Raymond McAnally

00:00Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio, the tastiest hour of talk in Music City. Now here's your host, Brandon Styll. Hello, Music City. Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio. My name is Brandon Styll, and I am your host. Today we've got a friend of mine who I've known since the fourth grade, and his name is Raymond McAnally. And Raymond is an actor, and he does all kinds of stuff. He's a jack of many trades. He's a professor, he's an actor, and he lives in LA, and he recently has recovered from COVID-19. He has outlined his entire process online. He started a podcast, it is called The Fatigued Podcast, and I wanted to catch up with him and just talk to him timeline.

01:01How did it happen? What was it like? What were you feeling? We went through all of the steps, and his opinions is he is a educated, sane guy who picked up the virus, I think like anybody could pick up the virus, and he's got some really good insights that I feel like we should share with everybody. I will tell you that if you want to get better, if there's little things that you don't know if you're doing right, you've got to check out Trust20. Trust20.com is Trust20.co, actually. Right now, you can go on there and you can get a Trust20 tactic training course. So if you just were curious, if you didn't know if you were doing the right things or you wanted to make sure you're doing the right things, Trust20 is based on 20 tactics in four categories. They lay out direct actions for restaurants to be able to deliver safer dining experiences. This course, along with the help of industry experts, introduces you to each of these tactics. So if you go to this course at Trust20.co, you'll be able to ensure diner safety and comfort, prioritize the health and safety of your staff.

02:06It's only 40 bucks. So get your management team together, sign up for this thing, and watch it, and make sure you're doing all the things you need to be doing, just like Puckets does. Puckets Grocery, they are doing all the, they are Trust20 certified. If you want to get certified, there's opportunities for your restaurant to become certified too. So go check them out at Trust20.co. It is Cyber Monday today and we have got a sale on all of our t-shirts and hats, 20 bucks for everything, and I am waving the shipping for one day. No shipping. We are, they are selling like hotcakes and we are just really, let's get it out there. Let's let you guys hook up some really soft t-shirts, some really high quality hats. We love for you to support us. I'd love to get you some really cool gear and let's get it to you at a deal. If you know somebody who loves this podcast and you want to share it with them or they just love the Nashville restaurant scene, go to NashvilleRestaurantRadio.com, click on the shirts, hats, and stickers.

03:12I will throw in two free stickers with every single purchase. NashvilleRestaurantRadio.com. I want to welcome in Raymond McAnally into Nashville Restaurant Radio. Raymond is an actor living in L.A. Welcome Raymond. Hey, Brandon. How you doing, man? I guess a little backstory real quick for all our listeners, like Brandon and I grew up together in Franklin, went to school together, and it's pretty fun to be invited to digitally remotely come back home and talk about Nashville or whatever we're going to end up talking about today. You know what, Raymond? The funny thing is because, yeah, I moved here when I was nine years old and we were in the same fourth grade class, Mrs. Hartley's class. Oh, you remember. Yes, that's the name, yeah. Mrs. Hartley's class, the first year, first time I met you, and I ended up going to five different high schools. So one of the crazy things to me about social media and all this stuff is how many friends I know from different schools and how these circles have now, as adults, have grown.

04:22So guys like Brian Kyle and Adam Lambert and these type guys who I went to Lipscomb with and met them at Lipscomb and you went, did you go to Franklin? I went to Franklin and then Kurt Redding went to Lipscomb and that's how I met Brian and Adam. Yeah, I was at Grassland with Kurt Redding when he was in, I remember him coming out. We're deep diving here, man, but there's going to be dead sugar bunnies, I mean. We're dropping names, real Nashville names. Real Nashville names here today on the show and I'm hoping because I have this feeling that I talk to chefs and restaurant tours all the time and one of the things is like people listen, but like I feel like when we put this on social media, these people we're talking to are going to listen to this podcast. They better because they don't know what we're going to say about them. They don't and I wanted to start the podcast off just as a teaser that we're probably going to talk about them. That's great. I like that. Well, I haven't, I haven't, you know, it's so funny because I used to see my late every year on Thanksgiving. I know I missed that show so much. Like the best show ever and those guys are just the most amazing guys, but a little backstory just for you.

05:27Like we, I've known you since I was nine years old of 41 and you've been doing all kinds of amazing things. Let's catch up, man. What have you been up to the last 10 years? Like you were in New York and now you're in LA and like, what have you been up to? Yeah. I mean, if you'd asked me growing up, would I have ever lived in New, in and around New York City for 10 years and moved to Los Angeles, I would have been like, you're crazy. I thought I was going to be, I don't know, a park ranger or something, you know, end up going into the dairy business like my dad or, or whatever. Yeah, I caught the, caught the acting bug at Franklin High. There was a teacher there, wonderful teacher named Mrs. Joyner, who also became, I think, a principal at Centennial. And which is where I graduated first year. She just saw in me something more than just a class clown who was running around the school pulling pranks. She and, and roped me into being on stage.

06:29And then that led to going to college for something completely different. So by the time I went to college, I went to Swanee, stayed in Tennessee, and I thought I wanted to be a philosophy professor. I thought I wanted to be an academic full time. And I kept going out for the plays and I kept taking acting courses. And finally, I admitted I needed to really see if this was what I wanted to do before I graduated. I went to New York for a summer and studied and got offered a off Broadway role. And that was a pretty good sign that maybe I should consider doing this legit. So I just kept stair stepping it and I decided to apply for grad schools, ended up going to Rutgers. And that's what set me up in New York. So I graduated with my MFA in 2005, actually did become an academic in some respects. I'm a part time lecturer for Rutgers online, so I'm able to be, you know, on set or doing a play and I can still teach my students.

07:29And luckily when I got COVID, I didn't spread it to my students and nobody had to mask quarantine because of me. So like, yeah, it's been a crazy interesting journey and kind of every step of the way because it is such a difficult profession. I just kept setting a little, you know, three to five year goals saying, we'll check back in and see if I'm still happy doing this. And so far it's worked. I did not know that, I mean, I would love to come home to Nashville, but my wife is an opera stage manager and we talk about it all the time. If we move back home, we would never see each other. We would be on the road 24 seven, you know, going to wherever the gigs were. You know, I do know a lot of the folks in that community in Nashville, like Denise Hicks at Nashville Shakes and all that stuff and they're wonderful people. And I'm a little envious that they get to live where I want to live and do it. But you know, who knows, who knows in the future, maybe I'll figure it out.

08:30What part of LA do you live in now? Burbank, beautiful downtown Burbank. Downtown Burbank. Nice. Yeah, it's nice. We tend to maybe it's the whole growing up in Franklin thing, but we tend to gravitate towards places that are quick commutes and close to the city. But it feels like a small town. Burbank has that. We lived in Jersey City when we lived in New York. And so we like that that idea being able to walk out our door and have a sense of a community around us. Yeah, sure. Both small town southern folks. Well, never forget, I was late night watching TV one night and Law and Order came on and they were doing like an interrogation and a guy came in the room and I went, holy cow, that's Raymond McAnally. And I think I immediately found you on Facebook and I was like, did I just see you on Law and Order? And you were like, yeah, yeah, I was on Law and Order. Now, I don't know why I was so excited. That was like my favorite shows. I was like, that's right. Look at the guy.

09:31He's there. He's on TV. This is great. In New York, we all joke that you're not truly a New York actor until you've done your Law and Order because it's been on for 25 years or something. And so I had already been acting or been performing off Broadway. I think I'd already done a national tour. And it wasn't until I did my Law and Order that my mom was like, oh, honey, you like she was always supportive of my career, but she was a lawyer and watched that show all the time. And so for some reason, the Law and Order credit was like, oh, I don't have to worry about you anymore. You're going to do well in this. So funny. And so what have you what else have you done? Like if my listeners out there want to see more of your stuff, how can we find your content? Yeah, you can see a list of all the TV and film credits, which is what most people would recognize. Modern Family, 30 Rock, Nurse Jackie, Black Mirror, you know, and a little bit of film and stuff like that, mostly television.

10:32You can find that on IMDb and find it on my website, RayMcAnally.com. And then I for years, I made comedy content that stuff's easy to find on Facebook and either my Facebook, it's just my name, or Daily Fiber Films was the name of our production company. We're probably going to start making stuff again. Everybody's itching to be creative. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm you know, I'm why it probably comes from my parents. Being self starters, I don't leave my career up to my agents or my manager to to help me, you know, keep it going. I I have to produce. I have to make my own stuff. And really, when I've gotten close to big, huge opportunities like series regulars on shows and stuff, all I could daydream about was, oh, it'd be so much easier to produce my own things if NBC is already promoting me. Oh, I imagine. Yeah, I think that, too.

11:34I just saw SiriusXM doing podcasts. I'm like, I want to get on there. Yeah, I wanted you to come on. I asked you to come on the show today for a very different reason. And I feel like we could do an entire show about the acting and just the behind the scene stuff. I'd love to know what it's like being on set and directors and dealing with this, how you get roles. I think there's an entire show there. But today, we're you're just past Thanksgiving. We're going into the holiday season and covid-19 cases are spiking. You know, you just recently tested negative. Finally, after 25 days of having covid-19, you started a podcast with a friend of yours named Caroline and it's called Fatigued, the fatigued podcast. Am I correct? Yeah, yeah. And based on the I guess our our hook, our our main thing is to humanize the issue, tell different covid-19 stories about how people contracted it, what their symptoms were, because the symptoms are wildly different, even though it's the same virus.

12:45And so fatigued came out of our own fatigue with our both our symptoms and just this situation. But also, it's the one symptom that seems to linger the most for everybody. They're just tired. So I want to jump right in. So, I mean, I wanted to I want to establish on the front end that you're a sane, educated guy. This this isn't a politically motivated deal. You're just you're you're looking at science. You're looking at logic. You're looking at your own experience. And through this, you've had multiple conversations with other people who've tested positive for covid, who you've talked about their experiences, as well as doctors. You had a lot of time by yourself to do a whole lot. Yeah. I mean, quarantined in my house away from my wife. We don't have kids, but we we had to stay in separate rooms. We had to mask up when we went into a common room like the kitchen. I mean, to do that in your home. Oh, I can't wait to get into it.

13:48So let's get what was your perception. Let's go back to when is it? It's November. Let's go to September. Let's go to like September, second week of September. We're past the quarantine. Places are kind of open. We're all being careful. What was your perception of the virus around that time? You know, it's interesting. I I was able thanks to work I do with a nonprofit here in L.A. to get a kind of a better understanding of how long this thing could last. So by September, my wife and I had already taken a trip. We drove to Texas to visit her family and stayed for a little over two weeks to make to make it all worth it. We quarantined before we left. So we didn't go out. We ordered our groceries just to make sure we weren't showing up with something to kind of mitigate any exposure because we were going to go visit her parents and they're they're much older.

14:50They're in a high risk area. Sure. And so we actually drove from L.A. to Lubbock in one one drive. All we did was stop at gas stations. We actually packed our food because there were spikes everywhere we were driving through along the way. Oh, yeah. And so then we drove back. So by the beginning of September, we'd had that experience. And had actually been really impressed with states like New Mexico. They had a lot of signage, like the digital signs on the interstate saying, we're in this together. Thanks for masking up like teamwork sort of stuff. Sure. And so we were we were starting to feel like, OK, you know, maybe maybe things are going to get a little closer to normal before a vaccine comes out. And we will be able we saw things loosening up here in Los Angeles. So September was probably looking back on it now, a feeling of a little more hope. I think the frustration because my wife very much works full time in live events at the opera.

15:55And so her her 20 year career, she's the head stage manager at L.A. Opera. Her 20 year career has been shuttered right now. And that institution, it's doing its best to taking care of its employees the best it can. And they just found a way to do a show. But I mean, our household is down over last time I did the math over 60K and in income this year of canceled contracts and stuff work we were supposed to do. And so we were I think we were starting to see hope because I think in September we even got some word that while the season was going to be canceled, she was going to have work in October and November doing the show. So, yeah, I would say then. But we still knew that that meant masks. We still knew that that meant that that meant safety protocols. It was that you were cautiously optimistic.

16:57You're learning to live, you know, to use the term new normal. You were kind of adjusting to things. You're looking at science. You're going, OK, maybe, you know, this might be coming back. We just have to be as safe as possible. You're doing what I think most responsible Americans were doing, right? Yeah. And I believe it was September or the beginning of October, maybe that we took our first trip with another couple that that we've kind of. I mean, we didn't consciously do it, but I guess you would consider us a pod. What people call a pod, you know. But we've been hanging out outdoors. Luckily, in Los Angeles, you can do that year round and, you know, having pizza nights and stuff like that. And keeping our social distance, but being able to see another living, breathing human being. And so we decided to take a trip to Joshua Tree. And the four of us, I think, did that in September. So we we were loosening up our personal protocols, I guess you'd say around that time. When you actually contracted COVID, what were what were the circumstances around that?

18:03Yeah. So that's why I started to be vocal about this. On social media. And it really quickly led to realizing that people wanted to hear more from those of us who'd had it. But the whole reason I brought it up on social media was because I was in the outdoors. I was at Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks. I was wearing masks. We were social distancing. Our only real contact with anybody else was occasionally, you know, you pass somebody on the trail and you put your mask on and and in the bathrooms and public restrooms at the campsites. So those were our only exposure places to someone outside of our four person group. And somewhere along the way, I started to get like a runny nose. Um, that was really the only symptom that developed while we were camping, because we were camping for a week.

19:07And I could easily write that off as the fact we were up in the mountains. Like we hiked the second day, we hiked up to nine thousand feet. So, yeah, it was beautiful. But it gave me COVID. No, I'm kidding. Elevation elevation causes COVID. You heard it first on the restaurant radio. Definitely start that rumor. Colorado be calling us going to stop it. Yeah, please, please shut up. Yeah, so. What we came back, we actually came back a day earlier than planned, because we got noticed that my wife needed to come home and test two days before she started rehearsals that Monday. So and so she was starting this gig. She was going to be around other people for the first time in a while. And so when we got home and I had like what I would consider a mild cold, you know, slight headache.

20:09What else I had the running, the runny nose, the sinus stuff was really the main thing. Eyes were starting to itch a little bit. But I felt like I should be over this by Monday. Sure, the common cold. Yeah. And so luckily, not thinking I had anything like COVID, I quarantined at home and and stayed in for Saturday, Sunday and into Monday and Monday afternoon at three o'clock. So it already had cold symptoms for four days. On on the fourth day, I lost my taste and smell. What was that like? Did you just wake up in the morning, go downstairs to make coffee and you take your sip of coffee and you're like. It had put any coffee in there, like, how did that work? Right. No, well, it is kind of like that. It happened during the day. So I'd already eaten something and tasted something that morning. And I think it was like a late lunch. And I went to the taste.

21:11I was making a sandwich and and like licked my finger or something and was like, wait. What's what's wrong? Did this it almost almost was like the assumption in my brain, even though I wasn't tasting anything, was that the food had gone bad. Yeah, because there wasn't a taste. And and so I I kept like trying little things and realized I can't I can't taste it and I can't smell it. And I don't have the best sense of smell to begin with. And when it's gone, it's gone. It's gone. And and I cannot man. I probably cannot do justice to what it feels like to lose two senses all at once snap gone and nobody can say, you know, don't worry, this will come back to you in 72 hours or whatever. It is incredibly disconcerting. And so, you know, I talk about it in our first episode at Fatigue Podcast. I was dumping hot sauce on everything, just hoping that I could I could taste something.

22:16And I talk in hot sauce that I, you know, would put a spoonful of it on something. On an entire meal. But I was dumping it on there, like a whole jar of it just to see if I could a get my sinuses rolling. Because at the time I still I've been tested, but I didn't know that I had Covid. And I really didn't think that I did. But the minute I lost taste and smell, by the time my wife got home, I had wiped down everything. I'd already figured out how we were going to quarantine inside the house because we were dealing with not only me exposing her, but her potentially exposing an entire cast of people. And I didn't know if, you know, if if I had if I tested positive, which I ended up doing, I was worried that my wife, after waiting months to get to do her job, was now going to get, you know, had had to exit this contract if I if she had gotten it, too.

23:16So there's family income involved there. There's there's the sense of like we very much support each other's careers. And so that would have broken my heart if I had done something that had caused her to lose a gig, especially after. I mean, she's normally booked back to back. Sometimes she flies back and forth between operas to do her job. I mean, she if I could be booked as much as my wife, we would be we would have no mortgage. We would be in Nashville. And, you know, I'd be gigging out in L.A. You know, it would be amazing. So for her to have this one gig to look forward to, I was all the thoughts, all the psychology of it. I was I was just finger crossed. I'm wanting to admit. So you finally get you get a message. I guess you get it. You get a phone call. I don't know how it works. I've got I've done two covid tests so far, but negative on both. I just got an email that said your covid was negative or whatever.

24:17Do they call you? Did you get an email? How did you find out? And what were your immediate emotions afterwards? That email was so surprising. So Thursday, we're still talking about the same week. Lost taste and smell on Monday. By Thursday evening, I got my taste and smell back. And it rolled in slowly. But by the end of the evening, I had it back to fairly normal, I'd say. So we thought for sure, OK, that was that's proof. This was just a super bad sinus problem, not covid. Because everything we'd read about, people lost taste and smell for weeks, if not months, and you're still separated in your home. Yeah, yeah. So we were waiting for the test result to know whether or not it was safe to to be in the same room. How long did it take to get it back? The taste and smell? No, I mean, the test result. It took because of the volume of tests they were dealing with.

25:17It took four days. So on Friday, the day after I got taste and smell back, that's when we learned that I was positive and it was through an email. And that was the weirdest. You know, reading, reading just that word positive. I went on their website, I used a really great lab called Project Baseline, and they're part they're one of the companies that is also trying to research this and put put data together and and come up with measures and protocols. So I just happened to find them because I was trying to find a testing site that could take me right away that Tuesday morning. It ended up being a really great resource because in the email that said, if you need to talk to a doctor, you know, call this number. I called a doctor, called me back within 30 minutes. And she was based out of New York. So she had a lot of she had a long history of dealing with this.

26:20The longest, you know, the full eight, nine months, whatever we're at now. And and she stayed on the phone with me for an hour, answering all my questions. I asked, you know, could this be a false positive? And she said, well, that's a rabbit hole. You know, like you could you could do a second test and that could be a false negative. She said. So I would I would err on the side of caution. It's it's saying you're positive. Let's start. Let's start your protocols and figure out, you know, when when we think you'll be done with this and when you can retest. So we actually came up with two different timelines. And this is part of it. I think a lot of folks who haven't had it assume that just like cold and flu season, a doctor can say, OK, you're going to feel like crap for 48 hours and then it's going to improve. And here are the symptoms. Nobody can do that with this. The doctor was very clear with me that she has seen a wide variety of things. She was glad to hear that my symptoms were mild, but she had had patients.

27:25She said she had had cancer patients who had stage four cancer. You couldn't get more immunocompromised. And they never exhibited a single symptom. And she had had young, healthy, no pre-existing condition patients who ended up in the ICU. And there was just no rhyme or reason to it. Is there some is there. Like how much COVID you get, is there a concentration? Like if you're walking by somebody on a trail and you get one molecule of it and it takes, you know, it doesn't spread rapidly versus like eating a spoonful of it, you know, is that some way? I don't know how you would do that. It doesn't make any sense, but like. Yeah, well, it is. I mean, it is like the difference between kissing somebody with COVID and walking past them. You might still transmit COVID. You might still get it, but it's going to be a different they actually call it a viral load. It's going to be a different viral load.

28:25Sounds like we're doing a porn podcast all of a sudden. But I promise, I promise we're not. And so, yeah, I mean, that's. Probably the issue is they can't do controlled studies right now, either for any number of safety reasons, I'm sure. But so we don't quite know. But yes, a big theory is it is how much of it you get because it has to get from what I understand. It has to get in your respiratory system. So that is why that's some of the major medical science evidence behind masking up, right? Is that at least that's something it's going to know it doesn't. It doesn't. Wearing a mask of any type doesn't keep every small particle away from you. But if it can lessen the amount that that does get through to your respiratory system, then that's a benefit that is happening. I think the analogy of wearing a seatbelt is probably the best out there because you wear a seatbelt, like you get into a wreck.

29:32Does it mean you're going to live? Like, no, but it means you might not fly through the windshield. Right. Are there a bunch of things that could still happen? Like, yeah. But are your chances of being ejected from the car significantly reduced? Like, yeah. I mean, why would you not do that? Yeah. And and it's interesting the whole because we go through this a lot when when it because it's very human to say, no, that's crossing a line for me. I don't I don't want to do that. Or I've watched people do that for decades with seatbelts. Some people just flat out refuse to wear them. Where that analogy, where that comparison stops is you not wearing your seatbelt in a car, something bad happens. That's completely on you. You. But this is more like me not liking seatbelts. So I take your seatbelt off. And say nobody gets to feel the safety of a seatbelt.

30:32If I if I don't want to wear mine, I mean, I can't it's not a perfect analogy, but it's a little more similar because my my case was a was a prime example. And the reason why I'm talking about it is I don't I have no malice towards the person who probably gave this to me or did. I mean, I got it from somebody. Yeah, it was most likely somebody who was asymptomatic. It was most likely somebody who had no clue that they had it. They had a false sense of security because they were outdoors. And one of the things we're seeing it, we're seeing it in the in restaurant communities, we're seeing it everywhere where people are sick and tired of the rules being told to them or they're even trying to follow them. And they're like, well, I was told it was OK to not wear a mask when I was outside. And it's like, yeah, you probably have heard that from a medical professional, but that's how I got this. And I was wearing a mask. So it it it speaks to how easily this thing can transmit.

31:38It speaks to all the variables that the medical community cannot control. And, you know, it's. I don't I don't have I'm, you know, I'm not a brainiac who has the solution. But it seems really important to give people the information so that they can make smart decisions, because I do think that's how. My industry, like like theater and your industry, like the restaurant community, how we do get to return to our jobs, because people were we're all I think. Kerry talked about this. Kerry Bringle talked about this on his episode with you. Like he mentioned that even if the restaurants opened up to 75 percent capacity, that he might only get a turnout of 50 percent. And we're definitely talking about that in the theater community. In fact, theaters are very scared that if we were to open up a show and do it full capacity with all the protocols and people started to get sick, then theater wouldn't happen for another two years because the mental perception of the audience member are patrons of people we need to spend money to come to us.

32:54They they would lock down. They would they would shut out the industry. And I'm sure the restaurant community feels somewhat similar. Like they want to do it right so that they're not to blame. I think there's a really interesting balance between doing the right thing in survival. Right. So I mean, that's there's a duality here because restaurants still have to pay a rent. We still have all of the expenses, the responsibility to employ people. We want our staff to be able to live and function. So, I mean, being open at 50 percent capacity, just the name of the game in our business is just break even. Hey, if we can just break even, we can help support the community in some way. Yeah. But then there's also the is there a responsibility for us just to close until this thing, till there's a vaccine and we can safely go out and die. And like you said, if you open and people start getting sick, then it's going to ruin us for the next couple of years.

33:57But at this point, everybody is just going to close forever if they're not open to some degree. Right. But even if you're open at some degree, you're still, you know, enhancing the spread because you're inviting people to all come to one area and to completely socially distance for people inside of a restaurant is impossible. Yeah. And that's what I mean. I don't have the answer for that. And I don't think nobody does. And, you know, one of the things we've been talking about at Fatigued is we are our frustrations, our need to keep the economy going, our need to make sure that, you know, there's still there's still business owners, small business owners left who who haven't gone bankrupt. All these things, the suicide rates, all this stuff we hear about, all that is true. What is also simultaneously true is that this virus doesn't give a shit. It is going to transmit and it's probably transmitting more than we think it is.

34:59There was a recent data study that said at the start of this, so I think March and April, for every one case we were picking up and reporting that there were 10 more that we were missing because of asymptomatic situations or situations like mine where the person was like, oh, I have allergies normally. And this is just a normal allergy response where I caught a cold. And it can't be this this big bad virus. Now we think we're catching one out of every three. So we're still not getting the transmission rate. The best thing I can come up with in my non medical understanding of this is the more surgical we could be about testing as much of the population on a regular basis as possible, making tests free, making tests accessible so that you can target when there is an outbreak, when there is a potential outbreak. And and yes, it would scientifically would need to involve contact tracing or some sort of willingness to participate.

36:07When you get told like when I got told I was positive, luckily, I'd only been around three other people. And two of them were getting tested regularly, my wife and our friend, because of work. And the fourth never exhibited a single symptom. He was he quarantined anyway, but he didn't he did not get tested. So two out of the four kept testing negative. And I racked my brain, OK, like, should I call the gas station that we stopped at on the way back from Yosemite? What what to what degree? Should I try and go to I stopped at pump number seven and I put gas in my car like, you know, I don't know what I could have possibly. Just let you know, I mean, you can't at that point. You can't mean it doesn't matter. Yeah. What do you do? Yeah. And and and what you know, with the person on the other end of the line, even care. Just I think it's interesting the side of what you're saying that no matter how we rationalize it, no matter what we do, whatever Facebook post we read, no matter what we read, however we feel COVID doesn't care.

37:19Yeah. Like the science behind it, no matter. And I hate the fact that this has been politicized. Oh, I mean, I mean, I hate that it's been politicized at all. I wish that we had better leadership. Yeah. But I don't want to get into all that. I just think it's interesting that idea that no matter what you say or what you feel, COVID has zero feelings. All it wants to do is reproduce and spread. Yeah. And like at the core of everything, that's got to be at the front of your mind, right? No matter what somebody tells me, oh, look, the numbers are going down like. OK, why? Like, it doesn't matter because it's still going to spread unless we're on a complete lockdown and nobody is going anywhere. Really, the only way it's going to stop and I don't think we're going to hit herd immunity before a vaccine comes out. Well, we can't. So for multiple reasons, number one, herd immunity as a concept without a vaccine is is medically unethical. The death rate. Yeah. Death rates far too high. I've heard doctors state that.

38:22The other thing is, and most people don't realize this, the going medical science, you know, we're we're not even a year out from this. We're still collecting data. It's still being analyzed. We're still trying to figure out what questions we should be asking with the data that we have. We don't have any distance from this. So we are dealing with. Constantly rolling, changing medical knowledge. What we do know right now is you get you get covered. Hopefully, you know, you're not contagious within after the first 10 days. If you're immunocompromised, then you're you're you should quarantine for up to 20 days to no longer be contagious. That's what I did, because I'm type two diabetic. So we went ahead and did the 20 days just in case I could still give it to somebody. Then, you know, it's all based on last symptoms. Well, one of the last symptoms they talked about is, you know, anywhere from some people, some some counties, say three or four days after last fever with no Tylenol to two weeks after last fever with no Tylenol.

39:39Well, I never had a fever. Hmm. Not one. I had chills. I had I had night sweats and things like that. I'm assuming I ran a fever, but I never caught one on a thermometer. So I never took any Tylenol and never took any medication of that type. I just took vitamin C, vitamin D and zinc. And that that, you know, and I had mild symptoms. So that was my case. But these are the protocols or the the expectations, the prognosis we know right now. There's so many outliers, so many people with different long term reactions that we don't know. And that's what we're talking about. We we really don't know what to tell those folks to expect. So you're just sharing stories. Yeah, because that's all we can do. I mean, like the medical professionals are are scratching their heads as to what exactly to tell people, because people want answers.

40:40They're frustrated. And going back to what we were just talking about, like our frustration is very, very, very human. I totally get that. But the problem with herd immunity is the concept of it or the application of it is not only the death rate, but this from what we know now, this doesn't stick around. You don't keep antibodies for more than three months. Maybe some people do, but the majority of people, they're not when they get retested, they're not showing up in their system. I know people who have actually never developed the antibodies and had very bad COVID symptoms and their antibody tests came back negative. So for whatever reason, their body never developed it. What that tells us is you can get it again. I don't know enough about all the medical journals that are reporting to know whether or not anybody has done this research. But I was talking with somebody who had had it.

41:42I want to say they're four months out. And they had gone back into the same level of flu symptoms that they had in the first week, four months later. Wow. Is that a kind of like with mono? Is that a relapse of the same COVID-19 exposure or infection? Or is that did they get it a second time? I don't know. Or did they just get the flu? You know, there were some interesting numbers this morning. I just looked up for our for our edification, because this is my life now and I'm just kind of like. You kind of open the podcast up with like, I try to be a rational, sane human being. And for some reason, the numbers give me comfort. You know, it's not somebody telling me what to do with the information. It's just the information. You know, but like total cases in the US, this is of yesterday for so for Thanksgiving.

42:50Twelve point seven million plus. That's it. Yeah. For the. Yeah, that's all. That's like the same number of people that voted. It's pretty close. The total number of tests actually is total number of tests. One hundred and eighty six million tests. So this is this is one of the more scary, nerve wracking ones for all of our like local, not not just municipalities, but our health care systems. Current hospitalizations, ninety thousand four hundred and eighty one as of yesterday. So that's how many people because we talk about death rate a lot. We don't talk about the people who land in the hospital and what percentage they are of the population. Ninety thousand people in the hospital right now. Just for this. So it's not like heart disease and cancer and everything else went away. Those people still need to be hospitalized. Yeah, is that people not taking this thing seriously, getting sick, having to go to the hospital or taking beds from people who are in car accidents and have heart attacks and can't.

43:56Yeah. A friend who is a is a ER surgeon said that was there at the start of this. That was their biggest fear is that, you know, they would be so overwhelmed with resources, lack of ventilators, things like that, that somebody in an emergency situation, also in an emergency situation, you know, would come in and they wouldn't be able to save their life. That's a very real reality and a scary one, because we're not used to that as a society. Very few Americans anymore, thanks to credit cards and in ways we can stave off the ways we can ignore our debt and things like that. Very few of us truly go without, you know, truly go without to the point we don't really understand when somebody talks about that being their reality. So to the concept of needing emergency care and even those of us who, I mean, I've lived years uninsured, but I knew that if I went to an ER, somebody would take care of me and I would deal with the cost later, but they could save my life.

45:12We don't, you know, we might be in a situation and we've or we've already been in situations where that option was taken away. What are your takeaways throughout this whole thing? I mean, like at the end of this and I end up in every show, but I like to give the guests the floor to say whatever they want for as long as they want. You do whatever you want there. And I don't know if this is that moment where we're coming to the point towards the end of the show. But what are like through all of this? What are some of just kind of your facts? What are some of your truths, your takeaways that you could share with us? I think one of my big takeaways is like I was trying to articulate earlier, I don't have any malice towards whoever might have given me this because they they most likely did not even know. Takeaways based on that are be be kind to yourselves and those around you. I've never felt the instinct to tell somebody, you know, when I've been in a grocery store or whatever and I see somebody without a mask on, that's you know, that they're going to do what they're going to do.

46:22That just means I'm going to get past you quicker and I'm not going to stay and get to know you. But like I'm going to actually avoid you as best I can. Yeah. But but realizing that, you know, we're all getting frustrated. This is this is going to continue. We're probably not living going to live in a world where everybody doesn't own a mask anymore. We might not be wearing them, but we also might find out that, you know, there are times maybe we should be doing a little bit of that protocol every freaking flu season when everybody's getting everyone else sick. You know, there's parts of the world, Asia in particular, that does that. And so part of that kindness is understanding, not jumping to the assumption that the person wearing the mask, the person not wearing the mask, they're making a judgment on you there or the or that they're doing something with intentional malice because so many people, I think one of the reasons we're seeing this thing spread so easily and continue to no matter what we're doing is because we we don't none of our protocols really deal with all the asymptomatic carriers or the people who are contagious before they even know that they have symptoms.

47:42Right. There's there's that incubation period where you can still be contagious, but you haven't had first symptoms. So you didn't know that you just exposed 20 people over the last three to four days and you wouldn't have any knowledge of it. But and that's how this thing keeps rolling. And to to carry that with you, not we talked about this on our on our podcast. I think it was in our second episode. I don't like saying I like I don't feel like I'm in fear even now. But, man, I like to be smart. And and protect myself and myself and others. And I guess that's the whole reason why I continue why I started the podcast, why I want to talk about this is to help the the understanding, the awareness that. Regardless of all of our human reaction to this virus, the virus is going to do what it does.

48:46It is going to keep infecting people. So we have really, really, really got to check in with ourselves about those frustrations, you know, about risk of exposure so that we can hopefully get back to normal as soon as possible. This vaccine, these vaccines, they're not going to be a cure all. It's going to take a while for it to get through the population. It's they're they're ninety five percent effective. So that means people will still get this, you know, we need to stay diligent regardless of how done with this we are. So that our communities, our professions, our livelihoods can freaking open back up. I want that so bad, you know. It's great catching up with you. It's great to see you. Yeah, this this obviously you put out as a podcast. If you want to watch this, head over to our YouTube page at Nashville Restaurant Radio. Raymond, again, let's just tell everybody how they can see your content.

49:50You have a podcast. It's called Fatigued. It's available on Spotify. You can listen to it all over wherever you can find podcasts. Yeah, it's you and your co's name is Caroline. How what is your relationship with Caroline? So Caroline and I met in 2014 working at St. Louis Rep together, so we're both actors. And she she's based out of New York and based out of L.A. She had covid in July. So this was born out of I had called her with some information on what vitamins to take when she told told all of her friends that she had it and she had it incredibly bad. Her episode is really important and timely to listen to right now that we're around the holidays because she actually contracted the virus from family members who were not honest about their potential of exposure. They'd been out on vacation and didn't tell her. And so she was staying with cousins thinking this is safer than a hotel driving from Florida back up to New York.

50:54And that's how she got so it was a good example of like her. Her family didn't mean to hurt her and get her infected. But she was then dealing with. Debilitating symptoms for 19 days by herself in an Airbnb in North Carolina. And then she still has existing symptoms four months later. Wow. You know, so that good example of like, it really doesn't matter what your intention is. You got to stay diligent because she is. She's a very soothing voice. Yes. And she's a fantastic actress. She does a lot of Shakespeare and all that. But yeah, she's she's fantastic. And so, yeah, if you want to find out more about Fatigued Podcast, we have a website, Fatigued, F-A-T-I-G-U-E-D, podcast dot com.

51:54You can also find me at Ray McAnally dot com. That's spelled M-C-A-N-A-L-L-Y. And or you can just Google my name. Stuff will come up. You'll see footage. You do a fantastic one man show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a I have a one man show called Size Matters. It's on Amazon Prime or Amazon. You can rent it. And we filmed it at the Franklin Theatre. I got to come back home and do the show. Yeah. So you should definitely check that out as well for a comedian. This was this show was hilarious. Yeah, we had our audience at Stitches today. Yeah, I'm a comedy actor. I'm I'm not one of those good standup guys who can make the most uncomfortable subject matters hilarious. Maybe I'll get there someday. Well, man, thank you so much for joining. Like I said, I always give the guest the last word. Like I said, no time limit, whatever you want to say. You're talking to hopefully those people we mentioned at the beginning of the show.

52:57See, that was so easy for them to they had nothing. We didn't call anybody out for anything crazy. Final word. Take us out. Just think about protecting each other. That's really that's really, I think, the call to action. Look out for one another. Check in with your frustrations. Make sure you're not you're not leading with with a knee jerk emotion or reaction. And I know that that medical science is doing the best it possible possibly can. And everybody, I mean, I hear so many credible arguments, understandable arguments is probably a better way to put it in terms of frustration with government, frustration with medical science, frustration with the situation. Everybody's frustrated. Nobody expected this. You know, we're doing we're all piecing it together as we go. And it's important to to separate things out and be supportive. When you can, as much as you can and not just dissent, not just throw your hands up because there might be a mix of information happening, if that makes sense.

54:11I really wish I prepared this last statement better. But that's it. That's what I've got. You did great. I throw it on everybody. I say, hey, this is the final statement. You get to just really speak. I think you did a fantastic job throughout the show of putting out a bunch of points and just some real life commentary about what we're going through out there. And hopefully, if you listen to this, you'll take heed and continue to wear a mask when you're in public, not only for your safety, but for the safety of everybody else. You don't want to be quarantined for 25 days away from your wife, kids, work, everything, losing losing your sense of taste and smell. Unmild cased is like rain, right? I mean, that's a doesn't sound like a lot of fun. And I can't imagine getting a worse case and what that must be like. So thanks for coming on the show. Like I said, it's great to catch up with you and. Happy holidays. Yeah, happy holidays, man. Happy belated Thanksgiving and whenever you release this happy Monday, almost almost Christmas, we'll be there before we know it.

55:16It is is absolutely. Thank you so much, brother. I appreciate everything. Yeah, dude. Thank you, Raymond McNally, for joining us on Nashville Restaurant Radio. Hopefully there's something in that that you could take when you go into work tomorrow. Today, we thank you all for listening and hope that you are being safe out there. Love you guys. Bye.