YouSaid · the spoken record

Dominic Cummings

lines on the record: 183
first: 2023-11-15
most recent: 2023-11-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“If you look at history, then you have to expect that what happens to everyone else is likely to happen to us, i.e. disaster. But that's not a reason for giving up. You have to try, even though you don't think it's going to work.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These people are just completely crazy, they don't know what they're doing, it's all going to fall down on their heads. That definitely was an advantage because it just means that they constantly fool themselves and undermine what they were doing. And they didn't learn from 2016. The mistakes they made in 2016, they just totally repeated in 2019.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely obviously has an effect because people will think, well, maybe we should do a deal with them. He cares a lot about blah. Maybe we should just let him do blah and see if we can persuade him. We'll help you with this and maybe you could help us with something else. Having priorities, actual priorities is incredibly rare in politics. Almost no MPs have them practically by definition. Not worrying what the media says and not worrying about everyone hating you, I think is a very powerful advantage. Insiders constantly say, did all the way through referendum and all the way through number 10?”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not calculated. I don't know if combative is the right word. I think the fact that people inside the system know I actually do have priorities and I do actually care about them. And I don't care what the media says. And I have an extremely high tolerance for everyone going crazy in order to actually get what I want.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't understand how low the caliber of the people are in politics. They don't understand like a fundamental golden rule, which is that the people in politics are almost never actually trying to solve the problem and don't care about solving the problem. I've constant conversations with ER types where they think that the Fundamentally incorrect. So it's not surprising that a lot of their plans go wrong. I think that they are also susceptible to the idea that Elites are more rational and the voters are more dark and easily manipulated by emotions, whereas in fact the truth is the exact opposite in my opinion. It's educated elites are by far the easiest to manipulate with emotional propaganda. And the voters are much tougher to fool.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, our idea was if you put it together, then you'll actually find out on day one or day four, oh actually this is a stupid idea and it won't work for the following reasons. We have to do it this way instead. But no one cares about that. It goes back to like what do people care about? No one actually cares if it doesn't work.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the things that we did in 2020 was we said it's summer 2020, what are the ways in which the number 10 system should change is the policy people should be brought together and actually physically sit with the management people, which is completely revolutionary idea, because that way when you're thinking up the ideas in the first place, you're immediately from the beginning talking to the people whose job it is like, will this actually work? Rather than what happens now is these people sit around, they go to bullshit seminars, they talk to journalists, they talk to MPs, they publish a paper, it's actually full of holes, it doesn't work. That paper then goes off the implementation people, the policy people then move on to whatever their next thing is, the management implementation people look at it and go, well, this is not going to work for all following reasons, but it's their job to make it work. They then have to go back and then start arguing with the, but we already decided that we were going to do this like nine months ago. Yeah, but it can't work.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The totally low status thing is, what are the actual implementation details? Like, has someone already tried to do this in eight different countries in the last four years? And each time it's been a disaster? No one cares about that. That's left to much lower status jobs. And none of the senior people will pay attention to it. And they're actually just formally separated.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything to do with operations and management and actually getting things done is the lowest status thing in Whitehall. The highest status thing is, A, bullshit about political strategy, inverted commas, and media and giving interviews. Everyone wants the word strategy in their job title, and it's practically always bullshit in their job title and shouldn't be in the job title. The job will be improved by removing the word from their job title. And nobody wants to be on logistics operations and actually making sure that something happens. And that's at the core of why so many things work the way they do. And you can even just see it in the whole policy process, right? The high status thing is writing the policy and then spinning it to the media.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the kind of plausible sounding few sentences to get through this conversation is actually what's important rather than what's the truth, what's the actual answer to the problem, how are you actually going to implement this over many, like everything like that is completely disdained. It points to a general problem with our system, right? I found it just one of the most important things is that”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it just encourages this kind of word cell bluffing basically That everything becomes just a sort of that is like, oh yeah, you spend a week, you skim through a few books, you come up with some like vaguely plausible stuff. And if you seem with a bit of good manners and a bit of social polish, then suddenly it all seems plausible. And you're all surrounded by people who operate in exactly the same way. So you have a room full of polished social word cells. It's just a very, very bad set of people then to throw at a problem like COVID. And also it encourages them to think”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And them to involve them in it. But Tim Gowers would be a good example of someone who personally could cope with the environment and I think would bring great values to it. So it's not, I don't think there's just one thing, right? What we need is multiple experiments with different pathways. Some of it is bringing in older established elite talent and then mixing them up in the system. Some of it is training younger elite talent differently. But I think there's no magic. There's no magic bullet to it. You have to try a bunch of things at the same time. Some people will respond very well to an odd mix of theoretical intellectual pursuits and intensively practical things. And that is definitely something worth trying to train and definitely can be trained.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They find that interesting and they'll get a lot of value out of it. A lot of people won't. So you have to think of it in multiple legs. So one thing is create those courses and that will find you a set of people. But there's another set of people who are, you know, Tim Gowers, a fields medalist mathematician at Cambridge, right? He's gone through one whole thing. Now, are you going to send him off on some course? No. Could people like that be brought into government to help in all sorts of ways? Yes. If they spent time working in government on some practical problems, would they develop a much better understanding of how government actually works and therefore be able to come up with new insights about things? Of course they will. I don't mean they all will because some of them would be like good, right? And just completely hopeless in that environment and it would be unfair on everyone.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Elite Universities now definitely don't train this sort of thing. The way that I think about it is this. It's easy to imagine creating new courses for like 17 to 23 year olds where they do a much broader mix of intellectual subjects, where they study a broader mix of intellectual subjects. They read Sun through cities, but they also understand some basics about statistics and TETLOC type stuff. But also you shove, but instead of them just sort of going off to do waste their time in summer holidays, they also go off and work at SpaceX or some kind of startup or with the military or in a hospital ward ER room. And they're moving between these worlds of the theoretical and the intensely practical constantly. Now, that won't be to everyone's temperament, right? Some people have a temperament.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, you want people with great intellectual ability, but as you say, some of those people can be highly functional in a political environment and some of them are completely catastrophic.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both extraordinary minds both did things of stunning originality. Von Neumann was completely at home in the world of Washington, could also go and deal with bureaucrats and navigate the corridors of the White House, give presentations to politicians, understood how let's have a pre meeting about this in order to make sure that so-and-so understands that. And so then the question is presented to the president in the right order so that this guy doesn't say that before, this person says that, etc., etc. All the kind of political skills he needs to actually get something done and avoid your meeting turning into a shit show. Co-dirdle is like the opposite. If you're going to put people on a graph, Coke Girdle would be like the exact opposite end of that, right? Famously totally useless in every practical way a menace to himself.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It totally depends on temperament and personality, right? Two of the most interesting intellectual people of 20th century are John von Neumann and Kurt Gerdel, who are both friends, fled Europe because of the Nazis and end up in Princeton.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They knew what it's like actually running a business. They understood the interface between business world and the government. They were familiar with all of those different worlds. And that meant that they were much better able at looking at the overall problems than the average MP, the average senior official, the average special advisor, et cetera, et cetera.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Face because you don't see at the coalface what it's like starting a business Or scaling a business. My view is much stronger having been in number 10 that what I wrote 10 years ago was correct, that especially having gone through COVID and the horrors around that, the way to deal with that is to have different kinds of skills, different kinds of people with different kinds of skills. But you also need some people who can look across multiple domains at the same time. So I think it's not a surprise, for example, that one of the most useful people in COVID was someone who done a physics PhD, was now working in AI, but had also built a business and had worked with that business in Whitehall. So they could see, they could understand a lot of the actual, they could understand some of the difficult science around COVID.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Politics is the hardest thing, right? It's the most complicated. There's a reason why it's just constant failures, much harder than the hardest startup. The people who can do well at it, at the top level, you need to be able to look at lots of different things and have some kind of sense for them. If you're just looking at it from a narrow perspective, so generally speaking, the people who are doing it have done history degrees or Pauli's philosophy economics degrees or Oxford type stuff and then they've got into the world of politics and government and it's just an incredibly narrow way of looking at the world. There's huge skills that you don't have, intellectual skills you don't have. Practical skills you don't have. You don't understand how things actually get done. You don't understand how regulation actually has”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's being able to point to real change in their areas and say, look at what's happened. Now, do you want to go back? Do you want the people who don't like this to take over? You see what I mean? I think the idea of coming up with some kind of agenda on it and then trying to persuade the public about mastery regulation and mass housing is a fool's errand.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because talking about it is extremely hard to do, even if you're very good at communications. So it was completely pointless trying to do it with the current that number 10 and that prime minister and that conservative party. So my approach to it then was just do it, don't talk about it and talk about other things. And so we did actually manage to get various things done then, but without any most people even noticing. I think overall though, if you really try to do at a big scale, the actual answer is that you just do it. You focus public communications largely on other things. When people actually see the effects of it with growth and houses they can afford and businesses starting and growing and thriving local areas and whatnot, then you can point to that, but you're not doing it in a theoretical way. It's not politicians promising things.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think a lot of people look for a magic bullet of communication whereby we come up with the right arguments, come up with some equivalent of take-back control, but for planning, and then we persuade everyone and the public will shift and start cheering house building. I don't think that's realistic. And I don't think that's the answer. In fact, in 2020, we did actually make some changes to the planning laws, but I think it's instructive how we did it. We didn't talk about it at all. I actually basically had a communications blackout on the whole thing.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Zoning laws, a crucial part of it. The whole ecosystem around startups, right? So the applications of the research, that whole ecosystem is a nightmare in all sorts of ways. And it's one of the reasons why constantly great startups here end up selling out early to American companies. All of that needs dealing with. There's just massive regulation of area after area after area which throttles growth. The whole housing market is a complete shit show. I mean, everywhere you look is...”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The answer is not as simple, right? Britain needs to do a whole bunch of things. So some of it is frontier research, but that's only part of it. Part of the reason for that also is not just economic growth, but also security and national independence, et cetera, et cetera. How much of Europe in 20 years' time is actually going to have meaningfully independent capabilities in lots of areas and how much of it's choice will only be, do we buy American or do we buy Chinese? Like if Britain wants to have its own choices, then it's going to have to build things. The science and technology staff is important for us to develop but not just for economic reasons. It's also very, very far from a magic bullet, right? There's a whole bunch of stuff that we have to do that we started work on in 2020.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, and I'm not an expert, but it's striking that the view of contemporaries was lots of the best young people were killed. And that's why now a lot of the senior echelons are not up to the job.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the years afterwards, saw the biggest transfer of property in Britain in basically 500 years since Henry VIII separated as often the Catholic Church, the dissolution of the monasteries, and that huge shift in the 16th century. It was 500 years, and immediately after World War I was a similar kind of epic shift as a consequence of that. The scale of the scale of death. And also, you also see that echoed in those blogs on Allenbrook's diaries through World War II. And it's interesting, he keeps referring back to it as well, when he's constantly bemoaning another military disaster and why the British Army is not working so well. His answer was, well, of course, like a whole generation of great leaders was destroyed.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the most important thing obviously is World War At the end of that, naval dominance gone, huge financial reserves poured into the mud of the trenches in France, in all of Europe. I mean, Europe's never recovered from it, never mind just Britain. So I think that was the single biggest element to it.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I would say there is really one by, there's a three volume one by a guy called Otto Flanz. Done in the 80s, I think. Not very well known, but it's by far the best.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your interpretability program that's running across it doesn't really work. It can't really explain to you. Why it's doing these things And then you think, oh, well, it all looks a bit murky. I'll close it down. And then, yeah, then you find out that actually the structure of the built was super valuable”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in the end, the Kaiser says, you know, I think I can do without you. Of course, the Kaiser was wrong, of course, and everything immediately started going downhill for Germany thereafter. And in some weird ways, also paralleling the AI argument, a lot of the key people around Europe started sort of wistfully saying, well, you know, It was a nightmare to deal with this terrible superhuman AI. But, you know, it wasn't a pirate. It wasn't insane. You could at least negotiate surrender. It wasn't just a berserk pirate. And some of them almost felt nostalgic for its rationality after it had gone.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it defines success fundamentally as expansion of its own power, which also means its own freedom of manoeuvre, and it treats all attempts to align its goals with border goals as enemy action to be destroyed, and it's highly effective at preemptively destroying them. So it deploys people try and send the intelligence services to close it down. It ends up taking over the intelligence services and using them to blackmail its opponents and forcing them into suicide and exile. At every stage, every attempt to create safety features is defeated. And the ultimate thing of just switch it off, switch it off as people start writing letters all across Europe, essentially they're saying switch it off, but they can't switch it off.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was prompted by a study in Bismarck at the same time as having a lot of conversations with people about the whole AI alignment problem and whatnot. And it just occurred to me one day that it's an interesting exercise to consider Bismarck's career through the prism of the AI Alliance So here are all the safety features that we're going to try and create. We can constrain it in this way. We can constrain it in that way. If all else fails, we can try and kill it. Can we switch it off, et cetera, et cetera? But if you look at his career, you basically see the AI alignment problem just actually living. You see something that's much more able than its competitors.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's a bit of paradoxical out though because I'm not sure. So now those guys were all constantly sending letters to each other, right? And a lot of those letters do end up surviving because they just defiled in some paper archive somewhere and then 60 years later there's a war and people get their hands on them. For us though, like how much of key people's WhatsApps between Jared and Trump or me and Boris or all these sorts of things, how much of that digital archive actually Will be saved and accessible, like arguably less than in the old days.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but that might easily be wrong. And what else was actually happening behind the scenes? Also, just like how much is lost to it, right? If you think about, if I think about my own time in doing the referendum or in number 10, like close to 100% of the reality of conversations and motivations and calculations is basically lost. History none of it was really recorded anywhere. I mean, there might be some sketchy WhatsApp conversations here and there. The odd person keeps a diary. Which can be useful for sure, but it was pretty rare, certainly amongst top people. I mean, even if they keep it, I think they destroy it, right?”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, almost everything close to 100% of the things written about me, what I was trying to do, what I thought, what I said, what I wanted to do, what I actually did, like approximately all of it is complete garbage. So it obviously affects how you see everything else. can't have any other effect it was true in the Department of Education it was true in the referendum itself it was true in number 10 so it definitely makes me much more skeptical about all kinds of details, I think like when you whenever you read history you it definitely makes me think all the time”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, they'd be crushed by the sisterite. You can imagine in China some Machiavellian character coming through the CCP. I mean, in some sense you could say has done that to some extent. Machiavellian character comes to exploits the system in a kind of somewhat mafia way, manages to take over, and then Stalin style starts purging people and manipulating the whole thing so that they acquire more and more power. The good thing about the British American system is that it's proved quite resistant to that sort of thing. That hits upon a fundamental paradox, right? That our systems have been good at preventing the kind of catastrophe of Stalin type person taking over. But the very characteristics that make it very hard for a Stalin to take over Also, make it electronically incompetent as well.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can imagine someone like that emerging in, I mean, actually, I can imagine someone like that emerging in China or Russia. Actually, it's much harder to imagine someone like that emerging in Britain or America or the Western world.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's more crazy and insane. Everything is crazier and more insane in Russia. But I think it definitely helped me deal with, you know, you always learn a lot, I think, from total failures and having to confront the fact that you just totally misunderstood what on earth you were getting into. And I completely misunderstood what I was getting into there at every level. So I think it was very useful for me actually when I came back to when I came back to Britain and then got involved with politics. I was much more careful about trying not to fool myself and trying to figure out what's real and not necessarily not and question my own assumptions about things.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The people obviously want to make the airline work, right? Like, that's the whole point of having an airline it's a successful airline. Wrong. Actually, what most the Russians wanted to do was steal from the airline and move the money offshore. And I never realized that. And a lot of the people involved with it didn't realize that. So it's very easy for Westerners. Russia was full of Harvard NBA types flying in from JFK and arriving in Russia thinking that it was some kind of vaguely normal country. And they, like me, learned the hard way that it is not.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of things doing it. I learned that Russia is a mafia state. I learnt that London is treated, was treated. Something which people here have not wanted to face because there was a lot of money to be made out of the whole enterprise. Even in 2021, when I said that this is crazy that we're still doing this, there was a lot of pushback, literally months before Ukraine war started. It was completely normal in London to defend the way in which we've handled the whole thing for the last 20 years. I also learned about incentives a lot. So everything I had to do with the airline was a total fiasco. And one of the things I figured I learned was I, like many naive Westerners, Got involved with it thinking.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to kill myself or something. It's like, okay, well, I mean, okay, maybe you decide that day to do what you want, but you're also thinking she's mad and this is not sustainable.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there it was credible for America, like they're the argument for America was, we are defending the Western world. We have NATO. There is a NATO agreement on mutual self-defense. And if you breach that and you attack one of us, then it means war against everyone. That was a lot, lot, lot more credible than there's a little island off the Chinese coast of absolutely. It's nothing to do with us historically at all. It's full of Chinese people, but we're going to threaten potential nuclear war over it. It's totally non-credible. And doing it makes you sound mad.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, it's just not credible, right? Like, do you think Chinese is sitting there thinking, okay, we know that Taiwan is completely existential for us And America also thinks it's existential for them. No, of course not. Of course, that's not what they're thinking because it isn't. So, you can't just go around threatening nuclear war over something where it's not actually a credible threat, where people think either it's complete bullshit or they are actually insane.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Britain gave strategic ambiguity a great run out in summer 1914. How did that work out? So, you want to repeat that with nuclear weapons? Where the crisis can kill like a thousand times more people, and happen a hundred times faster than happened somewhere in 1914.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What your parallel is that so we threatened the Soviets to say you shouldn't invade Germany and France and Britain. A parallel to say that Taiwan shouldn't be part of China. That's a really bad analogy”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, not a completely insane idea. It's an island that you can see from the Chinese coast. It's full of Chinese people. People in the army are cousins of the people in the opposite army. For decades, we found one China policy accepted by Democrats, Republicans across the Western world, it's going to be unified, but it should be done peacefully, not violently. That was the right approach. It's completely crazy for us to be ditching that approach and to be willfully antagonizing China over a place filled with Chinese.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there are lots of different kinds, right? It depends very much on what you're doing. I mean, some of the people we brought in were very technical, for example, something you're interested in in the whole AI world. There were some very, very technical AI people. It massively depends on the particular roles. I mean, there's another set of talent which is rare inside government, which is just a kind of like entrepreneurial project management type-y actually getting things done. Character, no surprise that we ended up in a crisis having to use British special forces for a lot of those kind of things because they're pretty much the only one of the few elements of the British state that are still extremely able and has that kind of operational, punchy, can get things done fast vibe. So it's just highly dependent.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I actually have more conversations with people outside politics about that than I do inside politics. Seems very weird, right? But the people inside the system are so completely just accept the existing system that they don't even really talk about that. So is a new party going to spend a huge amount of time discussing the intricacies of HR for how some kind of new solar service should work, how to create red teams inside Whitehall, how to create a startup for a drone army to replace parts of the MOD? No, because most people are not interested in all of that. But neither are the insiders, right? Neither of the people current, like the thousand most powerful people in the country now also don't think about that.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some extent that's always what politics is, right Because, as I said before, you could only ever talk about a relatively small fraction of all the things that you think are important. Also bear in mind, right, take civil service reform. Cyclops form isn't even a subject of interest to the insiders who have to live with it all day.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source