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

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“Any kind of mass communication always involves like huge simplification and huge focus, right? It's just there's an unavoidable aspect of things. So forget me in Brexit, anybody doing politics, there's always the same Bezos running Amazon. Yeah, it's customer obsessed, but there's also a whole bunch of stuff that he's not talking to the customers about. So I think that's just intrinsic to politics. The vast majority of what you're thinking about, what you're talking about, are not going to be the focus of public communications.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, obviously, all the AI stuff means that there's huge opportunities there, but I would stress, Colonel Boyd, people, ideas, machines in that order. Why was it that we built tools to help win election that no one else built? The primary question is that we really wanted to win and we really were focused on the voters. And that's why we actually built tools. The old parties aren't focused on the voters and aren't really interested in what they've got to say. Therefore, that's just not what they are thinking about every day. So I don't think the most important question is the technical side. I think it's, can you create something with very able people that really, really wants to obsess Jeff Bezos-like obsession on the customer that we wonder? Focus on the voter. If you can build that cult”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having the majority, you know, like we kind of maneuver the system into such a place that we could actually then transform one of the old parties into the new thing that we wanted to build. That's very hard, but it's easier than creating something new. And then taking over in a first past-the-post system, right?”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure if I would vote for it. Why not? Well, because my vote might be wasted and it might let the crazy people from the other side in. Right, so even if you imagine this wonderful new entity run by the best and brightest in America with an agenda you actually agree with, even then you might not vote for it because you fear that it might let the, you see, so there's a fundamental structural problem with the first past-the-post system. I'm in favor of first-past the post system. I'm not suggesting getting rid of it, but it does make it structurally very hard to replace one of the old entities. I mean, it's why the whole Brexit thing was such an incredible missed opportunity, because we could leverage off winning the referendum the chaos that that created, the collapse of both the old parties in 2019, one of the parties coming to us begging for us to save them, us going into number 10.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in the first past-the-post system, right? It's extremely hard. I mean, so when I did some research in America, I asked about the third party thing. And you see this problem come straight through in focus groups. People say straight away, I hate both the old parties. They're both obviously rotten. They both obviously can't do a good job. We obviously need something new. America's got so many wonderful people. Why the fuck have we got all of these ancient old, useless people in charge of absolutely everything? It's all a nightmare. All right, okay, so imagine the following party comes along and it's got the following people and it says the following things, what do you think? And people go, oh my God, that would be so great.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the whole idea of a new party and the whole idea of doing politics differently, everything fundamentally rests on whether or not you can get able people to step forward and do it. And history suggests that's phenomenally hard, that normally that only happens after the crisis comes.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are things in education that I'm interested in doing in terms of building things outside the government system that don't rely on the government. I'm thinking about the idea of creating a new political party. Someone I think is going to do it at some point. My thought has been that the normal path of history is collapse and then people create something new out of that. It's extremely hard to avert crises. But if we're going to, then there needs to be some new political force here. There needs to be a new political force in America that can replace existing elites. The fact that they're all getting so old and that they're so visibly failing gives some hope that it could happen. But it comes back to this catch-2 problem. The worse the system gets, the harder it's becoming to get able people to get involved with politics not easier.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe you see from the news, there's all sorts of things that could be, I mean, the people in charge could easily create a nuclear war in the next 12 months, right? The behavior almost only makes sense if they actually wanted to do that. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. My overall assumption is failure, the Western world will go the same way that everyone else goes in history, in failure, collapse and bloodshed. That's probably what will happen. But still you've got to try.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, what happened in 2020 is another sign. Once the system started to close back in quarter three, those people went back to their old jobs. If you're sitting in some very successful thing, making a lot of money in your wall garden with your fish ponds, you'll drop it if you can actually have real impact. But if you can't have real impact, then you're not there to just send stupid emails for trying to get authorizations for two years. And that's the fundamental thing”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very able people are extremely interested in politics and extremely interested in government. I don't think the problem is like trying to make them interested in it. The fundamental problem is that they don't want to get involved because rightly they say, I'll just be in endless stupid meetings. I can't actually do anything. A lot of them, if you said, would you like to run MI6 would think that would be a great job, right? Running MI6 would be a great job and more interesting even than my own, extremely interesting job in Silicon Valley. But would I actually be running MI6 or would I just be sitting in a whole load of student meetings? And similarly for whether it's health reform or anything else, could you get some of these very able people to do it? Yes.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It obviously depends on department by department, right? Different units. If you're looking at, say, I mean, across government. The place where you could be and should be most aggressive in everything to do with communications. Everyone has massive communications teams. Everything is worse as a consequence. A lot of those should be culled by like 95 to 99%. So, I mean, I actually did this in the Department of Education. When we went into the Department of Education, the communications team was over 250. When we left, it was less than 50. Everything had improved. And if it were to be less than 10, it would have improved again”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what you wouldn't do and what's doomed with that, as soon as with the Pentagon, is going into those buildings and saying, right, let's sit down and talk about a reform program for your procurement system. It's never going to happen and it's never going to happen. What you have to do is you have to set up a parallel thing that says, here's the new procurement system that's going to deal with the following things. And then you have to close the existing procurement system and get rid of 95 to 99% of the people involved with it. It's the only thing that has any even has any chance of success.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're going back to your Singapore example, so far it's been successful in preserving that culture, right? It's like, here's what our real goals are and the different elements of the government system have to change to meet those goals. And they're constantly adapting. And we try and face our failures honestly like they report on what they got wrong on COVID, unlike Britain already published actually accepting the errors and trying to fix them already happened. Britain were just paying lawyers hundreds of millions of quid to spend years arguing about it. The only way that you could even imagine something happening long term is if you not just replace the existing elements with nuance, but you also create institutional mechanisms whereby the elites and the public accept these things need”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, by definition, I think all bureaucracies end up operating for themselves, right? So you should assume that if you just, so if you do a kind of like a standard approach to this and you say, we don't like the existing bureaucracies, we're going to take over, we're going to scrap them and replace them, then obviously within not very long, those things are going to operate pretty similarly to what the old things did. The only way I think that there's any chance of like long-term changes, you have to build into the system. Institutions and public acceptance and elite acceptance of a kind of constant reinvention and rejuvenation and closing and refounding of things. It's the only conceivable way That over a time period like 100 years, you could imagine”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything depends on particular historical circumstances. I mean, you could do it with a relatively small number of people. You could do it with like, if you had the right PM, you could do it with, you know, you could start off with 10 people. But it has to be people that have a common set of what their goals are and who are very able and who are then able to build a network beyond that, right? It can never be no kind of coup or no kind of regime change ever happens if the small group of people at the start stay small. By definition, you have to convert people forcibly or through persuasion or whatever.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of that can only change if a centre say, no, here's how we define the problem and solving this is actually what we're here for, not staying friends with the old elites. And that's why this thing very rarely happens, right? It's why it normally historically only happens after a disaster.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can't be just one person. There needs to be some subset of the elite or a new or part of the elite currently not really involved with politics that decides to get involved with politics that actually decides that it's fundamental goal is to solve a set of problems. Its fundamental goal is not maneuvering the social hierarchy of existing political and media elites. That's the fundamental question. At the moment, approximately everybody in the system is optimizing for their position in the social hierarchy of insiders. That means that no one wants to face reality. No one wants to tell uncomfortable truths. By definition, you can't fix any of these agencies because that means alienating people immediately.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, such are just objectively very clearly, didn't it? If you look at just the memoirs of people that worked with her closely, the single biggest mistake Thatcher made was that she never actually got to grips with the permanent state, the permanent civil service. She talked about it a bit. She did some kind of sporadic occasional firings and a bit of purging here and there, but it was very half, less than half-hearted, ineffectual, and contributed to her downfall.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Pentagon and the intelligence services. And had all kinds of problems. Dealing with, I mean, obviously, in some ways, LBJ clearly had an unprecedented grip, at least since 1945, over parts of the system, for sure.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably FDR, you'd say. I don't know enough about LBJ to say. I mean, my impression is that for all his amazing skills, he didn't manage to grip”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both repeat and Trump and Biden, all of them repeatedly every day do things that make no sense if your assumption is that they're optimizing for winning the election. Why would Wishisunak say, Judge me on whether or not I stopped the boats. Then, when he's told, your whole plan and your legislation to stop the boats will not work, illegally can't work because of the European Convention on Human Rights, he just ignores it and does it anyway. It makes no sense if you think they're optimizing for winning an election. Donald Trump, if you spent three days doing market research in America, you'd know that Donald Trump's message should be about the economy and what you should be saying is this is what I did on the economy last time. This is what I'll do on the economy next time. The reason why all these legal cases are being brought against me is because people don't want me to do this with the economy. That's what his message should be. Should his message definitely not be arguing about the 2020 election and who won? What does he do? Keeps arguing about Twitter. So these people just constantly do things which are just objectively. All you have to do is most simple market research and you can say they are objectively not doing what is rational. If you assume”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally not, no, it doesn't left for that at all. I mean, the whole history of Britain since 2016 is a perfect example of it, right? We won the campaign. Did the establishment go, oh, how did we lose that? We controlled the question. We had all the money. We controlled all these institutions. We controlled practically everything with power in the country. And then this startup hobbled with all sorts of problems somehow won. Let's investigate. No, of course not. They created a whole conspiracy about Putin, Trump, Facebook, everything else as an excuse not to face the reality. Then in 2019, when we came along, and we just did very, very obvious things, actually focused at voters outside London, they just made all the same mistakes again and blew themselves up again in 2019. Look at the current situation now between SUNAC and Starmer.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We focus on the voters. But remember, everyone thought everything we did at every stage was completely mad and stupid and wouldn't work. When you do things that are actually focused on what voters want, to the old system, you seem insane.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Taken me out of the equation. Sure, answer the general thing. Winning an election in lots of ways is the easy part, right? Because in lots of ways, like the madness of the old system actually makes it easier and easier to win an election. Because the more divorced reality that the old system gets, the simpler it is to win an election just by actually focusing on the voters, which sounds completely crazy, but the old parties can't do that. Why do we win the referendum in 2016? Because we focused on the voters and the remain campaign didn't. Why did we manage to prevail in 2019 when everyone thought what we were doing was completely mad?”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now for them, they all think that they are all sensible and they're all rational and For others of us looking at it, we think that it's like just a wonderful sign of the old system's complete madness and inability to face the most obvious things. What are junior academics and political journalists who can't even cheat their own expenses competently? Why do they think that they're competent to make judgments about Elon and his management of SpaceX, right? It's completely crackers, but they don't think it's crackers. They think it's perfectly reasonable.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Superfill. And the old system now is completely full of people. A perfect way, I think, to understand the old political system in America and Europe is, that across the political world, academia and the media, you can see on Twitter. They're all very happy to give their personal takes on Elon Musk as manager and his startup abilities. And they take each other's take on that more seriously than they take.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do anything about it, then my investors would go mad, my employees would go mad, my family would think I'd lost my mind. I have demonstrators outside the house. Who the fuck needs that? The code system is working as intended. It's closed. Old parties and the old media are driving themselves and everyone more and more mad. But the people who could change it are very highly distance-in-centivized from getting involved. Look at what's happened to Elon, right? Elon literally generally regarded by the old system as a hero, even only what, two or three years ago. As soon as he says, shouldn't we take the first amendment seriously? And by the way, this Ukrainian war seems insane.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Silicon Valley builders, you should try, but that leads to a basic paradox, which is that the more and more mad, the old system of politics and the old media get. Stronger are the cultural financial, personal disincentives to competent people getting involved. In fact, the opposite is happening, right? The madder the system gets, the more the competent people retreat their fish ponds. They build wall gardens and they cultivate their fish ponds, they try and build their own companies where they can do things of value. They spend their time on research. They build hedge funds. They do things which you're trying to insulate themselves and other people that they care about from the chaos. And as a lot of them said to me personally, if I try to”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What extent is things just going to play out the way that they normally do historically, i.e. slow rot elite blindness, sudden crisis, collapse, bloodshed, chaos? That's normal. That's baseline expectation for our own current situation. What extent can One tried to preempt that the only way really to try and preempt it is that you have to change the nature of the elites and the obvious elite in America to look at is the elite who are most competent at building things. So the question, so my point was, if you leave the old system in Washington, New York to itself, then it's going to produce trumpy, Biden too, probably. Obviously, people can have heart attacks or whatever, but left to its own devices, that's where the system is heading towards. The obvious set of people that could put the country on a different track”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he was right. But it's extremely hard to turn those things around, right? There's no reliable way to do it. How do you turn rounded elite culture? What tends to happen is it implodes slowly, then hits a crisis, is blown up, and then something new comes along amid bloodshed and disaster. How often do you see a kind of deliberate, non-violent, non-crisis-led internal rejuvenation?”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's why history is what it is. The Roman Republic lasted for a few centuries much longer than America's lasted so far. And many times longer than democracy in Western Europe so far has been operating. But everything has its time of growth and decay. And it depends on the culture of the elites. It depends on the ideas that they believe in. It depends on to what extent are they public-spirited. When I was over in Silicon Valley, I quoted to some of the guys there a famous letter that Cicero wrote where he said everything basically is going to the dogs because the leading people in the republic are spending all their time in their wonderful houses tending to their fish ponds. And if this carries on, then the republic is clearly doomed.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fly, therefore, it all becomes about generation by generation. Is that moral leadership? Does that moral leadership maintain or does it dissolve? Because it's very easy for that sort of thing to go, right? Okay, his son's in charge now and his son seems to be. I mean, I have studied it very much, but seems to be preserving the fundamental culture, the people running the different agencies. Their job is to actually run the agencies properly, right? It doesn't seem to be corrupted. But it's very easy for that to change, right? Say he gets shot tomorrow or dies or has a heart attack tomorrow and someone else takes over very quickly the signals could go out. Actually, your job is not to do pandemic preparation properly. Your job is, like, here's how people would be promoted from now on. You'd always expect that as the default, right? Because that's just what entropy does.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the most important thing he's created is a certain kind of culture amongst the leadership in Singapore. A genuinely meritocratic culture, a culture where people are actually trying to solve the problems. Extremely not like Washington or London now. And where there's a kind of moral reinforcement for that culture, which I think is without that, everything else doesn't.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're two very extremely different examples. With Bismarck, you have a system where there's universal male suffrage, but a kind of gerrymandered constitution written by him personally on a little Baltic island designed essentially to make him the kind of fulcrum of all of the power, but in a sort of, in lots of ways, hidden way. You certainly wouldn't call it a democracy in anything like the Cohen situation. And all the deep state stuff, to use the modern terminology, the army, the intelligence service and everything were obviously completely excluded from that whole power structure and completely in the grip of the Prussian king. Lee Kuan Yu has created a system”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It'll I mean, look at what happened in Athens. Tried, and it only really worked as long as you had so. I'm not saying this is necessarily what I believe, but I'm saying a reasonable perspective. And endless demands on the treasury, the people voting handouts for themselves collapses, the cycle repeats. Similar sorts of arguments about the Roman Republic, right? So, I think they wouldn't be surprised at the collapse post war, post 1918 in Western Europe.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The old school aristocrats would assume that if you go down the path of democracy, then you will pretty rapidly end up with the Gestapo and the NKVD. And that is in fact what happened.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at the first half of the 20th century and say, yes, things proceeded pretty much as we said they would. You allowed Christianity to collapse, you allowed the socialists and the democrats to win. And unsurprisingly, you had the torture chambers of the Gestapo, NSS, and the NKVD. That's, yeah.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who had watched the French Revolution, who had watched the guillotine and the terror and bloodshed. And they said, we've got to try and stop this. And they were actually conservative, and they really meant it, and they were really trying to turn the clock back. After 1848, those people are kind of like either fled, retired, feel themselves doomed. And the old kind of aristocrats who call themselves conservatives basically thought, well, how do we use democracy or universal male suffrage anyway to try and smash the liberals up? who are their real enemy at the time, right? How do we use, which is what Bismarck and Napoleon III, III? Both try to do. But if you went back and looked at those people, also brought those people back to life and got them looking at our current situation. I think they'd say,”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You looked at what's happened in the West over the last few decades and you brought back some of the people from classical Athens, it would seem quite familiar to them in certain ways, right? They would say, right, so also some of the Roman aristocrats, they'd say, right, so democracy is having its predictable effects. You have demagogues in charge. You have a constant demand for more handouts, which is gradually bankrupting. the country you have moral and spiritual decay. You have a kind of collapse of internal cohesion pretty much what. Much of what we'd expect historically. If you brought back the people from, you know, if you look back at the big inflection point, I think it's like mid-19th century ran by 1848. Before 1848, you have a bunch of conservatives like Metn”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most of Europe since 1945, there's been a particular regime post-1945 of a kind of pseudo-American empire which has entrenched a certain kind of democracy in various countries. But that's very, very small change in the sweep of history, right? It's like saying in the year 100 BC, you know, asking questions about or say, is they 250 BC about the Roman Republic, right? Well, the Roman Republic has lasted for a century or so so far. You certainly can't say now democracy has proved to work. I would say One thing you see in history is regimes are constantly changing, and it's not everyone thinks in their own time that we're locking a change. Like what we've got is going to persist. It's always wrong, right? The most things persist is like a few generations, and then there's always chaos, and then there's always a change.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ideas matter most of all, but almost none of that really comes from government, right? Comes almost by definition from people who are at the time fringe.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They didn't understand at the time, but which clearly affected the next war, the next revolution's collapse of various kinds. Does the euro collapse? Is there a revival of fascism and communism in various forms in Europe? Is there a war between America and China over Taiwan or something? Those would be the big things. And if those don't happen, then we'll be largely forgotten in the same way that like, how much do people pay attention to the government in Britain in 1890 to 1895 now?”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You run that experiment on ourselves and you look back, what is it that we care most about now? You care about people who come up with new ideas, which is not something the governments do. People are saying what Nietzsche said, but the details of what the British government did in the 1870s and 1880s is almost totally forgotten and not really relevant. The thing I think which people obviously pay most attention to is what contributes to war and what contributes to revolution slash collapse slash regime changes Of various clients. And if you think about what decisions we make, if there's anyone still around in 100 years to look at it, the big things that people will look at are things related to that. What were the big things they did?”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mean, you'd have to be sun sued to figure out that from Trump's point of view, this is like an absolute dream scenario. And if America gets into insane enough to get into a war over Taiwan, then obviously a lot of this would be exposed. And there's a book by a guy who now works at Anjoul called The Kill Chain. And the truth is a lot of classified Pentagon stuff has said this, right? A lot of people involved in the system know that if America has a war with Taiwan, then it's going to be catastrophic for America. I mean, leaving aside the obvious risks of escalation to nuclear conflict, I just leave it aside just on a conventional basis, it's going to be a catastrophe for America.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, chickens are going to be coming home to roost on that now. That's going to get worse. From China's point of view, it's the most perfect situation imaginable because... They can charge Russia inflated prices to sell them a bunch of stuff, to blow up all of our shit, turning Ukraine into rubble.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My assumption is that there'll just be repeats of the COVID experience and lots of them worse. I mean, I assume that there'll be, you know, if you look at it roughly every decade or so, there's some kind of financial crisis. Would you and other financial crisis could easily be worse than the last one wouldn't surprise me that if in the next two years there's a worse than 2008 crash, perfectly plausible. Lots of hedge fund people I talk to kind of planning on that basis and think that something like that is quite likely. We're going to face the music shortly in Russia, right? Because the Ukrainian offensive is not going to be the great success that we've all been told. Remember last Christmas, right, nine months ago, the British and American media were full of Russia's about to run out of ammunition. The Ukrainians get all”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have left a completely rotten dysfunctional procurement and manufacturing system for defense continue. The same set of people in charge of the decisions and the MOD and the Pentagon, same set of bullshit pushed out about the advantages of aircraft carriers and blah, blah, blah. The whole thing makes absolutely no sense at all.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then we're going to simultaneously ramp up, we're going to ditch one China policy and aggressively ratchet up diplomacy against China on Taiwan and push the world's biggest manufacturer into a closer relationship with Russia whilst fighting a war of attrition against Russia. And then we are not going to actually have a defense industrial plan and a procurement change ourselves in Europe, but obviously that like even for you, Dominic, that will be just too ludicrous a scenario to happen. Nobody in there's right minds would actually get themselves into that situation, right? But that's literally what we've done. We've pushed the world's biggest manufacturer into alliance with Russia. We've escalated a war of attrition.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there is growing realization behind the scenes of what the reality is. Situation in Ukraine should make us even more pessimistic in various ways, right? If you'd said in advance, okay, Putin's going to invade Ukraine. Are going to do simultaneously. Encourage Ukraine to fight, arm Ukraine, push Ukraine into a war of attrition”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In war games, the British aircraft carriers flee immediately to the edge of the war game. In order that they don't get sunk immediately, if they're dealing with any kind of serious peer opponent, the aircraft carriers obviously a joke. I said that like 15 years ago, I think the first time 10 years ago, five years ago. And a lot of meetings about it in number 10, nothing persuaded me of anything other than the whole thing was massive waste of money. And that's just becoming more and more obvious, right? I mean, all over the West now, people are starting to face the music that a lot of these things that they've invested billions in. I just totally vulnerable to asymmetric technology and asymmetric costs where very cheap systems are going to be able to destroy platform worth multiple billions. A lot of senior people who've talked a lot of shit about it obviously can't admit any of these things publicly.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source