The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show 194 William Campbell of Challenging Opinions Podcast on Brexit

Episode Date: April 24, 2018

William Campbell of Challenging Opinions Podcast on Brexit

Hi folks, welcome to the ChrisVossShow.com Hey, this podcast here, of course coming to you with another episode we have all the best audience so we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in especially those guys who listen to the all the way to the end of the show

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So be sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel so you can get that as well. The most excellent, bestly guests that we always have on the Chris Voss Show, we have another one today, William Campbell. William is an author, podcaster, and entrepreneur. He spent most of his life in Ireland, and he has also been educated in the UK and the US, and he's lived in Italy Germany and Thailand in 2010 Brandon books published his book here's how creative solutions for Ireland's economic and social problems to positive reviews since the publication several of the innovations suggested in his book have been implemented as government

policy welcome to show William how are you i'm very well how are you chris good good and you're coming to us from the uk today correct no i'm in berlin in germany right now oh okay i'm sorry well you know it's i come from that era of children where it's all the uk you know like russia is just like still ussr to me as far every time i see it on the map, I see USSR. But, you know, what can you say? I went to public school as an education, so therein it lies. Give us your plugs, William, so people can look up you on the website, your podcast, all that sort of good stuff.

I think the most interesting thing for people will be the Challenging Opinions podcast. It's not hard to find, just challengingopinions.com. And little bit like yourself chris i talked to try to talk to interesting people but somebody who's got a uh point of view that they're pushing and i try to push back against it so whether it's sort of left or right i try not to fall into the silo of always talking to people who agree with me in fact i seek out people who I don't agree with and try to have an intelligent conversation with them. Well, that's very un-American of you, but you're not American. So here in America, we just try and find all the stories that support our prejudice and biases. Oh, I think you're not the only ones guilty of that. Yeah. So I think it's pretty interesting what you're doing. So you kind of have like a

counterpoint that you set up. So you find people with an opposing thing, or at least you try and take the opposing side, kind of like what you would in like a debate sort of setting where you have a counterpoint sort of situation where you have these two opposing thoughts. That's pretty interesting. I like that concept. Exactly, exactly.

And also try and keep it civil so that people actually learn something rather than just shouting at each other. That's got to be the fun part. Does it work pretty well most times? I think it does. I think people appreciate when they're being listened to. And, you know, there's nothing like making some center ground.

There's nothing for that except listening to people when somebody feel they're being feels they're being listened to that's when you can really you know make progress and make compromises with people i think yeah and maybe we need to do more of that uh in the world it's really hard to do that right now with what's going on in America because some of the things that are going on in America deal with racial prejudice and discrimination which are very ugly things and and you know racism is is is almost like someone who's has a fetish for something it's very hard to get them to change their mind once they've locked into that. Now, there's certain examples where people do change. But, you know, I mean, here in America, a lot of people, most people, if they're born into a political party,

they stick with it throughout their life and they rarely change. Probably the same with religion and other elements. So let's talk about, we want to talk about Brexit, I know was a thing that you wanted to take and do on the show. That probably ties into a lot of what we're doing. Give us an overview of what your perception is because you're European. You have a bigger stake in this fight, if you will,

than us Americans. Probably we have some misunderstandings on our part where we don't fully understand what was going on over there. Yeah, well, there's two sides to it, really, or two parts to this issue. And one of them is the problem, maybe it's unfair to call it a problem, but in the phenomena that was experienced in the presidential election in the U.S., whereby you had people who were so enthusiastic about Donald Trump when previously, perhaps, any of his qualities they would have condemned, certainly the evangelical Christians, it would have been surprising that somebody they would support. Yeah, yeah. But Trump seemed to hit a nerve of people

who felt excluded from the political mainstream. And Brexit in the UK, I think, did exactly the same thing. The type of people who were voting for Trump are also very similar to the type of people voting for Brexit, especially those swing voters. They felt that they were't being listened to. They wanted to kick against the establishment. They didn't particularly understand the ins and outs of what they were voting for.

The average Trump voter might not have been terribly well educated about what Trump's policies would do. Same with Brexit. But they knew that the establishment didn't like this. And for that reason, they wanted to kick against the establishment and choose that. And it's remarkable how close those two demographics are. Yeah, it's interesting. One other thing, I should say one other thing that's very remarkable about it is Cambridge Analytica. We've heard of this company that hacked essentially Facebook and got tens and possibly hundreds of millions of people's profiles and used that to micro-target ads at them. The exact same company did the exact same thing possibly sponsored by russian money certainly very strange

financing of that somebody who had never been a political donor previously became the largest ever political donor in uk history it seems clear that they broke campaign finance law and also broke data protection laws sharing data between different organizations. But that's spilled milk. The vote has been done and Brexit won by about 51.8% Yes, very close Yeah But now the milk is spilt and

when the EU negotiators, the other 27 countries in the EU they sat down and literally in one afternoon they decided that there are three priorities to deal with this and it was money people and Ireland and money was basically how much money the UK would owe how they would settle that that's been relatively easily settled the other two problems are not

going to be easy to settle so that the problems are uh who's allowed to live where. So if you can imagine that a state in the U.S., maybe Florida or Washington, is going to leave the United States and everybody who was born in Florida is now not going to have residency permits, be permitted to reside in any other state in the United States, and anybody who's in Florida who was not born there

will not be allowed to live there anymore. How do you- I'm actually up for that because Florida is pretty strange. They're like our very square part of America. If we cut them off, I'm sure we wouldn't miss anything from Florida other than those killings. There's a few people in Europe who are saying much the same about Britain, but of course- I think I just lost my floor to the audience. That's possible.

But the difficulty with that is how do you unpick family relationships? How do you decide? So there's sort of hints at saying that, well, if somebody has been resident for more than so many years, that will continue but does that mean a british person living where i am now in germany will they continue to be allowed to live in germany or in any other european state and that hasn't been clarified and the other problem for the for for britain and this is where it really kicks into the real

problems the priorities that the british need to have, is Britain is hugely dependent on migrant labor in some economic sectors. And one of them is the health service. About 25% of the healthcare workers in the UK are from outside the UK. And they're not feeling very welcome in the UK at the moment and the result is that hospitals and other health care facilities are having real problems recruiting health care workers. The second at the other end of the income scale, the other industry that's very heavily dependent on immigrant labor is agriculture so literally literally fruit picking, working farms.

And the UK pound has declined in value quite dramatically since this vote. So that means that people who might have come from maybe Romania or Poland to pick potatoes or to you know process vegetables it's not worth it so much anymore and they don't feel like going because they feel like it's a hostile atmosphere so it's not really clear it's a one of the one of the organizations in the UK that very concerned about this is the National Farmers Union and but the real one that's going to hit the real economy is integration with the European,

what's called the Customs Union. That means that, for example, there's a Nissan, the automobile company has a very new, very modern auto plant in a place called Tyneside, which ironically was one of the places that voted most heavily in favor of Brexit. This plant employs an awful lot of people. This area is very heavily dependent on it. They move 200,000 components in and out of Britain every hour that they operate. Wow. So what has yet to be explained, and they've only got a year to sort it out,

is if all of those 200,000 components per hour have to go through some sort of customs clearance, how's that going to work? And really, nobody's got a good answer for that question yet. It's an interesting thing that got us here. You know, as a kid, I was a student of history, and I hated history, the class, but I loved history books, and I read a lot of JFK, Eisenhower, Roosevelt.

And one thing that always interested me was seeing the decisions that we would make through presidencies that would affect other presidencies. Vietnam, of course, was one sort of dark period that played through several of our presidential administrations and only seemed to get worse from administration to administration. And this is one of them. I think the early seeds of this, you can hearken back to the Bush administration. I'm not being political here. I'm being factual. But it's a well-known agreed fact now that the Bush administration,

when they went into Iraq, which was unwarranted, just to, I don't know, outplay daddy's hand as a son. We went into Iraq war and we destabilized the Middle East. Yeah, the guy was a monster and a butcher and stuff, but he was able to keep the sunni and shiite factions from um starting their own little civil wars uh and he kept everybody all playing nice and and and you know they he fought with iran so you know he kept iran sort of on their heels um but once we destabilized the uh the arab nations the Middle East then uh weird stuff started happening and then we saw of course the Arab Spring um and uh we gave more power to players you know Isis arose from from Iraq and you know there's a lot of people that on over here that blame Obama for

pulling us on Iraq but when he took office we we were number one broke. We were going through the greatest recession we'd ever seen, almost a Great Depression. We came so close to our economy halting, it was even funny. And people were sick of 10 years of war and $4 trillion of the Iraq War. And so, you know, we had a president who was having to deal with a nation sick of war, which we've seen over the years. You know, I mean, one of the reasons we didn't go into world war ii initially uh like we should have and could have saved probably a lot of lives on our end and their end for what we had to go in and fix when it was almost uh you know they were almost encroaching on our property um was um you

know we got sick of that war, too, and World War I. And so the reason we didn't want to do World War II was because we were protectionists and nationalists at that time and very populist where it's like, we're just going to worry about us. Fuck you guys. Have fun in Europe. Clean up your mess over there. And then once it became to a point that we were being attacked and the fight was coming to us. We took the fight to them.

And when you really think of, if we would have stepped into that war, the moment, um, Berlin and Hitler started making our first transgressions into other countries, we could have shut that thing down and saved a whole lot of American lives and, uh, and, and, uh, and, uh, European lives as well. And of course the Jews, we could have saved that whole 6 million concentration camp in one of the ugliest parts of history. So it's interesting how it can really backfire on us when we don't step up and take care of problems

or when we create problems. There was a lot of problems I remember reading about with John F. Kennedy, the Bay of Pigs, Cuba, Russia, a lot of things that, you know, he got handed this bag of goods and they had to try and make them work from a prior administration as they were developing. And, you know, I remember reading years ago Castro loved the U.S. He wrote to them as a child and sent in a a dollar or something or peso whatever

their monetary was in uh pre-castro cuba asking and he wanted the state department or the the feds to send him an actual dollar because he feared the us so much and at one time he was in play towards us and russia to who was going to run his country when he took over as a revolutionary. And we snubbed him because we wanted to support, I think it was Ferdinand, the prior corrupt president that was there. And so he went to... Batista, I think. And here we are. You look at now, if we would have embraced him and said,

you know what, that guy was corrupt. We'll just, yeah, we'll just let you switch that one out um imagine what how different the last what is it 50 years now or 60 years that that we've been at war with cuba and it's achieved literally nothing yeah yeah and chris i think you're i'd agree with most of your you know the points you did a little tour of the world there um but i as somebody who's you know from outside the u.s and obviously my podcast talks a lot to people in the u.s but i would maybe encourage you to remember that once in a while the u.s has had victories as well and has you know oh yeah the right thing and and i'll give you one example and i'll give it to you

because i think very few people in the u.s actually know about it because after uh as was the soviet union and the u.s and with the help of britain and france defeated the nazis uh in germany um churchill who was the british leader at the time uh wanted all the senior nazis just shot on the spot. And the Soviet Union, under Stalin, wanted to have show trials, which was his sort of speciality. The US came along and they said, no, we need to have real trials with real lawyers, real charges,

and if people are found guilty, they pay the price. And that happened. And the US initiated right across the area of germany that it controlled what was called a denazification process and that process was going into every town every village and in the first thing they did was they locked up every single nazi party member and then let people out slowly and uh were very careful about how they did that. And they made films, and they educated the population,

and they founded newspapers, which are still being published in Germany today, but in particular made one incident that I was aware of, made a film of all the concentration camps, the death camps. And they forced them to watch it. Yeah, camps. And they forced them to watch it. Yeah, and the way they forced them to watch it, and of course this was on film, you couldn't copy it very easily, so it was brought from town to town. And when this film came to your town,

you were told you had to go to the cinema on this date and watch it, and your ration card would be stamped. And if this film had been to your town and you didn't have the stamp on your ration card would be stamped. And if this film had been to your town and you didn't have the stamp on your ration card saying that you'd been, no more food. So for sure, you were going to, and there was not a lot of food around. So for sure, you were going to watch that film.

And I remember seeing, and I can't remember which history book it was, but just a photograph. And the photograph was what would look to us like, you know, kind of two women. But when you look at it, you can see that the girls, they're quite young, but they're dressed in wartime clothes. So it looks old to us. And they have really not happy faces. This is not people who are smiling for a photograph. And the caption on the photograph was that the US troops who stood inside the movie theater when this film was running saw that these two girls were laughing and they were told, you have to go back and watch this film again. And

then this photograph was taken. And this had a profound effect this had a very very profound effect that lasts to this day and if you look to this day at the nazi areas that's to say the areas taken over by the nazis which were germany austria and also hungary was essentially a nazi allied country they were they had their own fascist dictator. After the war what became West Germany until unification, which is most of Germany, was effectively under US control. East Germany was a smaller Soviet controlled area, Austria and Hungary were considered to have, I think wrongly, considered to have been victims of the Nazis rather than collaborators.

And this denazification program occurred only in West Germany. To this day, you can see that neo-Nazi parties are stronger in the areas that did not get that denazification program. And the far right, these people who are banging the drum of intolerance, have no currency whatsoever

in the areas where the Americans ran these denazification programs. And I just sometimes like to tell that story when I meet Americans because it's something that's not so well known in the US, but it had a profound profound effect I've seen the pictures I've seen the pictures of the Nazis having to sit in the theatre and just the looks on their faces

as they're watching the concentration camp pictures and as I said I'm in Germany at the moment and on Berlin streets there are what are called Stumblestone. And this is maybe something the size of your fist that's just set into the pavement instead of a stone or concrete in the pavement it It's a brass plaque. And it says hier wohnte, here lived

and a person's name. The Jews that were taken from that location. Exactly. So where they can research and find somebody who was murdered, they will put a small memorial. And many, probably millions of German people walk over those

stumble stones every day when they go in and out of their apartment blocks. You know, there is, there is a, I remember one of my German friends who comes to visit me about every year here in America. She told me about the stumbling stones years ago. And I was pretty amazed. And then she told me the series of processes laws uh that they have in germany to prevent the rise of the uh nazi nazism again um i mean even as an american citizen if i go over there and make a hail hail salute i could be arrested um and and

they have really tight laws on, on keeping that from happening. Um, and you know, here in America, we, we struggle with this concept of free speech. It's in our constitution and what is free speech. And over the years, we've had to start drawing lines of hate speech, that there are certain elements of speech that are violent, dangerous. Um, but the problem is it is a sliding scale. It is a, you know, once you start cutting into these segments of what is not free speech and what is free speech,

you start, you know, you start getting in the danger of what Germany slid into where suddenly we're burning books. And, you know, we already have a problem with libraries banning books like To kill a mockingbird so what happened from the arab spring that came uh and you probably blame this on facebook and twitter as well come to think of it in fact they kind of caused this whole thing when it comes down to it so the arab spring overthrew a lot of countries and of course destabilized the middle east with us going in iraq and it started the the arab spring started the syrian civil war um and out of that civil war has just been the uh the i think it's millions of citizens from syria pouring into of course europe

and any place they can to get away from that ugliness. And, of course, ISIS was able to spread through that. And, of course, inside of Syria, ISIS was able to build a base and then parts of Iraq that didn't give a crap after we pulled out. So out of that, to my understanding, that surge of migrants is what really created this populism rise. Brexit, America, you know, everybody going, we want our country first. So Britain first, America first, all this sort of thing, because people really got tired of seeing the migrants come into their country. And sadly, you know, there's an old line about man that I love to take and repeat because we seem to be doomed to repeat all of our errors just about every generation. And, of course, it doesn't help we don't spend more money on education. But over the eons of American or of human history, government officials,

politicians have always played the immigrant card, the us versus them, the those people are different. And we're the chosen bunch and they're the illegal aliens. I'm not sure why we're referring referring to other human beings that share the same dna as us as aliens therein lies the problem with that discussion uh but you would think that human beings after seeing politicians play us like fucking fiddles with this us versus them immigrants are bad thing that's been going on for eons of time that we would get smart enough to go, yeah, we've seen this movie, we're not playing this game. But no, we're fucking dumb

because we're fucking human nature. And therein lies the basis of all of our problems. We're both good and evil and we have beauty and ugliness inside of us and hopefully one version of us will win. But to me, that's what really created Brexit. Am I wrong, or what do you think? Yeah, I think you're correct.

There was the involvement of Cambridge Analytica, which has never won a single seat in a UK general election in the parliament. So literally without having almost out of 650, not a single member of the parliament, they were able to become a single issue. So they were very unsuccessful as a political party, but very successful as a campaigning group and they focused like a laser beam on banging the immigration drum and that was successful. There's no question about that. They succeeded in doing that. And where Donald Trump had the Mexicans, they had a number of false stories.

Yeah, probably a lot, the issue was entirely bogus because the immigrants from outside the EU, the EU has no control over that. That's the UK's choice as to what level of immigration do they accept from outside the EU. But as I said before, you were dealing with, I think, a lot of voters who had a very clear idea of what they felt, but were perhaps low information voters and didn't want to be told by the establishment what to do or what to think. And if you look at some of the posters, they were explicitly using images of Syrian refugees without any explaining why that might be relevant to the vote but it was relevant even if it was not relevant to the vote it was relevant to the voters.

What's interesting to me and I've always studied economics M1, M2, money policy, the Federal Reserve one of my, I think when I was 18 or 20, I was studying to become a stockbroker, passing the test and understanding how the world of financing, banking, stock markets work. It's been disappointing me for most all my life

that we do a very poor job of education in schools, not to teach people these things so they can understand how little these immigrants affect our economy and how much they do contribute to our economy. Especially, you know, we have the same problem here you do, where we use a lot of immigrants to do the jobs that Americans won't do, like picking fruit and actually servicing most of our food sourcing that comes. You know, I just read a thing today that in California, in what they call, I think, the salad bowl or something like that,

but it's where a lot of our fresh fruit comes from. The immigrants there that are illegal are living 20 to a house. And, of course, they're scared of deportation. And what we don't realize is we're going to shoot ourselves in the foot and increase prices, not only with tariffs at walmart you know i i heard bill maher tell the joke i can't wait till all these tariffs kick in and all the immigrants are kicked out and people go and all the trump voters walmart find that there's the shelves are empty um they just don't realize how much this is going to make their life a living

hell especially for when you cost basis it's interesting to me too that people live today in such a non-actualized state that they can be played so hard with this angle of of hey your life's a living hell and a piece of shit, not because of us politicians have been doing our job and we've been overtaxing you and we've been robbing you blind by all of our inside deals and everything that we do where all of our congressmen become multimillionaires through their dirty dealings.

But the average Joe is sitting there going, well, I can't get a job. And then of course the politician comes along and goes, hey, you stupid knuckle-dragger, it's the immigrants' fault. It's not us. And they go, oh, it's the immigrants' fault. These politicians haven't been stealing money from me all this time. It's the immigrants. It's like –

Chris, there's a book by, I think, Eric Schlosser, Reefer Madness, but it has one section on, I think, exactly what you're talking about, the salad bowl in California. controlling the farming there, how they campaign quite carefully to have a very specific level of action against illegal immigrants. And they don't want to have all of the illegal immigrants kicked out. They want them just afraid enough not to cause trouble. They need that labor there. They don't want them kicked out they want them just afraid enough not to cause trouble and they need those that labor there they don't want them kicked out but they want them in just enough fear of being kicked out

that they uh don't uh don't um start demanding uh better wages or better conditions and I thought that was a very you know it was where a good documentation of a very cynical move yeah it's it's part of one of the things that came from the Syrian immigrants was Isis and of course we created Isis by leaving that void in Iraq by leaving Iraq because we became more nationalistic and didn't want to mess with Iraq anymore which is the problem we started and caused the destabilization of Arabs so their world there in the Middle East so we can I challenge you a bit on that Chris sure yeah I challenge you a bit on that um I completely agree on the destabilization that the Iraq war had, obviously on Iraq.

And you mentioned, and I think you kind of went very quickly past it, but there's, of course, and always been a lot of traffic, a lot of people from North Africa in particular live in Europe and work and study and so forth. And if you think the Arab Spring started in 2011, WhatsApp had a big influence on that. What did? WhatsApp, the messaging. WhatsApp, yeah. The messaging platform, yeah.

Because everybody who lived in Tunisia or Libya or Egypt had a brother or a cousin or a friend who was working or studying in Europe. And while you're a dictator and when you can control the information and you can say basically it's me or oblivion, then that's pretty convincing. But when somebody's got a phone in their hand and their brother is sending them a message saying, no, actually, you know, in other countries it's different. There's democracy. There's a better economy. There's better freedoms.

You can say what you like. People draw a cartoon of the political leader on the front page of the newspaper and the editor doesn't get sent to jail. And I think the business model of being a dictator in an information age has just changed dramatically and that enormously destabilized the Arab world, North Africa and the Middle East. The Middle East is slightly different, but particularly in North Africa. I totally agree with you.

That's what I was referencing when I said Facebook and Twitter. Yeah, WhatsApp. And, you know, even in China, I think there was Telegram or one of the apps that they were able to use even after the governments were shutting off the cellular systems. They could still use certain things to get around it. But out of that, we created ISIS, and you can't blame a president. I mean, it was public opinion at that time. We were all sick of the Iraq War. We all were sick of $4 trillion in debt.

We were almost broke in the Great Recession, so we didn't have a bunch of money left over to throw at wars and so it was time to you know quit policing the world and pull back a bit but out of that void was created isis and i think i think the large part of immigrants coming to europe and then of course the isis attacks uh the terrorist attacks that came with them and you know a lot of people started drawing comparisons of course, the ISIS attacks, the terrorist attacks that came with them. And, you know, a lot of people started drawing comparisons, of course, to we're letting the Afghans in or the Syrians in. And they're, you know, ISIS has infiltrated with them and coming through with them. And they're just running across the borders.

And that's not entirely accurate. I mean, there have been some terrorist attacks. They haven't come from people who came as Syrian refugees. Yeah, but I'm not saying specifically that's what it was. But it created this mindset among the voters, I think, where the voters were like, immigrants bring ISIS and terrorism and shit blowing up. And, you know, whether it's the Syrian thing I I'm the reason I think I'm highlighting Syrian above other refugees is because there were so many of them coming in that were escaping the Syrian war yeah that's true but but I think and I think your analysis is correct but it's not the only one. And one other aspect is the appeal of a fundamentalist ideology,

particularly to people who, it seems to be, have an education in the very hard sciences. So if you go to an Islamic scholar, somebody who spends time studying the Qur'an and understanding the background and how it was written and the various shades of meaning, you'd have it very hard to find a Muslim extremist. But if you, and the population from which people like suicide bombers are drawn are typically people who do not have a very good understanding of the Quran. It's people who have studied engineering, physics, mathematics and very hard sciences that give you very clear yes or no answers and it seems to be that that type of personality in particular is attracted to that. And when you mix that in with a degree of maybe social isolation, that seems to have become a very dangerous mix.

And that's an appealing alternative to the obviously very corrupt dictatorships in the Middle East. Yeah. I mean, certainly corrupt dictatorships in the Middle East. Yeah, I mean there's certainly these dictatorships really Help that sort of go along and of course and I'll certainly social media, you know YouTube I remember seeing during the Iraq war the Sunnis and Shiites and Al Qaeda Posting their videos on YouTube using these social media platforms as propaganda That also helped drive Isis and everything else I remember seeing them post videos of them sniping out American soldiers which were just

horrific to watch and they would be playing their music you know for propaganda purposes through the video and doing you know their chance of whatever their political things was. Yeah, I think that really hurt Europe. And it was probably already a great field to play on. I don't mean great isn't a good thing. But basically us coming out of the recession in 2000, from what, 2008 on, I know that europe had a hard time with that especially pensioners um you guys is you guys had a lot of banking issues over there um it really upset a lot of

people's retirement and finances i think more so here than in america that's true yeah and so that just created a fertile ground for you know uh people being disillusioned upset and of course the politician comes along and goes look over there it's those immigrants and in the meantime i don't know what's going on in europe but we have uh we have a political administration that is just turned us into a cash register, and they're just enriching their billionaire selves with tax things. The sad problem is they're making people's lives worse, especially the Trump voters in the middle of the country. The farmers and stuff now are being inflicted upon by these reckless terrorists we're putting into place.

And I was just reading the other day, there's a couple ships of sour gum that we've exported to China that are stuck in the middle of the sea between the U.S. and China because of the tariffs. And I'm sure that that's breaking the bank or probably bankrupting farmers, which are usually on the edge of bankruptcy here in America, as it is. And the sad part is is that's gonna create more

Economic disruption and more opportunity for people to go. It's the immigrants over there It's the immigrants and people are so goddamn fucking stupid that they will not Realize what's what's being played upon them by the snake oil salesmen. That's possibly true. I mean, if I can bring anything brighter to it, in the US there's, I think, a very strong tradition of the separation of powers, and that has prevented the deterioration of the democracy.

I think in many instances, it's a very important safeguard. Actually, what's been deteriorating the thing, and I think this is what you're saying, has been the deterioration of that separation of church and state. The biggest problem we're having right now is the influence of church over the state

and the commingling now, the collusion of church and state that is becoming a huge problem here in america i mean right now they're trying to uh pass the laws so the churches can create uh super packs which are these billion dollar political machines that can run commercials and spend all their money to influence political behavior. And one of the reasons that's usually been unauthorized or illegal up until this point was because they didn't want church influencing state. And it's one of the reasons that our churches have a tax exempt status. So it becomes a real problem when these churches decide that they can create

super PACs using their tax-free status to use that money to influence politics to enrich themselves more. Or to get their things done. It's just really messed up, especially when a super PAC, I believe, is a non-profit.

So a non-profit is being built on a non-profit. That's true. I PAC, I believe, is a non-profit. So a non-profit is being built on a non-profit. That's true. I mean, I think it's probably the case that that separation of church and state in the U.S. is more important because the U.S. is so much more religious. In Britain and Germany and other European countries, churches, religions get taxpayer money to run their schools

pretty much entirely financed by the taxpayer and nobody has much of a problem with that because the influence of religion is that much weaker that people just aren't that religious Do your political, do your church institutions over there

muck about in politics, though? Do they put money into political campaigns and things of that nature? It changes. It's different from country to country. No, but in Europe. I'm sorry, in Britain. In Britain, the UK has a state religion.

The Queen of England is the head of the Church of England. And there are 32 bishops of the Church of England who are members of the House of Lords who sit in Parliament and can vote on laws. So they don't need to interfere indirectly because they can vote on laws, so they don't need to interfere indirectly because they can vote directly on elected bishops. But in actual, I mean, to me, I'm uncomfortable with the level of religious influence there, mostly because of Tony Blair and Tony Blair who was Prime Minister from 1997 until 2007, strongly encouraged faith schools, that's to say religious run schools being funded by taxpayers money and there have been quite a string of scandals,

particularly of fundamentalist groups, both Muslim and Christian, taking over schools where only a small portion of the families sending their kids to school would subscribe to that religion, but they're getting essentially hardcore indoctrination day after day for their kids to school would subscribe to that religion, but they're getting essentially hardcore indoctrination day after day for their kids. Yeah, and it becomes its own thing.

No, I'm hoping that we avoid that sort of model coming to us in the U.S. It's really alarming, like I said, right now, where we're trying to get religions religions are trying to seize more power. It's been interesting. Our evangelical religions over here have embraced one of the most toxic people, vile people, um, both on attacks on women and attacks on, um, immigrants. Um, and they're willing to embrace that and, their souls to that devil in exchange for power in the government and being able to take over control. Yeah, I remember hearing about Brexit, that Brexit, a lot of the rural people were the ones who voted for Brexit and a lot

of the urban people of course saw the fallacies of it. There's been a book written and I can't remember the name of the author but it talked about the somewheres and the anywheres and the divide was a bit more

subtle than that and this guy divided the country into two social groups and the somewheres where the people who lived in a particular place probably lived there their whole lives and had a strong affinity to that place and the anywheres where people who maybe moved to go to university were very comfortable living in different places and comfortable mixing with people from lots of different places. So it was a social divide but it wasn't the one that we've mostly expected so it's not a class divide and London of course being so cosmopolitan was a very strong pro-European vote and by that analysis had lots of anywheres, lots of people

moved to London also from places in the UK. And then northern cities, industrial cities that have maybe gone through industrial decline, what might be called the Rust Belt, were the places where the very strong anti-European Brexit vote was. So we have the very similar thing. We have what are called the coastal elites, where we have on both coasts the largest populations concentrated, and those populations are the most liberal. And like you say, if you live in a very tight city crammed with a lot of people from all walks of life all colors all races people ethnicities you know I

mean it's it's a mosh pit of humanity this is the irony the irony is the people who hate the racist the people who hate immigrants most are the people who never meet immigrants. Exactly. Exactly. And when you live in a city, it's very hard to be a racist because if you are, you're going to be seeing all the people you hate like all day long. And I imagine it is possibly racist in a liberal city. But for the most part, you end up making friends with people of all different

uh of all differences and you you learn you know how to get along you have them as friends um and and uh you see the values you see their lives you find out they're just like us they want to they want to find the love of their life they want to get married they want to raise kids uh and live happily ever after hopefully with the financial life and career and all that sort of stuff uh you know people want pretty simple goals when it comes down to it and so you know we went through that with uh with our um extension of what you guys did and cam and Linica like you keep saying is the thread that that runs through Brexit and Trumpism in and why basically what they did is they took what politicians have done for years and they attached it to social media and went hog out with it and

tapped into people's darkest prejudices that they found closeted for the last eight years when we had an African-American president. Well, we did things like approve gay marriage and accept transsexuals as beings and et cetera, et cetera. We started doing all this stuff for the good of humanity at recognizing that we're all human and then uh those people who resented those things largely because their economic bases were being put asunder and and you know i don't know if you guys have what we have here in in britain um one of the problems we have was nafta and you know the people that are living in the steel or what we now call the Rust Belt, it used to be the steel belt, I think, you know, they can see very actively their jobs moving to Mexico, the cheaper labor. They can see automation taking their jobs away. these geographical rural areas that just become ghost towns overnight as these, you know, big job places leave for cheaper labor.

And, you know, we have this huge problem where we have the flower states, the center of the country, the red people that are wonderful, valuable human beings, sadly, are being impacted by this change of where they were going over in our society, where we're going from, you know, a mechanical age, industrial age, where we're now becoming an information age, and a more cerebral time, and time of automation robots that are going to replace a lot of jobs. And sadly, we really should be spending our money retooling these people's education maybe moving them out of geographic areas that are have become ghost towns you know it's sad that they you know a watching donald trump go we're getting your coal miner jobs back i mean was there a whole lot of people that are like yes i can get black lung now. I'm so excited for this.

I can go back to work in an environment that is so risky and can kill me so quickly and easily if something goes wrong. Yeah, that's what I want to do. And we're stuck in this juxtaposition between going from one age to the next. And we got what you guys got with, uh, Brexit. We got a clawback. We're basically here in America, uh,

everyone from their late fifties, uh, and sixties that were raised in this era of racism, a rampant racism and, and, and, and the, uh,

the, uh, control of the great white way. I can say that since I'm also white. I mean, that's really what they wanted. They got this clawback where they're like, you're not going to progress, and we want, this is our last-ditch effort in our retirees to pull you back to the way we used to be

because we feel we're losing our great white way power. And that's really the referendum of what we had. I'm always shocked when I see somebody who isn't white supporting Trump, but I mean, what can you say? Barnum Bailey said it best, there's a sucker born every minute.

So let me ask you this. How do we get out of this? Where do we go from here? Certainly Donald Trump became and brexit was kind of a shit show but donald trump took the shit show to a whole new level to a point where europeans said holy fuck we're not doing what these two idiots did uh you know we saw the thing with le pen and macron in france which is which was the next referendum after our vote, and people took a turn back to the left and said, okay, yeah, this is a bad thing. Where do you see the future going? Do you see Brexit

actually getting executed, or is that going to be re-voted, do you think? I think that very specifically on the Brexit one, I think it's going to be very hard to hit the brakes on that. However, I think it will be fudged. One particular British commentator said that for a long time, Britain was half in the EU

and they may end up just instead of being half in, they'll be half out. That probably is the worst possible outcome for uh britain in the long run that's to say that they will be part of the customers union which would mean that they would have to follow the various rules of the customs union, but wouldn't have a say over what those rules would be. So not a great deal, but the UK would be looking at very, very serious economic problems if they try to be entirely isolationist, because Britain is a trading nation. But I think to answer answer your main question which is how do we go forward and I think that Trump could not

have won Cambridge Analytica aside or all of those you know race basing aside and so forth all of those things certainly helped but they were built on a basis and the basis was that there was a bunch of people who were being left behind and who were not being listened to and not being even addressed by, you know, what you might call the coastal elites, what might be called the metropolitan elites in Britain. And, you know, you can bang your head and you can say, how stupid are these people? They're voting against their own intentions. And you're probably correct. That's right. They're clearly voting against their own best interests.

And some admit it's that too. They're just like, we're just tired of everything. So we're going with the fuck it card. Throw a Molotov cocktail in and see what happens because that's where we're at now. Yeah. And I have to say insulting those people is probably the least creative, the least constructive thing that you could do. That insulting them just doesn't work.

And I'm struggling to remember the guy's name, but he wrote a very very famous book uh black guy and i think he was religiously inspired but what he did was he set out to make friends and truly make friends with the members of the klu klux klan and he uh he he uh just didn't try to convince him of anything, didn't try to persuade him of anything, just was a friend and inspired many of them to leave and indeed and I can't remember, unfortunately I haven't had a chance to look it up, but he essentially destroyed the entire organization by befriending its leaders in this area. And it's an inspiring story.

I think I've seen videos of him or I've seen videos of him hanging out talking. I think he's an inspiring speaker. And yeah, and I'm not. He even goes to rallies, KKK rallies, and just have conversations like, let's talk about why you hate me. Exactly. if you become the cliche that they hate, it is very easy to continue hating. But if you challenge that and you can say,

no, actually, I'm just a human being. And if you just be a human being, it's much more difficult to, and for exactly the same reason that you get the highest levels of anti-immigrant feeling where you don't get any immigrants, for exactly the same reason that the you get the highest levels of anti-immigrant feeling where you don't get any immigrants because they're seeing these people as a cliche just as as uh a report on a tv news station or whatever but you know when it's the guy who sells you your coffee

in the morning the guy who's uh driving a taxi the guy who is the doctor who treats you in the hospital or whatever, it's very hard to hate on specific individuals who you know who you meet in your daily life. It's much easier to do that with a cliche. And right now we're stuck in this middle part of history where we have an aging racism era, born and raised voting bloc that is in our senior citizens i'm not saying everybody but the largely the trump voters um and you know they came from an era of extreme white power and control extreme racism they that a lot of them are have closet racism whether they believe it or not um you know i'll talk to i'll talk to people that are in the senior groups uh and and they'll say you know i love trump and i'm

not a racist and you're like okay well so you're not a racist and then once you start talking about different people like hispanics or something you'll hear yeah those people in their culture that culture that they have and then you start hearing these white supremacist words come out that i don't think they realize are racism or show their bias but the more they talk the more they tend to um they tend to uh uh what's the right word to reveal themselves and reveal themselves and i don't think a lot of them are aware of that. I think they're just generational.

They were raised in that generation of the 60s and 50s and stuff, which are the Trump voter bloc. And they want that back. And the biggest problem they've seen is their loss of power. They see the increase of immigrants coming over and taking over blocks. I was recently watching, I think it was a Vice show, where they were talking with and getting updates from Trump voters. And one of the Trump voters' issues was their worriness that there would be more immigrant voters that would start to control America over over them it's a real power fight over the great white way and immigrants uh minorities you know they're seeing the blacks are of course

voting and taking more of the demographic over these are the people who um just probably um just rile when they see a black couple and a white, a black and white couple together and go, Oh, what's going on with our, whatever. And so we're stuck in this middle part of history where this old block is dying off. They're fading away. They're moving into retirement and of course they'll pass away eventually. And that block will be gone.

That block of our generate or several generations that were raised in that racist environment you know this these people were still raised in an environment where we had a colored in a white you know bathrooms we had colored and white uh uh water faucets we had colored and white places they could go if you were black you couldn't go through the front lobby of nice hotels. You had to go in through the back door. These are what these people were raised with. And whether they realize it or not, when you sit down and talk to them long enough, you'll

at first get the economic bullshit that they put out as to why they voted for Trump. And then if you talk to them long enough and get into them, or what's interesting is you bring around other people of other minorities, then you start seeing the racism that's very latent and very closeted with them. And I don't think a lot of them even realize it. Sometimes you'll see the misogyny. Like I remember watching interviews of Trump voters in small towns like Pennsylvania. And you would see them talk about, well, you know, it's about jobs and this economy. I'm tired of my job. And the longer they talk, then the misogyny comes out or the racism comes out.

Like I would hear you start hearing comments about Hillary Clinton and her feminism or the fact that she is a woman. And then you would hear the misogynist stuff come out. And you realize that people were putting up a front, that what Cambridge Analytica played to was the deepest, darkest, ugly prejudice that people had. Now, in the middle part of our history, we have a new chapter hopefully beginning. We have this wave of these youth voters that are now really enraged by,

you know, they had to live every day going to school, wondering if they're going to be slaughtered that day. They, you know, they go through all these drills every day of what to do in an active shooter situation, which I can't imagine the terror of just going to school nowadays. And then these school shootings that are happening really on a daily basis here in America, which you guys don't have the pleasure of having over there in Europe. Thank God. I might move to Europe. And so we have this, but we have this huge voting block

that is now really being activated. And we have these young kids in these new voter blocks that they're used to living in the whole world. They're used to being on Instagram and social media. I mean, even social media opened up the world to me. After Twitter, I suddenly had international clients around the world that I was doing business with that I could never really ever know that I wouldn't have done that before without social media.

And so these people are also exploring other cultures. They're seeing pictures of different other worlds and countries and ethnicities and cultures. They're embracing those. They're watching on Instagram. This country is that. People posting their travels.

To me, I think there are a lot more international thinking people. They see the world and it's become their metro, if you will. It's become their big city, if you will. And hopefully with what they are calling right now the blue wave, which is supposed to come in 2018, where we take back control of our government and hopefully control over the White House where there isn't a supporting Congress

that just lets the president run willy-nilly, which wasn't supposed to happen. They were supposed to be the policing units of our thing. So hopefully we have this wave coming. Do you see any of that going on where you have a blue wave that might flip you back in the coming years? One thing that's very different about the European politics is that there's a pretty much every country that has two parties.

And that's a break on extremism. So, for example, in the US, you've had kind of general moderately conservative government for most of the history. But when even one party gets taken over by people with an agenda just to reduce taxation. Yeah, the GOP has had two really pulls to the far right. There was the Tea Party and then there was the Trumpism, there's feelings that the Democratic Party is being pulled to the extreme left as a thing. Now in Britain you guys have the Tory party and the Labour Party? That's true, that's in Britain. There is also not as strong as it used to be the Liberal Party which up to 2010 were in coalition government with the Conservatives. In Scotland the configuration is different because there's a Scottish National

Party which actually is in government in Scotland and other parties, Conservatives and Labour parties are much smaller. but in most countries in Europe the parliaments have four or five or six or a dozen different parties and a consensus has to be built across at least enough parties to make a majority in a coalition. majority of a small majority so you've got 51 percent out of a group that has 51 percent means you've got 26 percent of the country and you've got complete power and that's not something that can happen in a multi-party system you need to build a coalition and it's just that much harder to have an extremist government because you might get one party to adopt an extremist line but to get

several parties to adopt that that's quite unusual. I've often wondered because I've seen the coalition governments in Israel and around the world the European and it's kind of funny every now and then they have a referendum where they go

we can't all get along. So we have to quit and revote this thing, which seems semi wasteful. But I suppose that's what has to happen in balancing that. I remember when Theresa May, she forced her own vote and shot herself in the foot with her. Oh, yeah. That was a major error. Her attempt to grab power. I often wonder if in the U.S. we would have more of that. with her attempt to grab her power.

I often wonder if in the U.S. we would have more of that. I mean, certainly in the most recent election that we had between Hillary and Trump, they both came with so much baggage, and especially with Hillary Clinton, you know, she became the lesser of two evils. It became the lesser of two evils vote. I mean, I don't like Hillary Clinton. I have no problem voting for a woman at all but Hillary Clinton over the past 25 years has said so many so many issues so many political follies so much sort of dirty political dealings and stuff she was just horribly tainted

in the eyes of the voter and in in reality uh we were set up for anybody to win who was going against the establishment i i do believe bernie sanders would have won if uh hillary hadn't thrown the democratic party into the bus um i i believe bernie sanders would have won because he was also an extremist compared to um an anti-government you know let's change everything um and i believe he would have won over trump if if we would have kept him going and certainly the fact the electorate was so turned off by the lesser of two evils all the good people really didn't come out and vote a lot of the minorities didn't come out and vote because they were so disenfranchised um and that's of course what these politicians play and count on you know um they want they want the base to be

fired up and and cambridge ellenica did a great job of that and cambridge unlimited uh analytica and the russian bots targeted black voters i mean they had one of the largest uh uh facebook pages that was controlled by a white guy, I think, or a Russian. It was the Black Lives Matter. It was one of the Black Lives Matter Facebook pages, and no one had any idea that it was just a troll, and it was designed to disenfranchise

those people to not show up and vote. And they ran a hell of a good game. I'm hoping that what we're learning from Cambridge and Lenica and the Mueller investigation and everything else is we're realizing that these people can use these dark forces and magic and computers and the dark web to really fool a lot of people. And I'm hoping that as a human being human being race we're gonna start realizing that and flip back the other way um you know i i'm i constantly console myself with the uh speech uh president obama gave where he goes you know as in america we go through uh dark times we zig and we zag and we usually hopefully find the right footing and

follow the right course most of the time and every now and then we have to learn the hard way and we zig and we zag and then we have to go wow that really turned out ugly we better stop doing that and go back to the way we used to do things we've already seen a lot of that here in America I know what's going on in Europe but you know we've seen the you know of that here in America. I don't know what's going on in Europe, but, you know, we've seen the, you know, most of our news was almost dead and was just playing endless reruns of the Kardashians. And no one cared about print or news agencies much. But now there's been a resurgence in the power of them and people listening to the news,

watching the news, reading the news, getting educated. You know, a lot of the millennials evidently didn't go vote because they were so used to having ethical presidents to a certain degree because they grew up with the Obamas. They didn't know anything else. you know, maintain a modicum of decency and, you know, support or I can't think of the word I'm looking for, but, you know, supporting the power of the presidency, what it means, what it means in the world and when it's spoken. And instead, we've just put a white trash mobile home running billionaire into the presidency and it's just fucking jerry springer every goddamn day um it certainly seems entertaining from this side of the atlantic i'm not sure that i'd want to be any closer than i am can i move in your basement um i don't know about that.

We could try and make him stay. Get out of here soon, William. I don't know what's going on. At least you don't have North Korea threatening to fucking nuke you guys. I mean... Yeah, well, that's a whole other show. I have to say, though,

it seems like... I hate to admit it, it sticks in my though um um it seems like yeah i hate to admit it it sticks in my crawl but it seems like that um trump might have played the madman better than kim jong-un or however whatever his name is um uh because they've announced that they're going to stop their nuclear and rocket tests um and it might be because everybody was afraid of Kim Jong-un not because he was powerful, but because he was viewed as being close to insane.

Perhaps Trump convinced him that he could do a Kim Jong-un act better than Kim Jong-un could. Possibly. I think China had a lot to do with that and i do think pressure on china to address the thing but certainly but certainly there was a lot of political powers that came out of china to to get this taken care of as well i think i think china saw the arab spring and the problem that refugees caused that one of their biggest worries evidently has been that

uh either we might attack north korea and there would be just millions of of north koreans in refugee crisis pouring into china and they they would have to deal with this huge economic problem of that and and the social uh monetary and and of course you know dealing with all these people flooding into the country and there might be another thing that comes out of that crisis there could be a new terrorism that comes out of that uh new isis that might rise from uh you know immigrants of north korea etc etc i mean who knows where that whole thing can just go to a shit show that uh it's probably impossible to pick the proportions it can go to. And so I think, especially when you saw recently with him going to China

and meeting with China for the first time, I think China sat down with him and said, hey, man, look, we're done. This has got to stop. You know, these last couple of years, we've seen the proliferation of their nuclear program and their missiles and what they're firing. And so I think a lot of that stacked on china's um way and uh it just reached a point maybe with maybe with trump just being a complete fucking buffoon and being an asshole on twitter you know china went hey man we got to get north

korea to fucking shape up and ship out because these two stupids are going to fucking end up destroying everybody, right? Yeah, nothing happens in North Korea that the Chinese don't at least allow to happen. It might not be that they're deciding it, but they're allowing. And I think for a long time, they were perfectly happy for North Korea to consume a lot of food.

North Korea and China and Russia have let North Korea do whatever they want so that we keep focusing on them so that they can get away with all their dirty tricks around the world. It consumes energy. That's the purpose of it. When it starts to look a little bit too dangerous,

they're kind of reeling it in. Yep. And I honestly think that recently when, when, when Russia likes us being in Syria and us having the problem of trying to still fight a war and, and drain us of economic stuff, it's the same plan that Al Qaeda had with,

with their terrorist leader who blew up nine 11. You know, his whole thing was to just economically disrupt us by having us spend our own money like stupid pigs in credit and breaking ourselves and driving us into a recession. That's what he saw in going after 9-11 and the

Twin Towers, that we would respond in kind and crazy and spend all this money, which would sink us into an oblivion of recession that that will wipe us out which we actually almost did spending four trillion in Iraq um you can certainly say that was a contributor to us uh us in the Great Recession we went through um and that's what Russia is doing in supporting and I think when Trump came out and said hey we're going to pull out of Syria I think

they dropped that chemical bomb on purpose to keep us in Syria. I think they dropped that chemical bomb a week later on purpose to draw us back in because they like the drink that it has on us. I don't know about that. I'm slightly limited on my time, but I think it's probably worth discussing Russia very very briefly the Vladimir Putin was a KGB agent based in East Germany at the time that the communist government fell and he's highly aware of that he is very conscious that any civil unrest in his country could cost him his neck.

He's in a dictator trap. Dictators don't retire. They either die in office or they get shot by their whoever overthrows them because they've committed so many crimes along the way.

Or they die in the Higgs. Yes, exactly, because that's the other one. That's certainly where the Syrian president is going. It's just a matter of one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, William, I don't want to take any more of your time, but I'd love to have you on the show again

where we can talk some more of these items, and I like having some international content. This has been very enlightening. Will you give us your plugs again that people find out about? Sure, yeah. I'll just give you one for people who want to hear the podcast. It's challengingopinions.com. Very simple.

Cool. Be sure to check out William's podcast. I really like the concept of that, having a counter-counterpoint, having a good debate, and, of course, listening to other people's concepts um here in america it's it's a whole lot tougher because um i already know what your racist argument is and and you can't fix stupid but uh you know i'm interested in checking out some of your podcast episodes so i can hear this sort of thing. I kind of maybe like to have some of that on my show. At one point

in the early years of the show, I did have a co-host who was very good at kind of taking the counterpoint alternative thing not fully, but she would offer the differing opinions and that was really great content. So there you go. Anyway, thanks for waiting for coming by the

show and visiting us from Europe. He's in Germany right now, of course. And thanks to my audience, the greatest audience in the world. The world. We have the best audience. Pull my Trump out there. The bigly. We have a bigly audience.

Anyway, guys. Flattery will get you everywhere. Flattery will get you everything. So we certainly appreciate you tuning in. If you've listened this far, we love you even more. You're the best. And I will be beholden to you as a friend forever. Anyway, be sure to tell your friends, neighbors, relatives.

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