Ep. #541: Peter Strzok, Ewan McGregor

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

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Wow, we have a

did you get a shot of this going on?

Look at this.

There's actual people.

There's people.

People.

Thank you.

Thank you, Jesus.

I have people.

Okay,

people.

People, a live audience.

Are we making history?

Are we the first ones to do this?

We're doing it.

We're doing it very safely here.

Everybody has been tested, socially distanced, and compensated for their time.

Like the women at the bar at Nobu.

Oh, this is interesting.

You can hear people laugh individually at this.

Oh, I see.

That guy liked that joke.

That lady didn't.

That's an interesting experiment.

Anyway, I'm so thankful you're here.

I'd say you're very brave, but there's like no fucking chance you could get it.

Look at you.

You're a million mile.

I mean,

you've been tested.

You're masked.

You're spread way apart.

What we in the business call ideal for comedy.

But at least, hey, there's people.

There's people.

And boy, I picked a good

week

to get back to the studio with people because the forecast on my phone today, I'm not joking, it said smoke.

Tomorrow's forecast, Blade Runner.

Are you from Los Angeles?

You're all local, right?

Of course.

Okay.

All right.

Well, I mean, Jesus Christ, the air in Los Angeles, it was like a cross between Shanghai and my dressing room.

I'm saying there was a lot of, I mean, I'm.

if I'm sniffly, it's because yeah, it's good shit out there.

I went for a checkup yesterday to my doctor.

He grabbed my balls and said,

turn your head and stop coughing.

Seriously, you're coughing.

It's like fucking Mars out there.

Today Elon Musk looked out the window and said, finally I'm home.

Elon Musk, you know.

No, there is so much smoke in Oregon right now, you can barely see the tear gas from the riots.

I tell you, it's crazy out there.

The ash is falling.

You've seen this?

It's like it's snowing ash.

It's like the 80s all over again.

My nose is running, and there's white powder in my car.

I'm saying.

And

this pissed me off.

I'm sure it did you too, right?

One of the fires, you saw this, was because somebody, parents were having a gender reveal party

in the park, and the parents set off a smoke bomb that we would see if it would turn pink if it was a girl and blue if it was a boy, proving once again something I've always said, the wrong people are reproducing.

And of course, you might even have electricity.

We have rolling blackouts now here, right, you know, in LA, in California.

I mean, yesterday Nancy Pelosi had to get her hair done by candlelight.

And

President Trump has been monitoring the fires very closely.

He said his heart goes out to the insurance companies.

Oh, he's full of empathy, this guy.

I tell you,

it's 9-11 anniversary today.

Yeah, and Trump said he will never forget the moment when he learned that he had the tallest building in Manhattan.

Trump said that.

You know, because he's an asshole.

You see, there you go.

There you go.

There you go.

Sometimes you have to think twice on the thing.

You know, modern audiences don't get that fucking thing.

But I tell you, 2001, were you even alive, some of you people, for that, or you were kids?

I tell you, it's such a different time.

I mean, back then, Trump was a punchline with no interest in governing.

Oh, yeah.

No, I mean, 19 years, everything is just so different.

I mean, back then, if you ate on the sidewalk, you were either homeless or French.

And if you stayed six feet away from someone, it's because they smelled like axe body spray.

That's,

you know.

Now it's because the virus, you see.

But yeah, the virus is apparently not going away.

Dr.

Fauci said we're going to have to hunker down

because the fall is coming and it could get even worse.

And LA County took him to heart.

Boy, today they announced, L.A.

County did, canceled Halloween.

They have kicked, right?

No trick-or-treating, no party shit.

I had a great costume this year.

Slutty Dr.

Deborah Burks.

Jesus.

Now I don't get to wear it now.

Fuck.

It's so interesting.

Dr.

Fauci is in Bob Woodward's new book.

He's got a new book about Trump called Rage.

And apparently Dr.

Fauci said Trump's attention span is, quote, like a minus number.

And when Trump heard that, he was furious for about a second.

And then somebody rattled a bag of Cheetos and he forgot all about it.

But yeah, Trump yesterday held one of his super spreader rallies.

He's the president.

He has super spreader rallies there in Michigan, and he compared his handling of the virus to FDR.

The only thing he has in common with FDR is they both had difficulty walking.

All right, we got a great show.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for coming and doing this.

We're back.

Peter Hanby and Jessica Yellen are here in person.

We have real people here too, actual people.

And a little later, we'll be speaking with the very talented Ewan McGregor.

Ah, Ewan McGregor's here.

Well, we've got a big movie star on the show.

But first up, he is the former FBI Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence, my old job, and author of the new book, Compromise, Counterintelligence, and the Threat of Donald J.

Trump.

Peter Strzok.

Peter Strzok,

thank you so much.

Okay.

Peter, are you there on my Zoom?

I am, Bill.

It's great to be here.

Great to have you.

Thank you.

Let's hope the Zoom holds up.

Sometimes it doesn't.

The first thing I want to ask you is, you know, you're a G-man your whole life, and they're known to be apolitical.

Does it amuse you?

Does it infuriate you?

What does it do to you that it used to be only a few years ago that it was the liberals who were suspicious of law enforcement, and now that's completely switched?

You're the good guy with the liberals, and it's the Republicans who

think you're the bad guy.

What does that do to you?

No, it's crazy.

And it's hard to imagine how fast that happened.

And it makes you wonder how long it's going to last.

And some of that you can expand from that.

You know, the people cozying up with the Russians are not the pinko-communist liberals anymore.

You've got it turned upside down.

So the question is, in this topsy-turvy world, how long is it going to take back to revert and whether or not that happens at all or in some bizarre new world of domestic political alliances and beliefs.

Right.

Well, listen,

obviously Trump put you in a completely impossible position.

When I say you, you guys in the FBI, you certainly were high up there at the time because he was outrageous in his behavior.

He was saying things publicly like Russia, if you're listening, you know, hack Eve.

It was ridiculous.

You had to look into him.

That's my view.

That, you know, this crossfire hurricane, which was the looking into whether Trump was a mentor, you had to do it.

But it's interesting that once it was done,

you know, we have to be open-minded here.

It seems to me your view was that there was not something that happened there.

You said in a private text, so we know it was real.

You said, my gut sense and concern is that there's no big there there.

You said we have not seen

the New York Times had a big story.

In 2017, right after Trump was inaugurated, Trump campaign aides had reported contacts with Russian intelligence was the headline.

And you said, we have not seen evidence of any of that.

You said we are unaware of any Trump advisors engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.

That confuses me.

The Don Jr.

man.

Yeah, I can understand.

The Manafort, we found out, was giving polling data to this Konstadin Kalemko, who has been called a Russian agent.

Why did you say there was no there there?

Well, so you have to read that last document like a legal document.

We were trying to figure out when that New York Times article came out who the hell was talking to the Times, because they got a lot of things wrong, but some of the things were accurate.

And so we were trying to figure out, okay, who were those sources?

And when you see, when I say no intelligence officers, you got to think about that like a counterintelligence person.

You know, I spent 20 years chasing spies and recruiting people.

And when I say that, I'm talking about like a full-fledged foreign intelligence officer, not somebody who might be working with them.

And that's the kind of person we saw all over the Trump campaign.

We had him in contact with a foreign policy advisor.

We had him in contact with the incoming attorney general.

We had him in contact with the incoming national security advisor.

And person after person after person in the Trump campaign had these undisclosed contacts with the Russians that they started and continued not telling the truth about.

So when I sit there and look at it, the worst thing could be it's some big conspiracy kind of run from the top by the president.

But it doesn't have to be that to be really bad.

It's kind of like if you walk outside and the entire block has, every car has its window knocked out.

You could say, well, you know, we don't think one person did this.

Well, every window is still knocked out.

It's still bad.

And so when I looked at that, when I made that comment, I was simply saying, I don't think Trump is sitting like a mastermind on top of all these contacts, controlling and coordinating what's going on.

What I thought was they're a bunch of grifters.

opportunists, people trying to make money, all sort of individually pursuing their agendas in a way that made them vulnerable to the Russian intelligence.

I think you're right.

He's definitely not a mastermind.

No, really.

No, honestly.

I mean,

finally, it sounds like a full crowd.

No, I mean, but I constantly think people give him too much credit for that, and I think you're right.

It wasn't like that.

I think it's just the way you described it.

In fact, Dan Coates, who was the director of national intelligence for a while, he said he thinks Putin has something on Trump.

Well, that may be true, but I think what he has on Trump is the knowledge that Trump is a giant narcissist, or at least that's what I have on Trump.

I don't think you need to have something on Trump.

I learned this a couple of weeks ago when QAnon, you know, the total nutcases who think that the world is run by this secret cabal of

the pizza-eating pedophiles

who eat babies, you know.

I mean, they're really out there.

And Trump, when it was asked about him, yeah, I think they're good people and I take their support.

Whoever says they like him, he likes them.

If it's white supremacist and they say they like him, he likes them.

If it's Vladimir Putin and he says, I think Trump is brilliant, Trump is like, I love this guy.

I don't think it's much more complicated than that, right?

It's about the narcissism.

I think that's one thing.

Look, if you're trying to deal with somebody, that might be enough.

But put yourself in the shoes of the SVR or any Russian intelligence service.

Just because something works, you're not going to stop with that.

So, sure, Putin, he's got a team of psychologists who have looked at Trump.

They probably know him better than most Americans do, and they know how to push his buttons and play him.

But that's not going to stop them from finding other things to hold his leverage over.

Some of that's coming out in the public.

Like we had through the Mueller Report, the example of Trump is on the campaign trail in 2016.

And he tells a crowd, I think think down in North Carolina, I have no financial dealings in Russia whatsoever, none.

At the exact same instant, Michael Cohen and others are trying to get a deal at Trump Tower in Moscow.

Well, Trump knows he just didn't tell the truth.

You know he lied.

Putin knows he lied.

And so to maintain that, because if Putin turns around and says, hey, look, I'm going to tell the truth.

And every one of your campaign or the people at that rally are going to know you lied.

That gives them leverage.

So if you're an intelligence service, you don't stop just because you have one avenue in.

You keep looking for all these different ways to impact somebody's behavior.

Right.

All right.

Listen, I've heard you say there are things right now I and others know from 2016 that would damage his candidacy today.

What are they?

Next week, I want you to get the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence on your show and ask them that.

And when they say, well, we're not going to say, ask them why they have declassified so much information, which shockingly all seems to support the line and Trump that they're putting forward.

I can't tell you because it's classified or it relates to ongoing investigations or maybe even some stuff panned out.

Didn't mean anything.

But that question.

is something that ought to be asked of the administration, particularly given the way that they're just releasing things willy-nilly that are really, really damaging our national security when they do it.

So you're out of the FBI.

And I know you'd love to have Bill Barr on your show.

Yeah, that's going to happen.

Have you ever seen this show?

So you're out of the FBI now?

Right?

Yes.

Can you still talk to the old gang?

I do.

I do.

And this is what they're telling you now.

But you can't tell me.

No, look, I mean, I can't, you know, in terms of what those things, so A, the stuff that's gone on after I left, they don't talk about because that I don't have the need to know that.

And like, the Bureau is really, really good at keeping secrets.

I mean, things that shouldn't be talked about don't get talked about outside.

So, again, that goes into the whole area of like, you know, I'm going to maintain my security, the things I'm obligated not to disclose because of my clearance.

And they do the same thing with me.

So, nah, I can't.

I'm not sure what happened after I left.

All right.

I want to ask you one last question about Hillary.

Somebody said to you during the camp, because it's always interesting to me that, you know, the FBI goes back and forth now between are they the champion of the liberals, are they the champion of the conservatives, when really, I mean, it was the FBI and Comey who kind of tipped the election to Donald Trump, which is weird because I heard during the campaign, I was worried that Trump's going to win, and then the FBI, which they were calling Trump Landia.

And I think of law enforcement as pretty Republican to begin with.

I thought, oh, as soon as this guy wins, I'm in Guantanamo Bay.

Really?

I thought Giuliani was going to be head of the N.

What's that?

You still have time.

Thanks, Pete.

But

who was it who said to you about Hillary, Pete, you've got to get that bitch?

So that was somebody who had retired at the time.

And look, your assessment is absolutely accurate.

The Bureau is a conservative place.

I was born and raised a Republican.

Most agents are law and order, strong national defense type people.

But having said that, I'm telling you, day in, day out, for 20 years, I never saw an instance where somebody said, hey,

we have to do this investigative thing, either ignore this fact or make this up or leave that out of the write-up.

Just didn't happen.

That's not the way the FBI works.

Every FBI agent has an opinion, a personal opinion, but it doesn't, truly, it doesn't hit the wall.

You know what?

You don't have to convince me.

No, seriously.

I mean, I'm known as a liberal, but I've always been a fan of the people who defend our country.

I like squares.

And I mean that in the best way.

It's the anniversary of 9-11, so I'm sure you were involved in that.

And I thank you for your service and thank you for everything.

Okay, Peter Strzok.

Thank you.

All right, let's meet our panel in person.

Hey!

Wow.

There's people.

We're actual people.

I'm Cavelling.

All right, you can find her on Instagram at Jessica Yellen, where she's the founder of News, Not Noise, from Far Away.

Jessica Yellen, but closer than

I've had in a long time.

Great to see you from a distance.

Yes.

And he's the host of Snapchat's political show.

Good luck, American, contributing writer for Vanity Fair.

Closer to me than other guests have been.

Peter Hamby is

there.

That's fine.

That's fine.

Okay, I want to follow up on something we were talking about there.

I was going to talk to Peter about this, but I'll ask you about this.

I think they're playing by two different rules because

when

George Stephanopoulos asked Trump, when was that, about a year ago?

It was in the Oval Office, I remember, and he was like, if you got information from a foreign government, would you use it?

No, no other president would have ever said, yeah, sure.

And Trump said, yeah, I'd look at it.

The rules have changed.

The Ukraine impeachment went nowhere.

It's like when they put the designated hitter rule in baseball.

They changed the rules.

Nobody did anything about Ukraine.

Nobody said anything after he told that to Stephanopoulos.

Foreign help is now okay in elections.

If Democrats don't get that, the deck is already stacked up against them.

They're going to keep losing elections.

True?

Maybe, but maybe not this election.

I do think this election is probably a little more baked than people are willing to acknowledge.

Baked.

But yeah,

I think.

Baked.

Baked in favor of Biden.

Oh, not that kind of baked.

Set.

Done.

Done.

Closer to done.

I think the fundamentals of this election strongly favor Joe Biden and a lot of people, regardless of interference in the election.

Well, willing to say it.

I will say, to your point, I was talking to a friend today about these very things, that Trump just continues to push the boundaries.

And he said, he reminds me of a little kid testing his parents to see what he can get away with.

And he's finding he can get away with pretty much anything.

And what's scary about that is, imagine if you have someone with a brain larger than Donald Trump's who comes into office later, right?

They're going to understand they can get away.

with whatever they want.

You're right, he's kind of an innocent.

And he didn't understand that you can't take help from a foreign country because we never did that.

But that's what you would do in business.

So he just did it, and nobody stopped him.

And I'm telling you, now that's the rule.

And if you don't get that, you're just going to be a loser.

I actually think it'll change when you have a different kind of personality in that office.

The media and the public will adjust to their behavior.

I think Trump gets away with this because he is so shameless about it, because he is unconflicted.

But isn't he the Republican Party now?

He is.

The legacy is to him, not to the party.

I do think he's going to be able to do it.

So they're going to revert.

The Republican Party is going to revert back to.

No, let's see what happens in this election.

Let's see how much loss they suffer.

Okay, so it's seven weeks from the election.

I want to talk about what Nate Silver said this week, because he's the guy who cracks the numbers, we think, better than anybody.

Now, we know the Republicans have an advantage in the Electoral College, despite what Trump says.

This is really frightening to me.

Nate Silver says, if Joe Biden wins the popular vote by less than 1%, wins!

Wins the election.

That's winning the election.

You only have to win by one vote.

But if he wins by less than 1% of the popular vote, he only has a 6%

chance of become president.

If he wins by 1 to 2%,

he's got a 22% chance of being president.

If he wins by 2 to 3%, 46%.

So he could win by 3%,

and he still has less than half a chance of winning the election.

You've got to get up to 5% to 6%

before he has a 98% chance of winning the election.

That's a fucked up country.

Our system is bizarre.

The Electoral College is bizarre, and there is a good argument to change it.

I will say, though, that there's a lot of panic among Democratic supporters that this is a danger zone.

If you look at the numbers, Biden's numbers have been unbelievably steady since March.

He is up consistently six points.

And so a lot of the panic is this worst case scenario catastrophizing given what happened in 2016.

But the numbers don't really bear it out right now.

If you subtracted Trump and Biden's name from the top line horse race polls and even under the hood, we would all be saying there's no way Donald Trump can win.

He's losing independence by 20 points.

He's losing women, which make up half the country, by over 20 points.

Like the chances of these fundamental shifting in the next two months would take something overwhelmingly dramatic.

And the whole, what about 2016 thing?

It's just not 2016.

People have had four years of Donald Trump.

A verdict has more or less been rendered since he took office, given his approval ratings.

And Joe Biden is just not Hillary Clinton.

He's not.

I know, but

what Nate Silver is saying, it doesn't matter.

Because if he doesn't, I mean,

five to six percent is a lot in this country.

That's a big, big, big victory.

And if he doesn't get that, and races tighten at the end.

You sound like the panels I used to have on right before the last election when I was like,

you guys are whistling past the graveyard.

It's very hard to see the case that Trump is going to make between now and then that is going to swing all the undecideds into his corner.

If you take, for example, this argument about law and order.

Yeah, go ahead.

No, you go ahead.

He's going to this argument he has around law and order, right?

Democrats are most afraid that that's his winning hand.

That actually is not a net plus for him.

No.

It's not.

If you look

right now, you think it's going to shift.

It could.

I mean, anything could happen.

I mean, these are crazy times.

Well,

yes, but people generally don't like violence in the streets.

I mean, yes, you're right.

When he says, I'm the one who's going to protect you, they're not getting that.

They're not buying that.

What they're saying is Joe Biden is a healer and we need healing now.

This is, but this could change.

But there's also a lot of craziness out there.

You know, there's a book out there now called In Defense of Looting, which is being taken seriously.

There's a lot of articles in the press.

There's a fringe and you have to understand, you know, we live in these binary times.

So anything anybody on the right does, Trump has to own.

And anything anybody does on the left,

this is the country of, you're the party of,

you know, you're the candidate of.

Whatever the crazy on the left does, and I think looting is crazy, and defending it as some sort of justifiable protest is crazy.

But Biden has to wear that on his back into the election.

I think he's done a pretty good job of not putting on his back.

For example, when the protests after George Floyd first started, it was popular on Twitter and in certain corners of the left to actually defend looting, to support defund the police, both of which are actually strongly minority opinions.

But there's a lot of pressure from the left on the Democratic nominee.

Biden immediately came out.

Give the guy credit.

He trusts his judgment and has a North Star.

He was just like, I don't want to defund the police.

He's done a pretty good job of shrugging that stuff off.

And the chaos problem actually doesn't, it hurts Donald Trump.

If you look at this law and order message and his claims on this, it actually consolidates support for him among non-college Republicans, his base, because it's a message about white grievance.

But if you hear what it's doing with non-college Republicans, it's driving away swing voters because the swing voters

who are college-educated Republicans think Donald Trump is fostering the chaos.

They see him as both the arsonist and the firefighter and they're not buying it.

And there's also, I think the media has also

After the Republican convention, I think the media for a week or two around Kenosha ran with the idea that this was going to help Trump when there was actually no polling data to bear that out at all.

Even ABC News had a poll last week.

13%

of non-college whites, like that is the purest distillation of Trump's base, thought Trump would do, thinks he's helping the protests.

Like he's that, like, Republicans don't think Trump's

the property

destruction issue.

Because there's a lot of talk now.

I saw it in the news today.

Lululemon

had a workshop where they said, resist capitalism while they sell $150 leggings.

Wow.

When Lululemon is saying, resist capitalism, and there's a book called In Defense of Lou.

And then we had a primary where there was a candidate, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, were talking a lot about, you know, a wealth tax and a lot of wealth confiscation.

And

there's just a feeling out there now.

Again, it's on the far left, but things tend to migrate.

That property, you know, it's different than life.

And it is different than life.

and they kind of like compare them, like they're comparable.

It's like, well, you know, if you take somebody's life, that's permanent, but

if you wreck their business, that can be replaced.

And this is a sort of a justifiable way of protesting, and it's a form of reparations.

And, you know, taking, I'm not down with this, properties on the table as something we can just take because things are not right.

To me, that's not the way to redress our problems by throwing a brick through the window.

But where is this mass destruction of property happening right now?

Like, if you look at

if you look at Portland, it's two square blocks.

The cameras go to the city.

There's also Kenosha.

There's also briefly.

There's a moment.

It happens.

We've had it.

We had it here in LA.

I mean, there are stories I've been to that I saw on the news wiped out.

And those were moments of protest, which we have throughout our history.

And we don't know everybody who was involved in the protest.

You know, the people who are activating for racial justice and change are not necessarily the people who are breaking windows and causing violence.

No, but there is a there is a

most of them are not.

Right.

But there is a there is a view, and it's in the media.

Please, I know you've seen it.

Don't look at me like I'm making this up.

That somehow this is a justifiable approach.

Well, isn't it?

Isn't that what the...

So you're part of this.

Do you believe that?

I'm asking.

I believe that.

Because I think if you're a regular guy, I saw this guy who had a Papa John's franchise, and he was yelling through his broken glass you're gonna elect Trump and I'm just trying to feed my family I don't think his view was just like c'est la vie it's just property I do think you're right that there has it been a drift of the sort of this goes back to like 2014 when there were protests at right after BLM and there were protests at the University of Missouri like That sort of campus thinking has drifted into the national press.

It has drifted into Democratic politics where you have these very academic debates about,

you know, Trump sort of ridicules them as critical race theory.

That stuff percolates on the internet, absolutely.

And certain Democratic candidates in the primary ran with it.

But again, not to fluff Joe Biden again, but the guy

has his North Star, is that regular guy in Scranton or Rochester or wherever.

He understands, I think, that

America's political values are not derived from the internet.

He just doesn't live in that.

Why are so many columnists then saying he needs to have a sister soldier moment?

You know, sister soldier was the one in, poor Sister Soldier, I don't think she deserved getting the reputation that that was.

I think it's for the same reasons that journalists ran with the idea that Kenosha would help Trump.

It's just because we in the press always think there needs to be something new, some event that changes things, what's next this week, what's happening the week after that.

And to what Jessica have just been saying, I think the race has been fairly steady this whole time.

And like, that's kind of a boring story.

Okay, yeah.

The protests should be made more complex because there is a piece of the protests that are the people who are actually asking for policy changes.

And that piece of this discussion gets ignored.

We don't talk enough about that.

We end up having this conversation about looting and about windows being broken, just like the media puts the camera on that.

But there is another piece of this conversation to be had.

Yeah, well, that's that conversation is being had.

Not broadly.

Really?

I don't see do you under do Do people understand what defund the police means broadly?

People are so confused about what that means.

Okay, but

the people who you're talking about very often are data-free.

I mean, I saw them screaming last week at Rand Paul, not my favorite politician, but saying, say her name.

And Rand Paul had written a bill.

With Breonna Taylor's name in it.

Rand Paul, he's the one guy you shouldn't be screaming about this for because he's Mr.

Libertarian.

He was always for things like, let's not have these no-knock police.

And now it was called the Justice for Breonna Taylor bill that he introduced, and they're screaming at him, say her name.

And there's another, there's a learn something before you do that.

There was another video in Washington.

That's a big hand for learning something.

Yeah, learning something.

How about for learning something?

Another video that went viral last week in Washington, D.C., a woman was just sitting outside at a restaurant and a herd of white protesters came over and told her to raise her fist.

Turned out she had marched and given money to a variety of BLM causes.

A Democrat that I know who used to serve for Obama works in Black Man.

And she just wanted to finish her dinner.

Correct.

And by the way,

even if she hadn't done that, you're allowed to eat dinner.

I don't have to do it 24-7 because you do.

But this is the best thing.

I can eat dinner and still be down with the cause.

Exactly.

And she made the point in a follow-up op-ed in the Washington Post saying, this is not how persuasion works in politics.

It was pretty smart.

But a Democrat who works in Democratic tech circles texted me last week about a video in Pittsburgh going viral showing things similar.

And he was pulling his hair up because these things get so much attention on the internet.

And he says he was suggesting that this is the perfect chum.

for Russian trolls and Chinese people or Chinese trolls on the internet.

Like, they're not making fake news anymore.

I disagree.

Really?

I think this is what the Twitterati obsesses over.

But the Twitterati is the media.

But I spent all day.

Thank you.

I talk to Twitter.

It shouldn't be, but it is.

I talk to swing women voters all day long.

I talk to swing women voters all day long.

Right.

On Instagram.

I do.

That's what I do.

And they do not bring this up.

This does not register on their transom.

What they care about is when...

What about the Lululemon thing, I bet you?

Maybe the Lululemon if it would close it.

But I think we're saying the same thing.

I think the media and the Twitter elites and people in the Acella corridor talk about these things, and the folks you're talking to

don't.

I think we both agree on that.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

That's.

Let me interrupt here because

breaking news.

Jessica Krug is in the news.

Yeah, I didn't know who the fuck that was either.

Jessica Krug

is a respected black activist, author, and history professor at George Washington University, who turns out is a white Jewish girl.

She admitted this week in a bombshell essay that she has not been black after all, all along.

She's white and Jewish.

Remember Rachel Dolazah?

Here we're having it again.

So

we found out that there's some things about Jessica Krug that were really telltale signs that she was actually

white.

And

would you like to hear some of them?

Yeah, I'm sure you would.

For example, she live tweets the crown.

Okay, right there.

I mean,

she can tell the property brothers apart.

Okay, this, this, yeah.

She's been to Utah on purpose.

I'm seeing the pattern here.

Her favorite rapper is William Shatner.

Did he put out a rap record?

Is that why that's...

Okay.

She celebrates her birthday for six weeks.

I've known white girls who do that.

She follows Jewel on Instagram.

Her purse is full of tiny dog.

She can tell the difference between country songs.

And she sings along with the music in the supermarket.

Okay, all right.

Okay, so let me ask you this question about Jessica Krug.

This,

I'm a white person, but I get to say I'm black that Rachel Dolezoll pioneered.

First of all, I think there's going to be more of this.

No?

Why?

Because I think it's hipper.

It's hip to be black.

And, you know, I mean,

first of all, I know it's like the worst thing in the world

to mark that we've made a lot of progress, which is stupid because you can say, yes, we still have a lot of work to do, which we do.

It's a vital issue, racism, but we have made a lot of progress.

Because like 50 years ago, would any white person like want to say, oh, I'm a black person?

That wouldn't happen in 1920 or 1930 or even 1960, probably.

But my question is,

like, you can say you're a different gender.

Why is that okay?

But you can't just say, well, I identify as a different race.

Well, I do think she is the worst embodiment of the performative white liberal.

Jessica Cruz.

Oh, Jessica Cruz.

Yeah, like she is like...

Or again.

Yeah,

yeah.

The one I just heard about two hours ago.

She's like the Sasha Baron Cohen caricature of the

white cisgender male who apologized for being a white cisgender male.

Oh, that's come to life, right?

But I I don't know.

I do think

you have a point that it is cool to perform your virtue on the internet in an era where identity politics is a currency, for better or worse, on the internet.

And this happened five years after Rachel Dolezal.

So, like, Rachel Dolezall happened.

She saw it, and she was like, I'm going to double down for like five years.

Man, I really hope we don't see more of this, though.

That would be.

And

what should the attitude of right-thinking people be about something?

Oi vase near.

What's happening?

Oi, like this is

ridiculous.

People make choices in life.

This is a bad choice.

Right.

But

this seems like a mental health problem, which is a lot of people.

Which more than like...

She wrote about this.

It is, I agree, but isn't it partly a mental problem, health problem, with a lot of white people who have like this ridiculous level of white loathing about themselves?

I mean, I don't hear stories like this.

Really?

You haven't seen the video of people washing black people's feet?

No.

I'll send that.

I do think that.

I mean, there's a lot of that now.

Not a lot, but there is like, you know, we're holier than you and wash my feet.

Not to pivot back to, I keep pivoting back to the presidential race, but throughout the Democratic primaries, white college-educated liberals like voted for, you know, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders.

We're like, black folks voted for Joe Biden.

Black folks in poll after poll oppose defunding the police.

They sort of oppose a lot of these au current political issues that surface on Twitter and favor moderate Democratic candidates.

I mean, I just, I do think that a lot of these opinions seem like they're mainstream because they're on the internet when in reality they're not.

No.

No, I don't think they're mainstream.

I mean, I don't think they're, a lot of this stuff, you know, I think there's a black silent majority that There has been throughout this year.

The two kinds of, this is so boring.

All the people.

The two kinds of swing voters, the most important voters through this whole election have been over 40 black people and over 40 suburban white people who wear khaki pants.

Like, those are not sexy people to a lot of people in the press.

They're not young Ernie types.

They're not

entertaining, but they are the ones turning out in election after election.

Most black people want more policing or at least the amount of policing they have.

I mean,

the Democrats thought, oh, good.

You know, the Radicals were like, oh, we have a primary with all these radical candidates.

And the black folks were like, no, let's go with Joe Biden.

Let's be practical.

Or the governor of Virginia.

Remember that?

Everybody thought, let's get rid of the governor of Virginia.

And the black folks were like, no, you know what?

He made a mistake.

We get it.

He's a good guy.

He's going to help us.

And he did.

He won re-election.

He got all the progressive things that everybody wanted passed.

And they're extraordinarily motivated to get rid of Donald Trump.

And that's why this race has been so steady for months.

Unlike the Hillary Trump back and forth, remember at this time then, everyone's talking about how we have two candidates no one likes, we can't stand our choices.

You don't hear that conversation this time.

Like, the Democrats aren't complaining, they are focused.

And it's because the majority of the party, especially the black community, is single-minded about doing what they can to get rid of Donald Trump.

And all of this conversation is the equivalent of focusing on looting.

Like, it's the sideshow where the momentum is about focusing on November November 3rd and getting rid of Trump.

And there's anything that's not.

I mean, if it's your business, then it's not a sideshow.

Focus groups have borne this out.

Academic research has borne this out.

Black voters are skeptical of big promises.

They're skeptical of ideologues.

They're skeptical of

radical change.

They have been fucked over for so long

that they just want they want to trust somebody who can just make government work from that

dollars and cents.

Right, right.

Not brickthrowers, Barack Obama.

And I'm not saying that.

That's what I'm saying.

People who are government nerds who know how to actually make change.

They're the people who improve people's lives.

Not even change, just incremental change.

Right.

Make government make sense to me and my family every day.

Not and by the way, all the people who were chanting at that lady at the, they were all white.

Yeah.

All the people who were surrounded.

Right.

Yeah.

Okay.

We're going to run out of time.

9-11 anniversary.

We have a minute.

Any thoughts?

It's been 19 years.

Where are we with this?

I saw a picture today of Joe Biden going up to Mike Pence today and doing the little elbow bump thing.

Yes.

And off to the side, you saw Jerry Nadler and Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, all these New York luminaries.

Again, a picture doesn't tell the whole story, but they were kind of looking this way.

And to me, that sort of embodied a little bit of Joe Biden and like his, whether it's realistic or not, but like he's okay

trying to like talk to somebody from the other.

You have to.

Even if the Democrats win the election, half the country and all the Republicans are not going to self-deport.

We have to work together.

All right.

Let's bring out Ewan.

He is the Golden Globe.

Bring him out, well, on Zoom, the Golden Globe winning actor whose latest motorcycle docuseries, Long Way Up, premieres September 18th on Apple TV.

Ewan McGregor is with us.

How are you, sir?

And how are you?

Okay, Ewan, I must tell you, I've been watching you in the movies and enjoying you greatly for so many years, and I realized this week as I was doing all the research, I know nothing about you.

We never met, and yet I feel like I hardly know you.

I learned so much.

I had no idea you were such an adventurer.

You're like the European Sean Penn.

I mean, the list of countries countries where you have gone and done heroic work,

Congo and Iraq and Honduras for HIV and landmines and child poverty and malnutrition.

These are what our president calls the shithole countries.

You must have a high, do you have a high threshold for danger?

Not really.

I've got a big appetite for adventure, I think is the difference.

I love going out into the world and finding myself in places that you wouldn't normally travel.

and i've done that um with my mate charlie on our motorcycle since 2004 and in 2004 we rode from um london to new york so we went east across europe and then uh into the ukraine and russia kazakhstan russia mongolia far eastern russia and then we flew to alaska and we rode right all the way around to new york and then in 2007 we rode down through the african continent so we left the top of scotland and we we rode to cape town and um

we just did them for fun you You know, we did them out of a sense of adventure.

Charlie and I have done,

we met 25 years ago, we've been best mates, and we've always loved motorcycles.

And

we just wanted to go for an adventure.

We decided to shoot them as these documentaries called Long Way.

So Long Way Round, Long Way Down, and Long Way Up.

And this one, you go from the tip of South America, and you come up back here to LA.

And I understand that these bikes you're on this time was electric.

Now, don't you need a charging station?

Are there charging stations when you're going through rural South America?

No,

there aren't any.

But

there are places where electricity exists, you know, and occasionally we would have to,

you know, we would plug in at people's houses or we'd plug in in a hostel or a hotel or a bar or a restaurant or wherever we were.

We just asked people if they minded if we plugged in a bikes in.

And across the board everyone was happy to do it.

And

then occasionally we would have, we would, we would get stuck and then we would have to find somewhere that had a generator and that's how a lot of people make their their um electricity down there anyway but it was pretty it was pretty daunting um through Patagonia and the Atacama Desert and things like that

where you have to climb to very high altitudes and

we had to learn a lot.

We didn't have time.

Harley Davidson made this electric bike called the Live Wire which is a beautiful motorcycle.

But it wasn't for sale yet when we did the trip.

We left last September and we arrived just before Christmas.

And

we asked them to make a version of their live wire bike that was more of an adventure bike.

And

it was just an amazing, it was an amazing experience to do it electric.

It was a different experience from doing the other two trips for sure.

Wow.

I mean, I have a Tesla, which is electric, but it's got a 300-mile range.

I won't go to Pacoima.

But that's just, you know, I'm not.

Somewhere beyond its range?

Like, have you gone somewhere and had to charge on the way somewhere or no?

For my car?

Yeah.

Oh, I have a driver.

No, I'm kidding.

Yeah, I mean,

I charge it in my garage, and I never

go anywhere.

I mean, we're locked down.

You know, where the fuck am I going to go?

But

so you're in these out-of-the-way places, shall we say?

Is part of the attraction there because

no one knows who you are?

Or did they were there indigenous peoples in the Andes who knew who you were

no no well there was people in the cities who knew who I was and then you generally speaking when we're out in the cuds in the middle of the countryside no but it's not a reason to do it I mean I don't people ask is it sort of a reason is that the reason why you do it and it's not you know I don't have a life that I feel like I have to escape from at all.

So

it's just the adventure of it, really.

But it is nice, isn't it?

Nice to travel like that anonymously, yeah, for sure.

So

I know about you.

I've known forever.

I can hear it in your voice.

You're Scottish.

Where are you on Scottish independence?

Because I don't know if people even know the history.

I don't know.

I think people have a feeling.

I don't know if

they even know that the United Kingdom is really an empire.

There's England.

at the center of it, but my people, the Irish, and your people, the Scottish people, are conquered peoples.

We're Celtic people.

We're not Anglo-Saxons, which are really Germans.

We're Celtic people.

I mean, the people in Ireland didn't even t speak English when the English conquered them.

So, but the Scottish have voted against their own independence in the past.

Where are you on that?

Well, I never, I never,

I was always for keeping the Union.

I think it worked.

It works.

And then after the Brexit vote, I think for sure I've changed my tune about it.

I think.

I think Scotland have been voting for a government that they haven't been given for years.

We've very left voting country, Scotland.

And we've been under Conservative rule, you know, all through my childhood.

And

so I think probably enough's enough.

And I think after the Brexit vote, when, you know, I was shooting in Scotland, we were shooting the follow-on film to trend spotting the night of the Brexit vote.

And

I couldn't, the next day they showed the sort of people that voted for, to stay in Europe were on the map in yellow, and the people that voted to leave were in blue.

And the map was split in half.

Scotland was yellow and England was blue, apart from a little bit around London.

And I just thought that's it.

You know,

again, we're not, you know, the Scottish people want to stay in Europe, in the European Union, and the English don't.

So I just think we're living in different, we're going in different directions.

So I think probably it's time.

I just think probably it's time.

I think once Boris became Prime Minister, Scotland was like, right, that's it.

We're fucking out of here.

It's great to meet you.

I know

I took my mother to see the movie Down with Love.

Remember that one you were in?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

One of my favorite.

Did you like it?

I fucking loved it.

I don't know if people at the time remembered Rock Hutchins and Doris Day, but it's one of my favorites, and you've entertained me a lot.

And I thank you for coming on.

Thank you.

Ewan McGregor.

All right.

All right, time for new rules everybody.

With an audience, we have new rules.

Okay.

New rule, the only thing gender reveal parties reveal is that the baby's parents are morons.

And if you start a massive wildfire with your gender reveal party, you have to go live someplace that's not hot and dry.

Have all the babies you want in Saskatoon, but quit burning down California.

Because I don't know if you've heard, but babies aren't born here with a gender anyway.

You know, now that Canada's top doctor is advising people hooking up for the first time to avoid kissing in face-to-face contact and to wear a mask during sex, Pornhub has to introduce the new category, stepmom doesn't know she's fucking stepson.

I've heard how was it for you after sex.

I've never heard sorry, I thought you were someone else.

Roll, the veterinarians at a Polish zoo who say they've been conducting a study of the stress-relieving effects of marijuana on elephants have to admit what really happened.

You were high,

and someone said, let's get the elephants stoned,

and you did.

And

by the way, weed just makes elephants paranoid.

They spend the whole night thinking, could I leave my trunk open?

Neural, before the NFL season starts for real, Dr.

Fauci has to tell us if it's safe for bros to chest bump each other after a touchdown while screaming, that's what I'm fucking talking about.

Maybe that was just me.

Neural, if it's okay to have coffee mugs that say things like, caution I haven't had my coffee yet, then addicts of other drugs can have the same.

Like a cocaine bile that says, I'll start working when my cocaine does.

Or a syringe that says, ask me after my heroin.

Okay, and finally, New Rule, someone must tell all the parents who now say that the recent homeschooling has left them with a new appreciation for teachers, it's about time.

This week, parents across America face the harsh reality that after a spring with the kids home all the time and a summer with the kids home all the time,

we may have a fall and winter with the kids home all the time.

Which is not only nerve-wracking, it's destroying mom's relationship with the gardener.

Yeah, summer is ending, but for parents, summer was never the vacation.

When the kids go back to school, that's the vacation.

Why do you think summer camp was invented?

It wasn't to teach you survival skills.

It was to get you out of the house.

They're calling online classrooms distance learning.

Distance for who?

The kids are right there at the kitchen table all damn day.

Distance is what schools were for.

To

provide a five-day a week break from having to deal with those little shits on your Christmas card.

No wonder 69% of parents now say that being a teacher is a harder job than their own.

And 80% say they have a newfound respect for teachers.

Great.

Okay, but how about we go beyond giving teachers newfound respect?

How about we also give them the benefit of the doubt?

Ask any teacher what their number one complaint is, and it's helicopter parents sticking their noses in,

doing their kids' work for them, trying to adjust grades, and undermining discipline.

You have two kids, and you want to strangle them.

Can you imagine having to deal with an entire classroom full of tiny, sticky strangers?

It used to be the teacher would send home a report card about the behavior of the child.

Now it's the behavior of the teacher that gets judged.

I've heard it from teachers many times.

Parents saying things like, but my daughter studied really hard for this test.

Yeah, but she got all the answers wrong.

That's what matters in life: results.

Not just trying, not just participating.

When everybody gets a trophy, the only people who win are the people who make trophies.

If children don't learn that life can be full of disappointments, they won't be ready for marriage or Democrat primaries.

If your kid gets a D, don't blame the teacher.

Tell your child, you should have worked harder.

You should have buckled down more.

Now go to your room and do whatever it is you do there on your webcam.

And the next time that there is a classroom disagreement where a teacher says one thing and your kid says another,

side with the teacher.

I marked the onset of American decline to the moment parents started siding with their children instead of with the teachers.

Seriously.

Kids may be cute, but they're also relentlessly manipulative little weasels

who can only be contained with a united front.

Mom, dad, and the teacher used to form an iron triangle, a tight threesome like Jerry Falwell, his wife, and the pool boy.

Kids couldn't get away with shit, and they were so much healthier for it.

Helicopter parenting or bulldozer parenting, whatever you want to call it.

It isn't good for anybody.

Not the teachers, not the parents, not the kids.

And the idea that kids have too little self-esteem, it's antiquated.

It's antiquated.

They have too much now.

And it's turning them into angry, screaming grievance collectors.

And all of that childhood tolerance is resulting in grown-up tyrants.

It's no wonder by the time they get to college, just having to listen to an opinion they don't agree with is considered an act of violence.

Oh yeah, it doesn't even end when the kids leave the house.

Parents go on job interviews with their kids now.

A study a few years ago found that 30% of employers had gotten resumes written by the applicant's parents.

15% reported fielding complaints from a parent when they didn't hire the kid.

And yet somehow our economy is falling behind China's.

Weird, huh?

So

if in the future a teacher takes your kid's phone, just tell that teacher, thank you.

Thank you for doing something I lacked the balls to do years ago.

All right, that's our show back here.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

I want to thank Jessica Yellen, Peter Henley, Ewan McGregor, and Peter Strzzok.

We'll be back next week from the studio, I hope.

Thank you very much.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Ma every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand.

For more information, log on to HBO.com.