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

“We're not having that. In fact, I want to strengthen the vaccine task force. We want to move on to the next generation of vaccines, et cetera, et cetera. If they don't do that, and if the people in charge of it can't call on the PM's authority, very, very quickly, the system will just devour the new entity and force it to conform with all of the normal system. I'll give you another example of this on rapid testing, right? So one of the things that we did to get the rapid testing to work was we got a guy who formally was commanding officer of the SAS, British Special Forces. And this guy got a bunch of his friends from Special Forces also to work on rapid testing.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should change because it's going back to normal. They have to do the following things properly and possibly we gave them special dispensations because of the extraordinary circumstances of summer 2020, but these now come to an end. So those sort of things come in. The Treasury says, well, the spending rules and how the people in the vaccine task force make decisions, well, that was an emergency thing. So now the normal rules are imposed. So before you know it, all the different parts of the system have basically said The thing that you created outside of the normal system now has to obey all of the things that it was specifically created to avoid. Now the system will just do that automatically unless there is a very powerful counterforce fundamentally only again only the PM can say no.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why did we create the vaccine task force the way we did? Well, because we were trying to actually embody principles like responsibility and authority pulled together. brought one person in. We said you are responsible. But once we'd gone, then what happens to that entity? It's sitting there amid Whitehall, right? And all the normal parts of Whitehall just start going back to being normal. So what happens? They say, well. They are exempt from all of these rules on HR that the Cabinet Office imposes on every part of government.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Manhattan Project is much in the news with the Oppenheimer movie. If you look at the very last bit of General Gross's book on Manhattan Project 8, he talks about what are the most fundamental principles about why it succeeded. And one of those principles is also relevant to government. One of them is the quality of the people is fundamental. Another one is that responsibility and authority are always delegated together. Now, the entire British constitutional system and management structure is based on the fundamentally opposite principle, responsibility and authority are not delegated together. So if you're asking about something like the vaccine task force, in the normal system nobody really is in charge of anything. Lots of people can criticize, lots of people can complain, lots of people can argue about things. Lots of people can veto. Almost nobody ever has the authority just to build something or just to do something.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was even more powerful than that there were a whole load of legal actions brought to say that the real problem with 2020 was we went too fast and we did things too quickly. People actually brought legal actions against the vaccine task force, they brought legal actions against rapid testing, they brought legal actions against all sorts. And the system didn't say this is completely insane. Actually, the bureaucracy and the sloth killed thousands of voters. It said yes, we're going to investigate all of this and this is every signal propagated through the system was essentially back to normal. You will be promoted for obeying the most insane process. And you will be demoted and blacklisted if you say this process is insane and we'll try and do better.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically closed and forgot to order enough tests the following year. So if you look back in 2020, most of the people who were most wrong were given awards and honors by the system and promoted to new jobs. The people who were most obviously right repeatedly of almost all left. What incentive is there for people to speak out about How these things work. No one expects anything to change. Think rationally, right? Because even after something as big as COVID, when you see what the reaction is, everyone could now see the truth. Well, you can have a one-century pandemic. It can kill tens of thousands of people unnecessarily. It can be a complete carnage for the economy. Everyone will just go back to basically go back to normal and MPs will ignore it and nothing much will change. So if you're a standard official inside”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one in any normal functioning environment would spend two and a half years emailing each other to do a project taking eight weeks. But for everyone inside the system, this is completely standard. Have to realize that, and a lot of the people who are most senior in the system have been in anything like that for 30, 40 years. They don't know anything different. And it just seems completely normal to them that this is what would happen. And in fact, in 2020, for example, when we did some things very differently, it was extremely disruptive and extremely unwelcome to large particles. Hence why a lot of what we did was closed down. Did they say, okay, the vaccine task force here in Operation War speed and the states have been great successes, we should massively reinforce them. We should build the next generation of vaccines. We should spread the lessons of how the task force operated. No, they basically closed the task force. Sewage monitoring closed. Rapid testing.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a mix, right? There's a lot of people inside the system who don't actually think of it as being dysfunctional, who just think that's their life. It's completely normal for them. So, you know Arrive at number 10, I've taken a bunch of people who are actually experts in data science, AI, and blah, blah. We talk to a bunch of officials about projects around data. Officials say, Oh, yeah, well, here's some examples of some interesting projects we've done. You ask them about it. Turns out that they took two and a half years. Why did it take two and a half years? Well, the actual project took eight to 12 weeks. The rest of the two and a half years was the system emailing each other about legal permissions. What to do Now from the people that I brought in from outside, this is obviously insane.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How much faster you can do things if the PM's authority is used and you're prepared to drive things through the system and the PM is prepared to say I will deal with legal issues later It also showed that even in a crisis where literally thousands of people are dying day after day after day, that large part of the bureaucracy will still simply say, no, we are optimizing force sticking to the old rules. And that also happened an awful lot.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are the simplest things take last month to a large extent because of the scale of the crisis that happened but still the vaccine task force was still plagued by lots of parts of Whitehall saying well we don't want you to do this we don't like this so the reality is it depends on the characters involved it depends on how much the person the PM empowered will actually push. It depends on the extent to which they come to the PM it depends on the extent to which the PM then shows everyone in the system I'm actually supporting them and ultimately fundamentally is prepared to say people will just be removed from their post if they don't if they don't do don't do what they're told COVID”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we essentially appointed someone and the Prime Minister said, ignore all the EU procurement rules, ignore all UK procurement rules, ignore everything. Just build the vaccine task force the way that you want to. We're freeing you from all the normal white wall HR, all the normal things which add massive friction and mean that nobody can do anything quickly.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To some extent, so the system here in lots of ways is the Prime Minister has more powers than the President does and is less legally constrained than the President is because in all kinds of gaps in lacunae in the system, there are kind of ancient assumptions that the PM is operating with the authority of the crown and royal prerogative. The PM can just do a whole bunch of things particularly in a crisis and doesn't have to necessarily get approval from Parliament. The most obvious example of what you're talking about in COVID was on the vaccine task force. So I said with others in March 2020, the normal system obviously can't deal with vaccines, it can't do anything fast. We're watching it deal with all these other logistical problems. We have to create a completely different entity to deal with vaccines.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you multiply that kind of problem by hundreds and thousands of problems, you get a sense of why partly why COVID was so crazy. This is normal government, right? But in a crisis when no part of the system can actually move fast, all of these bottlenecks end up very dramatically escalating to the PM's office. And if you read Jari Kushner's book memoir about the White House, very, very similar tales there that a lot of things that obviously should have been solved elsewhere couldn't be solved at any other part of the system. They all end up kind of cascading upwards in the centralized bureaucracies because ultimately only the president or only the prime minister can give certain kind of orders.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did that, but only the Prime Minister could actually cut through all the bureaucracy and say, ignore these EU rules on blah, ignore Treasury guidance on blah, ignore this, ignore that. I am personally saying do this and I will accept full legal responsibility for everything, right?”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of people come into number 10 sitting around the table and they say we have a meeting and it's about supplies of PPE to the NHS. None of this PPE that we've ordered is going to be here until the summer. Okay, but the peak demand is over the next three to four weeks. Well, sorry, Dominic, but that's just, you know, it's not going to be here. Why not? Well, because that's how long it takes to ship from China. Why are you shipping from China? Well, because that's what we always do. We shipped from China. A, we need it now, and B, all of the airlines are grounded. No one's flying anything. So call up the airlines, tell them that we're taking their planes, we're flying all the planes to China, we're picking up all our shit, we're bringing it back here, do that now, do that today, send the planes today.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That itself is problematic because the large part system will say, well, we can't just dismiss them or if we do dismiss them, then there'll be legal. But you can actually remove them from the post. There are complications, and those complications have grown in the last few years because of the way the legal system and various parts of the law have evolved. But the PM can actually remove someone, but only the PM can. So that gives you an idea as well of the tremendous bottlenecks that occur inside number 10. So I tell you a story about that, the kind of summarizes it, right? In COVID, the peak of COVID craziness in March 2020, a whole bunch of people come, in fact, actually on the day itself that the PM tested positive for COVID.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Legally cannot fire anybody else in the building. So his personal three people that he brings in that he's allowed by the system, he can get rid of those three people. The other hundreds of thousands of people in the system, he can't get rid of a single one of them. So the person who actually is in charge of personnel at the Ministry of Defense is the permanent secretary, stressing the word permanent, right? The only person in the British state who has the legal and constitutional ability to say this senior person in the Ministry of Defence or the Department of Education or whatever is clearly failing and they must be removed. And I ordered that they are removed. Is the Prime Minister”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's part of it, though I would pick up on your language, which I think is important, right? Because you say the people who are actually running the departments, of course, they're not running the departments. So they describe themselves as my department. I'm running the department. The media describes them as they were running the department. But how many people can the Secretary of State for Defense fire? Three. Three people”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we sort of did that in quarter 1 2020. We actually stopped participating in the number one insider elite media show on BBC Radio. We just said we think the show is rubbish and it's a waste of everyone's time. And no ministers are going to be going on it anymore. The media went completely crazy. One of the most senior people in the BBC said to me that I was a fascist. And a lot of the MPs went crazy as well because for them being on that show is like, is Their raison d' So it was extremely unpleasant and disruptive for both the old media and the MPs who grown up in that culture.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not we don't care about all of your interviews. We don't care if you are on TV or never on TV. That's not how we're going to judge. Because they've all grown up in a culture where they think whether or not they're going to be promoted really depends on are they seen as a good media performer or do they botch things on the media? Well, that's just a fundamentally bad criteria, not least because their definitions of what's good on the media are themselves terrible, right? By approaching government like that, you're incentivizing them to think that their goal is making friends with the media. So then they get good interviews. That also incentivizes them to leak everything. So again, the whole culture and the incentives are self-reinforcing in a very negative way.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a large part of the day, or going to stupid ceremonies or whatever it might be. So again, I think so, I think that analogy also shows. Some of the central problems, these people have all grown up in a system where they just don't know any better than dealing with the media all day. Now, if you actually understand communication, you know that communication is not the same as answering questions to the media. But that's not what they think. And it's not the environment in which they operate. And also it's not the incentives in which they work. Again, one of the funny conversations I had with Boris was I said, you know, we should say to the ministers that here's your actual priorities as defined by us. Whether or not you get promoted and whether or not your career goes well is going to be defined by how well your department actually fulfills these goals.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just going back to your first point about the kind of CEO analogy, imagine if Steve Jobs or Tim Cook or Patrick Ollison or someone actually spent a large part of their day just doing photo ops. Well, like, that's actually the reality about how a lot of these jobs have evolved. So you have a person whose time is the single most precious asset. Who, because of the dysfunctional bureaucracy, his decisions or her decisions is the only thing that can actually break down the bureaucratic resistance and make sure that something happens. Yet they're actually standing with the ambassador from Tonga Zonga, whatever country.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by then, it'll be 14 years of conservative government. We've just won an election partly by running against the previous decade of the Conservative Party. Can't pull that off again. We're actually going to have to do a whole bunch of things. And also, that's why the people... Have a personnel problem about a lack of talent, but you also have this fundamental question of do the key politicians want to spend their time on the important problems or do they want to spend their time running around all day dealing with the media? The answer is almost all of them want to do the second.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we've got to get number 10 and your time, the PM's time, away from how it's been managed for the last 20 years, which is media entertainment service. And his response was, no, no, no, no, no. That's crazy. Everyone will go crazy with us if we do that. We've got to make friends with the media. We drove them all mad last year. Now it's time for us to, you know, a great reconciliation. And I said, well, we could do that, but if we do that, we'll just be the same as every other government for the last 20 years, which is chasing the bullshit in the meteor all day. And four years will pass, and we won't actually have done anything.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He says, Well, these various journalists are complaining that you don't return their calls. Now's the time for us to make friends with all these people after the chaos of 2019. And I said, no, I don't think that's right at all. We've just won the, we've gone through hell. We've won an 80-seat majority. Now we have to change how this building works and we have to focus on the actual big problems facing the country.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there isn't a kind of background system with a set of people who are just plodding on going, right, the actual important things are science and technology agenda, productivity, reform of the Ministry of Defense, procurement reform, deep state list, et cetera. So that's a fundamental structural issue. We try to deal with that in various ways, but it led... January 2020, it was clear that this essential question was already a kind of fundamental disagreement between me and Boris. So in the first week of January, Trump had just whacked that Iranian guy, his name I've forgotten now, the head of the revolutionary, whatever it was, you know, with a drone strike in Iraq. So we're talking in that week about the future, so three weeks after the election.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what is the management system you're going to build that actually can maintain focus on those things whilst the inevitable chaos goes on, right? Because you obviously, so most obviously, for example, some terrorist incident happens in central London. Prime Minister can't ignore that. It's going to involve the Prime Minister's time. Politics, the news the government means that there are things like that happening all day, every day, right? If you have the normal state of affairs, then the Prime Minister is just pulled from one crisis like that after another. Now, some of them are justifiable. You've got to deal with a terrorist crisis. In fact, what's happened over the last 20 years is that that's just been the model for how prime ministers spend practically all of their time.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A fundamental problem with how the British state works is this question of prioritization in the Prime Minister's time. So you have all of these normal parts of the system that essentially can't really do anything quickly at all, even in a crisis. So the Prime Minister's time and the Prime Minister's prioritization is the most important asset. But also it's something which is constantly pulled hither and thither by all of this craziness. One of the things that obviously we wanted to do was fundamentally reorient number 10 away from what it's been since Thatcher, which is a kind of precedent attainment service where the whole building is just built to respond to what the media says. And instead, say, what do we actually think is important?”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So one very small little thing in a way, but probably certainly anyone who's been at a kind of high functioning company. Just be completely stunned by a lot of how the core of a G7 state actually works.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a combination of bureaucracy, security concerns, arguments between, so it's actually the sort of interesting thing the Google Docs thinks we arrive in summer 2019. There is no system for file sharing. We say this is completely insane. We're going to create a system for file sharing. Months of wrangling ensue. Two different parts of the deep state basically argue about whether teams or Google Docs is more susceptible to China and Russia intercepting no resolution. This actually ends up affecting COVID. We force the resolution. We get GCHQ to build a system. Still now, four years after we started this discussion, the Cabinet Officer No. 10 are still fighting about Google Docs versus Teams and have now recently resolved to hire some consultants for millions of pounds to spend a year doing a study on it.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There wasn't even a file sharing system. So a three man startup could at least write a press release on a Google Doc. For example, the British Prime Minister could not have access to such a system.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saying we don't think we should because it's probably going to bomb the wrong people and then other parts of the system come in and say, no, we should bomb them because we've got to stay friends with America. Then there's some other disaster on the news with, you know, something flooding. And it's just constant. Okay, obviously some days are more crazy than others. But I think it's if you haven't been in that environment, it's extremely hard to appreciate that you have these handful of people trying to come up with the right answers to extremely hard problems with all the weight of the news flooding in on you. That makes it just intrinsically difficult. Then on top of that, you have these just incredibly old centralized bureaucracies actually trying to cope with all of this in number 10 when we arrive, for example.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you go through that door, you're basically going into a sort of a kind of rabbit warren of old townhouses that have been kind of knocked together behind the scenes. It's nothing like any kind of modern office building. It's a very, very odd physical environment. And I think probably you would be struck by, first of all, just the constant string of chaos. I think people don't really appreciate what it's like being in a building like that. Every day you've got, so for example, in one day on COVID, the day starts off with, are we going to have a lockdown? It then proceeds to the prime minister's girlfriend going crazy about the media. It then involves Trump calling up saying, we've got to go and bomb all these people in Iraq. It then goes to the deep state coming in.”
2023-11-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source