Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime – Episode #608: Ross Douthat, Rikki Schlott, Piers Morgan

Episode Date: August 13, 2022

Bill Maher and his guests answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 08/12/22) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Moore. And over time, I was just offering Ross a... We've already given away two of the others. Would you like the pee tape? Would you like the Trump penis pump?

I got to step off stage and call my wife. Would you like the receipt for Maloney? How about that for that? All right. So where are the... Okay, here we are. Cracker Barrow 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 so you just kill fish it's fine it's fine it's true

you gotta have some trade-offs I get it I gotta have ethics in the vegan game their motto a little murder as a pascatarian 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 goes 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 animals. Did you ever see a happy vegan, ever? Yes, yes. They're always, always hungry. aren't they? No, that is not true. To me, see you eating a steak.

Stop it! And you know what it is. He's just want a steak. No, that is not true. But what we need is the Kevin Costner character in Yellowstone when he has a little 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. That's in the crossfires of production versus taking an animal rearing it and then allowing it to be abused 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 use to do that 100 years ago. There wasn't factory farming. That's more than 90% of the meat that we consume from supermarkets. I only eat

meat from an animal that died of natural causes resting comfortably after a long illness at Cedarsine. Those are the only animals. 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? You interviewed Trump recently down at Mar-a-Lago, right? Yeah, I did. Four months ago, yeah.

Yeah, and he walked out? If I'd known he had the nuclear football sitting there. I'd probably not gone. It was quite funny because the interview was quite fractious in part, and then he would be quite friendly and then quite fractured. 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.

It was like meeting, like, Al Pacino and the Godfather. He had this bit of paper, and he was like, you called me a mob bus? He 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? Yeah, someone had sent...

You know who he used to do that? At the end, Frank Sinantra. Really? He would have a list of... He was too old to remember who he hated. Yeah. Really. So they... I'm not kidding about this. He would put down this broad, this stupid broad, 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. Right. He went, oh, it was a great show. I went, I know. I know. I said, have you seen the interview with Ernie Elson, the Palm Beach Gazette, whatever it was? And he'd just come out. He said, Ernie, he gave an interview because he played with him. He said, no, what did he say? I said, he said, he was the best presidential goal for he'd ever play 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... And that is all you need to know about Donald Trump. It's all transaction. Everyone is always over. thought 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 or whoever likes him. He will automatically like you. I remember he said it in the campaign. Putin said it 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... 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 kind, with, when you're a person who has an experience like this, right? And you realize that, you know, you have a problem that the system can't fix, right?

You get tugged into weird places. And suddenly you're saying, well, you know, 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, start talking to him about Bigfoot, and he's like, oh, another 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. You know, they don't know why Tylenol works? They don't know why anesthesia works.

Well, Tylenol would never get approved by the FDA today. Why? It's too, isn't it too carcinate? It's too, this is why. Isn't it over the counter in the U.S. Of course. Tylenol? Tylenol is, I think, you know what?

Not at the pharmacy and Tijuana. I'm going to refrain from displaying ignorance and let people take their Tylenol. I'm just saying, yes. There's definitely something. I don't know. That's right. Yeah, there's definitely one of those things. It's one of those things.

Do your own research. I'm amazed. Feed 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. Oh, yeah. Again, like any medicine. There is a... No, no, and lots of... And did you have antibiotic? 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 were worried about doctors over-prescribing antibiotics. Before I got Lyme disease, I was like, oh, doctors, they'll give you an antibiotic for anything. Right. 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? I'm 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 your 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. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10. Or watch them anytime on HBO on demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com.