean has a ship now that holds 6,680 passengers. Even smaller cruise ships emit as much air pollution as a million cars and pump 150,000 gallons of sewage into the ocean each week.

More if the potato salad sat out.

And

I hate to be a vacation scold.

But the reason you can afford a week of all-inclusive fun is because in the middle of the ocean, there are very few laws or people to enforce them. Kind of like Texas.

Scant labor laws, so a kitchen worker for the princess line works 13 hours a day, seven days a week, for six straight months. It's not a grand hotel at sea, it's a slave ship with a food court.

You may think the crew below deck is having a rollicking good time because you remember Titanic.

But the actual living conditions are more like the room where Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.

Oh, and you know what's happened 322 times so far this century on a cruise ship? Someone fell overboard, which is code for got murdered.

Really? You think you're going up top to play king of the world? Next thing you know, you're playing girl from the opening of jaws.

Finally, if you've ever been on a cruise, think about your day on board. Could you really do anything you couldn't do on land? They have movie theaters and laser tag and skating rigs and Starbucks.

Congratulations, you set out for the West Indies and you made it to West Covina.

I don't get the selling point. Our ship will make you feel like you're not on a ship at all.
Then why go?

Some of the new ships actually have fake windows with a screen that shows footage of the ocean. So you can imagine you're on a ship while you are on a ship.

It's like having sex while you fantasize about jerking off.

Wouldn't you rather do this on the actual ocean? It's cheaper, safer, and fuck, you don't have to sit through the magician. All right, that's our show.
Hopefully, not our season. We're off next week.

I want to thank my guests, Miller, Liz Smith, Edward Luce, Andrew Zimmering, and David Gropi. All right, we'll see you hopefully a week after this.
Stick with it. Good night.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10, or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com.