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

“40, 20, 45 is still going to be manned. And there are all kinds of classified studies that show that drones are not going to be able to do this, that, and the other. Really, well, let's open up these studies. Let's see what OpenAI and DeepMind make of these called studies. Of course, it'll turn out to be total bullshit. Britain is still going ahead with that, though, right? Our current plan is to build another fighter in the same way, optionally manned with BAE, completely ludicrous. So there's huge resistance inside the system to making that kind of shift for all of the normal reasons.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but a lot of your drone programs are complete dog shit and the drones fall out of the sky and they don't work and they're massively expensive and they should be closed down. There's a drone now that Britain is trying to deploy in Ukraine called Watchkeeper. In private meetings in 2020 the MOD admitted the whole program was a complete disaster. They keep dropping out of the sky. They're completely shit and the whole project should be closed down. Of course, once we left and the system went back to normal then they didn't close it down. They haven't replaced it. They've just thrown more money at it and lo and behold the things fall out of the sky and fuck up. In 2019-2020 a lot of these arguments were quite theoretical, right? There's some things happening on the fringes, you know, there's the war in Armenia and whatnot where you could kind of see some beginnings of people experimenting with some of these things. Literally 2019-2020 people were saying to me well Dominic our future fighter in 2014”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, generally in Britain, it's completely shocking. Again, 2019, 2020, you know, we had arguments about this with number 10 and the MOD. Essentially, you had a bunch of younger people in the, again, it goes back to this generational thing. There's a lot of younger people inside the MOD and obviously a lot of people in special forces who are looking at the sharp end of this and saying obviously drones are going to completely change how land war operates obviously we should be pushing this and exploring it ourselves obviously we should be thinking about how do you get large numbers of relatively cheap things using a leverage commercial technology and then think about how to add deep state capabilities on top of that et cetera et cetera but you had also a whole set of the senior people thinking as they always do fuck this like this sounds like it's going to cannibalize our budgets well we've already got these drone programs”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the main problem is no one cares about it. I mean, obviously, if you turned MI6 and GCHQ onto a question like, what exactly is China doing with AI? Who are the key people? How can we honey trap them and blackmail them and blah, blah, blah, blah, then obviously you could get an extraordinary amount of interesting information. But A, the politician, the system won't do that by itself. B, the politicians won't tell them to do it because the politicians aren't really interested in it. C, there's incredible kind of risk aversion. So there's huge kind of self censoring in large parts of the system and much less aggression than most people would assume.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just hasn't been focused on you know lots of people, I know lots of people who've been watching the world of AI now since at least like 2014-ish, right, when DeepMind made a big splash or the couple years before that. But even in 2019-2020, I went into number 10, wearing an open AI t-shirt on the first day to try and make a point to people that people should be paying attention to this. In 2019-2020, that was seen as extremely eccentric. Never mind, you know, five years earlier. And you'll say, well, if you were president or prime minister, I'd be aiming these amazing capabilities and say, okay, I assume the GCHQ in the NSA are like, you know, no, who is running the equivalence of open AI in Beijing? Who is running the black projects for Chinese intelligence on training runs? Where is the black project data center?”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very bad. It means that the bureaucracy metastizes and a lot of decisions are made without any real challenge. So that's bad. But going back to the main thing. Capabilities in various ways, badly focused, badly prioritized, but the quality of analysis is much, much worse. So in trying to analyze what people might do, how they'll behave in a negotiation, will they start a war? If they do, those sort of questions, a lot of the work there is poor. And technically, also, I think it's crucial to bear in mind that”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No MPs really know anything about it. But if you looked at the system, people would just be completely appalled. Also, parenthetically, a lot of that kind of stuff is basically being shifted away from politicians over the last 10 years. So it's almost large parts of that system now, nobody really has any visibility on at all. When I dug into these things inside the Cabinet Office, I was essentially the only political person in a long time who'd actually even been discussing it with parts of the system. So the officials themselves said to me, because it's been pulled into the cabinet office away from the Ministry of Defence, away from the foreign office and away from the Home Office, the three parts of the system that legally in the past had a lot of oversight over what was happening. Now a lot of it happens inside the Cabinet Office where there's essentially zero political oversight of any kind to a large extent.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's an interesting example. So I say you have to draw a huge contrast between two things, capabilities and analysis, right? There are some extraordinary capabilities that Deep State has in the Western world. If you want to dig into people's phones, if you want to acquire secret information in various ways, then there are some extraordinary capabilities which people have. and can be aimed. However, in Britain they are generally aimed not nearly as aggressively as they ought to be. The process for prioritisation of things is extraordinarily awful. Again, another thing that if you actually wrote it out,”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You imagine having a sci fi novel, and you said, What are a whole set of data systems that you really would not want the British state or the American state to be transferring data about? And then imagine that it turned out that these things are controlled by, owned by whatever Chinese intelligence, then that gives you a kind of nightmare picture that is the reality. I can't go into specifics of it because the specifics of it are, I think, illegal to discuss. But if you just wrote a story and imagine what are some of the most obvious ways in which, I mean, in fact, you probably wouldn't write such a story because you think, well, that's completely implausible. There's no way that that would happen. There's no way that they would transfer data between A and B about”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at just the public record on nuclear staff, then I think the only reasonable conclusion is that we've got extraordinarily lucky through the Cold War. You know, whether it's the famous hydrogen bomb falling out of the plane and all of the safety devices apart from one, I mean, you know, America nearly Nuked itself, right? I mean, that was just completely by the grace of God that that didn't go off. We've been very lucky so far, and there's no reason to expect that luck to continue. And if you look at what's happening in Ukraine now, then you can see that large parts of the system are very happy to dance right on the edge of the abyss.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the end of the meeting, I said, So, James, what do you think about this? Of course, these people have no idea who he was. And his answer was, well, pretty much everything that everyone has said is impossible or it will take 10 years I have personally done in the lab. In the last two or three years. So Now, does that mean that the whole system for biosecurity is a disaster? No. Does it mean that everyone involved in it is a nightmare? No, there are obviously brilliant people everywhere. But across all of these things, there are There is a chronic inability to build long term. There is constant bureaucratic incentives not to face reality and face the truth. And that's the case across all of these secret systems.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That cyber, there's nuclear bio. I organized a meeting on biosecurity in summer 2020 as well, particularly given obviously at the time there was COVID and we were thinking, is it a lab leak? Is it not? What's the truth about all of this? So we organized a meeting. We asked various questions. I didn't say that one of the people that I actually took to the meeting was themselves brilliant young scientist who'd been working in the state actually in the Genelia lab on neuroscience and whatnot. All these people inside the system said, Don't worry about this, Dominic. This will never happen. This is impossible. This is science fiction, or this is like 10 years away, blah, blah, blah. And everything was about trying to reassure me that I shouldn't really worry about this.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is massively distorted by the fact that in reality you have literally tens of billions of pounds that are going to have to be spent on the nuclear weapons infrastructure that are completely don't appear in the official accounts at all. And simultaneously, you have part of that infrastructure which are literally watting, like parts of it that just don't work properly, appalling safety that's been neglected for year after year”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In bunkers without phones talking to officials about the state of the nuclear enterprise, weapons safety infrastructure. And the truth is there as well. I mean, absolutely horrific. And it's horrific because for year after year and administration after administration, they haven't faced hard problems. They've punted off. So you have a combination of things. You have normal catastrophic procurement, which just means it's totally normal for everything to be fucked up. Well, that also applies to the nuclear enterprise. Also, then classify a lot of that so that it's hidden, and that means it's even easier for things to keep going for longer. It also means that the budget problems are hidden. So a lot of what happens in terms of the public discussion about MOD budgets and the national accounts in general”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of some of the, I mean, I've been in meetings where these things have been discussed and the PM and now PM then Chancellor have sat literally with their mouths wide agog at the extraordinary tales that they've been told. And like, what the fuck? Are you kidding me? The number of MPs who know that is probably like a handful at most. And it's almost all completely hidden. Similarly, in the nuclear side, I spent a lot of time in 2020.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the kind of world of intelligence services and special forces and things like that, there are obviously a lot of incredibly able people and incredibly public spirited people, people who make huge sacrifices to believing in what they're doing. But it's also the case that simultaneously a lot of the very worst, most appalling aspects of the bureaucracy happen in that world. And part of it obviously is that they can classify things and use classification to hide extraordinary public disasters. So for example, the situation in terms of China's infiltration of critical infrastructure in Britain, including data systems, is much, much worse than practically all MPs have any comprehension of. But the reality”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lots of ways it's worse. So I saw recently Peter Tiel said something like we know that DVLA is a disaster. Is it DVLA in America or is that here? The people who organize driver's licenses. But we don't see much about how the NSA works. And my assumption, said Peter Thiel, is that in lots of ways the NSA is worse managed than the people doing driver's licenses. There is unfortunately a lot of truth to that. But the position is mixed there in the same way that it's mixed generally. So you can't say it's just all a shit show and the people are all rubbish, obviously.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's impossible to be a good PM if you accept the way that the job currently works, right? It's totally possible because of what we've been talking about, you're just buffeted by media events all day and you don't actually control the government. You can't actually make anything happen. If you accept all the constraints and you accept the way the White Hall works, it's impossible for anybody. It doesn't matter. You could put General Groves into that job. If he did it the way that SUNAC's doing it, General Groves would fail too. You could put in FDR, you could put in Bismarck. The reality is nobody who actually gets a lot of things done historically operates the way that the current Prime Minister is forced to operate by the prevailing system. They are fundamentally incompatible things.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to make the old system work. It's political disintegration. He doesn't control the government, he doesn't even control number 10 in the covenant office. He has no political story. He has no message. He has no grip. And he's just buffeted hither and thither by events in the same way that every PM has been since Thatcher. He had a fundamental choice. I go to try and win Which involves challenging the way that the conventional system works, the conventional power system of Whitehall, and am I going to tell a story to the country which is convincing? Or am I going to do what all the insiders are telling me to do and keep them happy? He chose to do B with the inevitable consequence.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have to have an integrated diagnosis of what the problems are and an integrated plan for what they're going to do to change it. And then actually one team of people. And then you stop Whitehall also picking you off and using the normal divisions.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We wanted to do was eliminate this friction that has lots of weird consequences. So, one of the most stupid things that number 11, the Treasury basically hides huge amounts of financial information from number 10, which is obviously completely insane. Like, how can you have a prime minister making judgments about all sorts of things if his own treasury is hiding data? It's saying makes no sense whatsoever, but it's completely normal in Britain. We said, fuck that, we're going to have one team between number 10 and number 11. The data will all be completely transparent. So exactly what the spreadsheets are in the chances office are instantly, completely accessible and open to the prime minister's office, not something you'd think that ought to be very controversial, right? Highly controversial and unprecedented change literally within like three hours of me leaving treasury went and stopped it straight away. So our thought was if you're actually going to get to grips with growth and productivity and all these things, you have to bring the number 10 and number 11 systems together.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the big structural problems in how the British state has worked that there's a kind of structural conflict between number 10 and number 11. You normally have a prime minister in number 10 that's always wanting to spend money and then you have a number 11 which says we've got to control number 10 but the number 11 has in lots of ways much more power over Whitehall than number 10 does because is it legally signs off the checks not number 10?”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he seemed much more than the normal MP interested in actually doing useful work rather than running around the media and giving interviews and all the normal bullshit that they're all obsessed by. So from our point of view, we had a chancellor then at the time who just couldn't do the job at all, couldn't manage the department, didn't have a self-confidence to grip the officials in the treasury. So it seemed just like an obvious change. And as soon as I didn't understand politics very well, a lot of things he didn't understand. But from our point of view, that didn't really matter because we could do that. We didn't want him to do the politics side of it, of things. We wanted someone in there who also wanted to work with number 10, right? Which is a critical thing.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Sunak, he's obviously much brighter than the normal MP. He'd actually worked in functional private sector organizations before coming into government, unlike most of the MPs. He was extremely hardworking, unlike most MPs and unlike most ministers. He actually dug through the detail and wanted to understand it and could understand it and did understand it.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That destroys so much value. And there's just such incredible low-hanging fruit. But basically all of that was dismantled by Boris in 2021 after we left. Because for the reasons I already said, he came to the conclusion, and most of the party agreed. Remember, in 2020, when it came out that we were working on all of this stuff on growth and taxes and the planning system. Daily Telegraph now today screaming about growth was totally hostile. Most notory MPs totally hostile. Most of the conservative party were not agitating for an aggressive progrowth agenda in 2020. They were actually hostile to it.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now, not really. In terms of number 10, remember, as I said before, how small number 10 is, right? So number 10, which in lots of ways is a good thing. Everything to do with economic policy, growth, et cetera, et cetera, is almost like 99% of everything to do with all of that is elsewhere, mostly in the treasury, which is actually anti-growth in most important ways. Now, in 2020, we started a whole bunch of things to actually make it a core part to shake up the way that the system worked. So we changed how the power relations between number 10 and the treasury, also with the cabinet office, and we actually created task forces to start working on lots of these most critical problems, right? So the science and technology startup ecosystem, procurement, the planning system, which is one of the major things.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a few. I mean, there's a guy called John O'Neans did Brexit negotiations. There was a brilliant young woman called Hannah who kind of coordinated deep state stuff with MI5 and things like that whenever there's a terrorist attack. a plane is going to fly into Parliament and try and kill everyone and it's going to be shot down then like she's the cog in the wheel that actually like organizes the system to get the right calls and blah blah blah blah so you know there's a lot of people like that who are extreme I mean the joke amongst the Vert Leaf team used to be that if you swapped the private secretaries for the cabinet in every single job you would have you would basically improve the caliber of the of the person by like 10x However, lots of those people have now left, right?”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's an oddity in the system And promotes the most HR friendly types. But the PM's office is for art historical reasons slightly odd. So in the PM's office itself, you have roughly a dozen or so traditionally young bright people who are put into that job to do specific things as part of kind of training them for the future. So it's just an oddity of how the system works that you have this one set of people who are formally not senior, right? So these people don't have very senior roles in the hierarchy of the caste system. But they have a lot of kind of unofficial power and authority because they are talking to the PM every day and they're part of the PM's private office. So it's just, it's a weird way in which the system works.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, the Prime Minister Secretary for Economic Affairs has moved from this job to that job, and it's now been replaced by 31-year-old so-and-so. Because those jobs actually are far more important. If you look at Brexit, the Foreign Secretary was almost completely irrelevant to all the Brexit negotiations. The Prime Minister's private secretary are very, very, very able character, much more able than anyone in the current cabinet, totally unknown in the media, name never in the media, far more important. So I said to this editor, why don't you have a page and stop that? And he just, well, everyone would think I'd lost my mind if I did that. And it would antagonize everyone. The MPs would go completely crazy because preserving this fiction that the charade, the Potemkin charade of the MPs trotting up Downey Street and all being filmed going into cabinet, which is taking decisions, right? As long as the Potemkin carries on.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working five meters away from the PM have usually far more power and authority over things than the ministers on TV do, but their names are never in the papers. No one knows who they are. This weird mismatch is never explored. It's never covered. I had a funny conversation the other day. I was talking to one of the editors of one of the biggest newspapers in the country. And I said, In the old days, people used to be a parliament page in newspapers that would report what happens in Poland, right? Because that's the center of political activity, what happens in Parliament is important. I said, why don't you start a page where you actually report on the deep state? And you say,”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Behind the door, the people actually running most of the government regard the cabinet as just kind of bullshit theatre. The meetings are literally scripted. People are given their talking points to read out by the officials. They read them out. They read those out. And the conclusions are all pre-written, right? So the whole thing is a complete kind of Potemkin farce. From the MP's point of view, while we're on TV, we're treated like we're in charge. Now, the fact that the people actually running the Ministry of Defence is not the Secretary of State, the fact that these ministers have fundamentally no power, the fact that in number 10, officials who are like 28 years old”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the permanent civil service are brilliant at manipulating the theater to keep the egos of the MPs satisfied. So the most obvious way to think about, right, is the cabinet. You have the most famous door in the world, number 10. Every week, these characters walk up the streets, the cameras are all there, the cameras were, they click, they shout out questions, the ministers smile at the cameras, and they think we're part of the insider gap. This is the peak thing that everyone aims at.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some ways it's very odd, right? Because you think, what's the point of doing this for 30 years? And then you kind of become a minister, but you're not actually in charge for anything. And you can't actually do anything. And then you're spat out and you're not even going to be, most of you, like not even a footnote in history. What on earth is the point of it? It kind of seems completely crazy to me anyway. I think that misunderstands how they see it for them the theater and appearing on TV is the critical part of it, right? It's not have you actually done anything.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That all just sounds like a lot of hard work and making a lot of enemies, and it doesn't really seem necessary because Labour Party is a joke. And I just want to be friends with London. I want to be friends with insiders. I want to have a nice time. The overwhelming majority of people in politics are the fundamentally prioritize social relations within the insider network. That is just what totally dominates their life day in, day out, year in, year out.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In January 2020, we were already arguing about what the fundamental direction is that we're going to go in. As I said before, my view was we've won, we won, say we're going to do all these things. We now have to actually do all of these things. And in order to do all of these object level things that requires facing these very long, multi-decade long term, some of them over a century, in terms of how the actual constitutional system works, how the civil service works and everything else versus his view, which is”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of it goes back to what I said before that you have two fundamentally different attitudes towards the whole thing. Boris was prepared to be very aggressive and revolutionary in various ways in 2019. fundamentally because he thought it was necessary for him to survive as prime minister. Not for the country, which he didn't care about, doesn't care about, but for himself”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In 1989 and the fall of the towers. That period is what people kind of like psychologically gravitate back to. So in summer 2020, the attitude was our attitude was, right, now the state needs to be fundamentally re-engineered. But most of the system was we're tired, we just want to go back to normal, we want to do what we always do, which is like chat with each other, give interviews to the media, and not change much. And given that Starmer is so obviously rubbish on the other side, we don't actually have to change very much either.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've said for years that a whole bunch of things are wrong and that the next big crisis will reveal it. Well, we've had the next big crisis and it has revealed it. And it's obvious that we're right. Now we've obviously got to make all of these changes. And by the way, in the election six months ago, we also promised we were going to make all of these changes. Boris Carrie and the majority of the Conservative parties' attitude was far more. Keir Starmer's rubbish changing anything big will just be very disruptive and create lots of enemies. Why are all of these people talking about disruption and firing people and rebuilding things? We just want to go back to normal. We hate COVID. We hate, you know, we don't want all these arguments about Brexit. We kind of want to go back to normal. And for them, what normal is, is like the 90s, right? The kind of default mode for how people in politics think about normality is can we go back to that lovely time between the fall of the wall”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It should happen. Now we can argue about the details of it. Clearly, the personnel system needs opening up, the civil service is going to have to have the biggest shakeup that it's had in a century or more fundamental problem was that the PM then thought this is going to annoy so many people that I just can't face it. Also, other dynamics, which I'm not sure how much you want to go into, but the fact that Starmer is just so obviously rubbish also meant that Boris and his wife thought we don't actually have to do very much. So it goes back to this question, are you actually trying to change a lot or not? Response to summer 202”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the most entrepreneurial elements of the deep state because they'd all seen this system completely implode. So the closer you were to number 10 and the closer you were to actual power, the more you actually appreciated the full horror story of how the apex of the British state completely imploded. And so a lot of them, particularly the younger ones, said, well, now it's the time you've had a one century pandemic. It's the biggest crisis Britain has faced since Hitler in 1945. And you've got Brexit done and you've got the Vote Leave team in number 10 who've said before they arrived here they're going to change civil service, okay, well now obviously this is all going to happen.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To dismantle all democratic changes. So that was the reaction of large parts of the old system to saying half a dozen duffers are going to be removed and we're going to start promoting some younger, more dynamic people. And that's part of an overall shift that needs to happen. Clearly a whole bunch of different parts of the system have failed. agencies need to be shut. new things need to be created So it is possible to do, but the tail of that also shows the problems. The reaction from the old system and the media is very severe. Nobody supported us at all, including all the conservatives. Ironically, the people who are most in favor of it was actually the deep state itself.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“British system, only the PM can do that And we actually started to do that in summer 2020, right? So after the first wave of COVID, when the PM nearly dies in March, April. For about eight weeks or so he was highly aggressive in saying this whole fucking disastrous system has got to change. It's nearly killed me. It's killed tens of thousands of other people. We've got to blow the whole thing up and rebuild it. So in summer, we actually got rid of, I can't remember exactly, but say half a dozen roughly of the senior permanent secretaries in charge of a lot of these departments. And it was described by the insiders as quote a rolling coup, unquote fascism, the votely fascist entity is now essentially mounting a coup. Orban style.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leave and the most like HR compliant disastrous people to be in charge of supposedly fast moving agencies are the ones who are promoted to take over. And then that culture itself becomes highly self-reinforcing, right? Once you get a whole cadre of leadership at the top that's like that. Well, it's extremely difficult to break out of. And it's not like, okay, well, IBM's gone wrong, but then you have a whole ecosystem of competition for IBM. So, okay, IBM dies, but the American economy evolves and continues. In government systems, that obviously can't happen. So you have like... IBM is dead, but it's still actually in charge of everything”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What happens is the young, excellent people get weeded out by self-selection, largely because they go in idealistic, they're there for a few years, but then they look at what the process is to be promoted and they look at their bosses. And the best of them look at it and go, I don't want to be like that. I don't want to have to make those decisions. I don't want to have to make those compromises. I don't want the job like that where it's almost all bullshit. We can't actually build anything. So the most entrepreneurial, the kind of people who actually want to get on and do stuff now.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine sorry to interrupt, but imagine as well what the promotion system is like that, right? And who ends up getting to the top of these systems? A lot of people say, oh, you're so negative about the civil service. You're all saying that everyone there is rubbish, it's not fed. That's not my view. In fact, if you look at the civil service, you actually see a lot of very able people, but most of them are young.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not actually meritocratic. It's a system that promotes practically 100% internally and is therefore by definition closed to approximately 100% of the world's most talented people. Now that's defended on constitutional grounds now as to, well, this is the only civilized, sensible way in which a state can operate. But of course, it's totally self-serving. And as we saw with COVID, it actually just means massive bureaucracy, very poor people in all kinds of critical positions, and a state that's actually paralyzed when it comes to the crunch.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so in Britain, it started in the 1850s when people said Well, the old aristocratic system based on patronage is irrational. We've got a shift and we've got a shift towards a much more meritocratic system. We should have officials that are appointed on merit. You essentially had a transition from Pre 1850s aristocratic system based on patronage where all kinds of dodgy corruption in various ways and favors done in various ways, but it also moved much faster and in all sorts of ways much more efficiently, particularly in a crisis. And you shifted towards what you say is like a modern system where you have permanent civil service, supposedly meritocratic. However, over time, you see that this supposedly meritocratized system ends up actually just being a closed.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's how extreme things have to be in order to actually. It was only by doing that a second time and making clear that I would get the PM to actually just start firing senior people in the capital office. It's only then that the system will kind of part and go, okay, this element is allowed to. But you imagine as soon as that countervailing force is removed, all the normal C floods back.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We could have a second wave. There's going to be thousands more people getting COVID. There's NHS, people dying, etc. We can't have any of the normal civil service HR. We can't have any of the normal civil service bullshit on procurement. Exactly the same as with the vaccine task force. All of this must do. Everyone sits around the cabinet table. They all nod their heads. Reclaim later I call this guy former SAS boss and say, so how's it going? You're getting who you want and everything working great? No. All the same should show. So I have to get all the people back in the same room with the country's most senior official and say, who the fuck have we got a fire around here? Make clear that these people doing testing don't have to do all of your bullshit HR.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we first created this pushing for number 10, I got the critical people from procurement, commercial, HR, et cetera, into the cabinet room with the Cabinet Secretary, the single most important official in the whole country. And the two of us said, the PM wants rapid testing dealt with as if this is a wartime crisis.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source