Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance

Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Dominic Cummings, who was the chief advisor to Boris Johnson when he was prime minister. And before that, he masterminded the Brexit campaign.
Let's start with talking with your time in number 10, which is your time as chief advisor. What is the thing about the government and being in that famous ministry? What is it that most people don't understand? 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'd 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 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 something flooding.
And it's just constant. And obviously some days are more crazy than others, but I think 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 arrived, for example, 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 did not have access to such a system. Was it because of security concerns? What was the reason? Because of a combination of bureaucracy, security concerns, arguments between...
So it's actually a sort of interesting thing, the Google Docs thing. So 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 a resolution, we get GCHQ to build a system. Still now, four years after we started this discussion, the cabinet office number 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.
So one very small little thing in a way, but probably certainly anyone who's been at the kind of high-functioning company would just be completely stunned by a lot of how the core of a G7 state actually works. Yeah, yeah.
Hopefully, the consultants are allowed to use Google Docs to decide whether you're allowed to use google docs quite you go into government you you're right afterwards you've written on your blog i had these like priorities these main things i want to accomplish day to day you have all these things that are coming up do these things feel like distractions from the thing you went to government to do do they all feel important i mean you have this big picture idea and all these things are coming up. I mean, what does that feel like? A fundamental problem with how the British state works is this question of prioritization and 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 press entertainment 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? 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? So 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.
But 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. And there isn't a kind of background system with a set of people who are just plodding on going, right, the actually important things are science and technology

agenda, productivity, reform of the Ministry of Defence, procurement reform, deep state this,

et cetera, et cetera. So that's a fundamental structural issue.
We tried to deal with that in various ways. But it led, in 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, the drone strike in Iraq. So we're talking in that week about the future.
So what, three weeks after the election. And he says, well, you know, these various journalists are complaining that, you know, you don't return their calls.
You know, 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 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.
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, 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 media all day. And four years will pass and we won't actually have done anything.
And then, it'll be 14 years of conservative government. You know, 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 are here, right? We actually want to solve these problems. Those issues get to the heart, I think, of a lot of it.
You have a manageable question about how you actually manage priorities in such an insane environment. You 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? And the answer is almost of them want to do the second there's a lot i want to ask about there it's interesting because the way you're describing it it sounds like it's a company with the prime minister's a ceo who's dealing with these all the operational things that come up but there is no ceo who's who has like a long-term plan i'm curious about the media stuff i want to understand why it's the case that they're so obsessed with the media.
Does the media actually matter that much to how people perceive the politicians? How is the media interacting with the things that are happening in the building so that people are constantly thinking of the media? But why is the media so ever present in people's minds here? Just going back to your first first point about the kind of CEO analogy, imagine if Steve Jobs or Tim Cook or Patrick Collison or someone

actually spent a large part of their day just doing photo ops as 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, you know, the ambassador from Tonga Zonga, whatever country, you know, just doing photo ops for a large part of the day or going to stupid ceremonies or whatever it might be uh 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 for all day, 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.

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, the whole, the culture and the incentives are self-reinforcing in a very, in a very negative way. What would happen if you said, okay, no more interviews, the prime minister was somebody who agreed with you and said, no more interviews, ministers, you're going to do your thing.

Media is out.

How would the media react and would that matter?

So we sort of did that in quarter one 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 there raison d'etre? Right.
So it was extremely unpleasant and disruptive for both the old media and the MPs who'd grown up in that culture. How much does it have to do with the fact that in the British political system, the people who are running these departments have to be an MP, so they have to be an elected official? Is that why they're so obsessed with the media? Because it's like if a congressman had to become the secretary of state always.
So that's part of it, though. I would I would pick up on your 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 department.
So who is? So they describe themselves as my department. I'm running the department.
The media describes them as they're running the department. But how many people can the Secretary of State for Defense fire? Three.
Three people. He legally cannot fire? He legally cannot fire anybody else in the building.
So who can fire? 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 Defence 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 Department of Education or whatever is clearly failing and they must be removed, and I order that they are removed, is the Prime Minister. That itself is problematic because the large system will say, well, we can't just dismiss them, or if we do dismiss them, then they'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'll tell you a story about that that kind of summarizes it, right? In COVID, the peak of COVID craziness in March 2020, a whole bunch of people come in. In fact, actually on the day itself that the PM tested positive for COVID, a bunch 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.
Well, 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 gonna 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 ship it from China.
But 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.
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? So you multiply that kind of problem by hundreds and thousands of problems, you get a sense of 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 Jared 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 these centralized bureaucracies, because ultimately only the president or only the prime minister can give certain kind of orders. What if the prime minister or president said, I guess in this case, the prime minister, I am giving a blank check.

If I appoint you as minister, whatever you say, I'm going to sign it. You can rule as if I agree on everything you said.
Could they write such a blank check and basically give the minister whatever authority they might want? To some extent. So the system here in lots of ways is, in lots of ways, 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 and lacunae in the system, there are kind of ancient assumptions that the PM is operating with the authority of the crown and royal prerogative. So 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, but 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.
So we essentially appointed someone and the prime minister said, ignore all the EU procurement rules, ignore all UK procurement rules, ignore everything. You 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. And the simplest thing is take months and months.

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 is 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 fundamentally is prepared to say, people will just be removed from their post if they don't do what they're told. COVID showed 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. But it also showed that even in a crisis where literally thousands of people are dying day after day after day, that large parts of the bureaucracy will still simply say, no, we are optimizing for sticking to the old rules.
That also happened an awful lot. What I find interesting is you've written a lot after you got out of the government problems and but you know but there's other people who have been at a high level in governments in the uk us wherever and it's weird to me that if there's this much dysfunction why are they just not are they not noticing it are they just refusing to talk about it have they just never been in a functional environment where they maybe in the private sector or something where they realize how dysfunctional this is? Why is everybody not screaming about this as soon as they get out of the government? 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, we arrive at number 10.
I've taken a bunch of people who are actually experts in data science, AI, and blah, blah. We talked to a bunch of officials about projects around data.
And officials say, oh, yeah, well, here's some examples of some interesting projects we've done. You asked 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 like eight to 12 weeks.
The rest of the two and a half years was the system emailing each other about legal permissions on what to do. Now, from the people that I brought in from outside, this is obviously insane.
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.
You have to realize that. And a lot of the people who are most senior in the system have been in a thing 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, you know, in 2020, for example, when we, you know, when we did some things very differently, it was extremely disruptive and extremely unwelcome to the large-plus system. Hence why a lot of what we did was closed down.
So did they say, okay, the vaccine task force here in Operation Warp 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 basically closed and forgot to order enough tests the following year.
So if you look back at 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, have almost all left.
What incentive is there for people to speak out about how these things work? No one expects anything to change. And I think rationally, right? Because even after something as big as COVID, when you see what the reaction is, everyone can now see the truth.
Well, you have a once-a-century pandemic. It can kill tens of thousands of people unnecessarily.
It can be a complete carnage for the economy. And 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 the system, all the signals to you are very clear.
In fact, in 2021, 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 of that. 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 insane process.
And you will be demoted and blacklisted if you say this process is insane and will try and do better. Okay, so there's two things I'm curious about here.
One is what exactly in the system, or who exactly is a person who decided vaccine task force has to go, we can't continue it?

And two, and this might be related, what happens if a PM decides, I don't give a shit about these legal challenges?

Pile them on if you want.

Is it just going to cost a lot in lawyer fees?

Like, why does it matter?

Manhattan Project is much in the news with the Oppenheimer movie.

If you look at the very last bit of General Groves' book on Manhattan Project, he talks about what are the most fundamental principles about why it succeeded. And one of those principles is also relevant.
They're all 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, right? 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 pull together.
We 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.
This should change because it's going back to normal. They have to do the following things properly and possibly, you know, 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... 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, 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, etc.
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

formerly 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. When we first created the, when we first got 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. We're going to have a second wave.
There's going to be thousands more people getting COVID. There's NHS, people dying, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
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 that.
Everyone sits around the cabinet table. They all nod their heads.
We click track hall, this guy, former SAS boss, and say, so how's it going? You getting who you want and everything working great? No. All the same shit 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 to fire around here to make clear that these people doing testing don't have to do all of your bullshit HR? Yeah. Right? You actually have, 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 Capitol 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 sea floods back. So at some point, we should talk about what it would actually take to change the equilibrium.
It might be first useful to talk about how did this come to be? So presumably, at some point, this is not the way the government function. How did it end up? Is it just that the kludge builds up? If it does, like, I've been talking about the actual mechanism of how does it end up this way? 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 to shift, We've got to shift towards a much more meritocratic system.

We should have officials that are appointed on merit. So 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, However, over time, you see that this supposedly meritocratic system ends up actually just being a closed caste.
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, 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 in 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 comes to crunch it's like a japanese company where you get into college and just stay until you die you know i mean i live in san francisco and if somebody works in like a company for three years or five years they're oh my gosh you've been here for a while you know you're like a long-term employee so the idea that you would be the same place for 40, is really odd. And 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 fair.
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.
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 a 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, leave.

And the most 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.
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 has 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. This reminds me, there's this wonderful biography of LBJ that Robert Carrow wrote.
And in volume three, which is about him taking over the Senate, you know, when he gets in the Senate seniority system is known as a senility system. Because you have these people who are in charge of these important committees and they're 80 years old or something.
And they're in charge of like ways and means. And so he realizes when he becomes a majority leader can't have this if i want to get things done i need the young senators in charge and so he engineers ways to get like 40 year olds or 50 year olds in charge of these committees yeah what would it take for could a prime minister just say we're going to retire everybody who's over a certain age or just like we're going to retire a whole bunch of people the people we see a whole bunch of up-and-comers are going to put, you know, 20-year-olds on the path to management or path to advancement.
Who would that be up to? In the British system, only the PM can do that. Yeah.
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

exactly, but say half a dozen roughly of the senior permanent secretaries in charge of

all 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,

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against the democratic coup coup, unquote, fascism. The votely fascist entity is now essentially mounting a coup, an anti-democratic coup, Orban style, to dismantle all democratic gyms.
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 tale 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 were most in favor of it was actually the deep state itself 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, 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's the time you've had a once a 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.
Yeah. And it should happen.
Now, we can argue about the details of it. Clearly, the personnel system needs opening up.
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,

I 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? Our response to summer 2020 was, 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 Karrie and the majority of the Conservative Party's 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 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 in 1989 and the fall of the towers, right? 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.
So when I hear this story, I'm thinking, well, you know, on your blog, you've written about all these other reformers throughout history. When they were able to make their changes was, you know, like a time of crisis, Lee Kuan Yew after the British leave, or Bismarck after Prussia loses the Napoleonic Wars.
You can go down the list, right? The Meiji Reformation or something. And in this case, you have COVID, you have Brexit, you have an 80-seat majority that you've engineered based on campaigning on these things.
And you have you as chief advisor to the PM, somebody who understands these things, has thought a lot about them, and in fact accepted the job on the condition that you would be able to do these things. You have all these things come together.
Why was the opportunity wasted? And you mentioned, for example, that Boris and Carrie were not interested in changing these things. Presumably they saw that the problem was there.
I mean, if you're a PM and you're seeing these changes, you must see the craziness. And also, I mean, wasn't he like a fan of Churchill and he wanted to build a legacy or something? I would think if I was PM, like most PMs are going to be forgotten, right? You might as well just like go for it and try to do something big, try to be remembered.
Why did they they waste this opportunity you know you have all these things that are going for you guys or if if something was going to happen that seemed like the perfect moment to make something happen part of it goes back to what i said before that you have like two fundamentally different attitudes towards the whole thing boris was prepared to be very uh uh 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.
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 term, 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, 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.
And the overwhelming majority of people in politics are there to fundamentally prioritize social relations within the insider network. That is just what totally dominates their life.
Day in, day out, year in, year out. Now, in 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 of 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 theatre and appearing on TV is the critical part of it, right? It's not, have you actually done anything? 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 street the cameras are all there the cameras were they, they click, they shout out questions, the ministers smile at the cameras, and they think, you know, we're part of the insider gap. This is the peak thing that everyone aims at.
Whilst 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.
So the whole thing is a complete kind of Potemkin farce. But from the MP's point of view, well, we're on TV.
We're treated like we're in charge. 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 like fundamentally no power the fact that in number 10 officials who are like 28 years old working five metres 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, right? It's 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, you know, in the old days, there used to be a parliament page in newspapers that would report what happens in parliament, 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, oh, the Prime Minister's 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,

a 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, well, why don't you have a page and start 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,

the charade, the Potemkin charade

of the MPs trotting up Downing Street

and all being filmed going into cabinet,

which is taking decisions, right?

As long as the Potemkin carries on,

just don't break kayfabe,

as they say in WWE, right?

Yeah, it sounds like you have

two constitutional monarchies in Britain. In some ways, yes.
Yeah, yeah. Exactly.
Now, you say you have these undersecretaries who are these 31-year-olds or 28-year-olds. And they're the ones in charge.
Doesn't this contradict the idea that you have this gerontocracy of people who had to wait 40 years to get promoted to be in charge of these departments, this permanent civil service? So it's an oddity in the system, right? And it's purely around the PM. So the way the system works is, in all the different departments, you have the gerontocracy is in charge, and you have this appalling HR system that filters out almost all of the best people 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 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 formerly 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.
Yeah, got it. And who, by the way, if you want to mention the person, the 31-year-old able person who we'll help with, do you want to mention who that was? Well, there's a few.
I mean, there's a guy called Jono Evans 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, if a plane is going to fly into parliament and try to kill everyone and it's going to be shot down, then she's the cog in the wheel that actually organizes the system to get the right calls and blah, blah, blah. So there's a lot of people like that who are extremely...
I mean, the joke amongst the vote leave team used to be that if you swapped the private secretaries for the cabinet in every single job, you would basically improve the caliber of the person by, like, 10x. However, lots of those people have now left, right? Because of their selection, self-se self-selection exactly okay got it uh so it's interesting as a foreigner when i think about the uk and i'm just learning the basics like what are the problems in the country and the main thing is oh your productivity growth since 2005 has been abysmal you guys are much poorer than you guys could otherwise be um this is the main thing that jumps out in my mind.
Is there a team in number 10? Is it anybody's job who's a very senior to deal with this specific problem? 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 all 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.
So the science and technology, the startup ecosystem, procurement, the planning system, which is one of the major, one of the really big things 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, the Daily Telegraph now today screaming about growth was totally hostile. Most of the Tory MPs, totally hostile.
Most of the Conservative Party were not agitating for an aggressive pro-growth agenda in 2020. They were actually hostile to it.
Speaking of the Treasury, by the way, you helped promote Sunak to Chancellor of the Aschequer. He was, from what I understand, relatively unknown before that.
What did you notice about him that made you decide to do that? Maybe tell me more about why you think the Treasury is anti-growth as well. 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. 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 Sunak 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 didn't want him to do the politics side of things.
We wanted someone in

there who also wanted to work with number 10, which is a critical thing. One of the big structural

problems in how the British state has worked is that there's a kind of structural conflict between number 10 and number 11. You normally have a prime minister and 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 and number 11.
You normally have a prime minister and a 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 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? What we wanted to do was eliminate this friction. And that has lots of weird consequences.
So one of the most stupid things is 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? Insane, 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 Chancellor's 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. Changed 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.

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.
Yeah. Well, what do you think of Sunak now? I mean, you notice he was intelligent, hardworking, paid attention to details.
Is that enough to make a good PM? He's trying to make the old system work and he's treating the old system with respect. And it's political disintegration.
He doesn't control the government. He doesn't even control number 10 in the cabinet 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 that year.
He had a fundamental choice. Am I going 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.
I'm more curious about the sort of broader lessons about personality this reveals than him necessarily. In the American context, for example, like FDR clearly had control of the government.
As far as I understand, he wasn't known for being intelligent or being micromanaging details. But you had Howard Hopkins to do that for him, right? Right.
So, I mean, what does that reveal about who makes a good PM? Like, what are the characteristics needed for a person who can control the government? It's impossible to be a good PM if you accept the way that the job is currently works. Like it's totally impossible 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 wall 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 Sunak'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.
Okay. So if the government is this dysfunctional, I mean, this is the same government that has nukes, that deals with biosecurity.
I mean, all kinds of things that I'm sure I'm not even aware of. Intelligence agencies, counterterrorism, all this stuff.
Do these things really, I mean, are the people who are in charge of the nukes as dysfunctional as like not having Google Drive and having like two years of litigation to do a two-week project? Is that part also fine? In lots of ways, it's worse. So I saw recently Peter Thiel 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. DMV? 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.
In the 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 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 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.
You 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 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 parts of that infrastructure which are literally watching, like parts of it that just don't work properly, appalling safety that's been neglected for year after year.

So that's 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,

a brilliant young scientist who'd been working in the state, actually,

the Janelia lab on neuroscience and whatnot.

And so all these people inside the system said, don't worry about this, Dominic. They're like, this will never happen.
This is impossible. This is science fiction, or this is like 10 years away, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And everything was about trying to reassure me that I shouldn't really worry about this. And at the end of the meeting, I said, so James, what do you think about this? And 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 budget horrors.
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, you know, across all of these secret systems. Why hasn't there been a disaster? In many countries, you know, the systems are this much of a shit show.
And I mean, this is the West. I mean, Russia has nukes, Pakistan has nukes, and you can only imagine how fucked up their systems are.
I mean, what's prevented? You could say, well, the system is so fucked up that actually there was a lab leak and that was COVID. And so maybe there already has been a disaster.
But what is the explanation for why other parts of the system haven't crumbled in a disastrous way yet? You know, if you look at just the public record on nuclear stuff, then I think the only reasonable conclusion is that we 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 wall.
I mean, you know, America nearly nuked itself, right? I mean, that was just completely, by the grace 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.
On the Chinese infrastructure stuff, I don't know if you can say more about that, but I'm very curious. If 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 imagined 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 just completely plausible.
There's no way that that would happen. There's no way that they would transfer data between A and B about disinformation and then find out later that that was actually controlled by China.
That would be fucking mental. How about the intelligence agencies, MI5, MI6, and then America's CIA? How much situational awareness do they have about the most important things? Honestly, if I was the PM, maybe on my daily briefing, the top thing I would want is the training loss on the newest AI models or things like that.
But on the things that matter, how much situational awareness do the intelligence station set? That's an interesting example. So I say, I think 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 prioritization of things is extraordinarily awful. Again, another thing that if you actually wrote it out, 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, i.e. away from the Ministry of Defense, 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, that's very bad.
It means that the bureaucracy metastises and a lot of decisions are made without any real challenge. So that's bad.

But going back to the main thing, amazing 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 there just hasn't been focused on, you know, 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 of years before that. But even in 2019, 2020, you know, I went into number 10 wearing an AI, wearing an opening IT show 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 five years earlier.

And you're saying, well, if you were president or prime minister, I'd be aiming these amazing capabilities and saying, OK, I assume the GCHQ and the NSA are like, you know, no, who is running the equivalence of OpenAI in Beijing? Who is running the black projects for Chinese intelligence on training runs, right? Where is the black project data center? And who the fuck is running it? And where is it in which mountain? And how many spy spy satellites are looking at? If the prime minister said, I want to know how many H100s NVIDIA will ship out next year, go to TSNC, go to Taiwan, go to wherever, find out how many China is ordering, what university or state company in China is ordering how much. Does the capability exist to get that information? Or is it just like nobody cares about it? 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, then obviously you could get an extraordinary amount of interesting information. But A, 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 now in large parts of these systems, particularly after one with Iraq and then the legal investigations post-Iraq and terrorism and whatnot.
So there's huge kind of self-censoring in large parts of the system and much less aggression than most people would assume. How about defense? So, I mean, in Ukraine, we're seeing this like very asymmetric returns on different kinds of new weapons where you have these cheap drones that are taking out, you know, expensive Russian tanks.
How come it is defense generally and how much are they adopting these new technologies? I mean, generally in Britain, it's completely shocking. Again, 2019, 2020, you know, we had arguments about this between 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 leveraged commercial technology and then think about how to add deep state capabilities on top of that, etc.
But you had also a whole set of the senior people thinking, as they always do, fuck this. This sounds like it's going to cannibalize our budgets.
Well, we've already got these drone programs. 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 deploying, 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, 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.
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 in 2019, 2020, people were saying to me, well, Dominic, our future fighter in 2040, 2045 is still going to be manned.
And, you know, there are all kinds of classified studies that show that, you know, 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. Let's see what OpenAI might make of these so-called studies.
Of course, it'll turn out to be total bullshit. Britain is still going ahead with that, 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. The reason I'm especially curious about this is we're seeing how this war in Ukraine is happening.
I'm very curious about what this implies for if there was a conflict in Taiwan, like how easily could you take out an American or British aircraft carrier? Having seen the insight of how these things work, like how confident are you in these war games and these projections? If there was a national conflict in which like Britain had to get involved, what do you think happen well in war games the the British um aircraft carriers flee immediately to the 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 um peer opponent um the aircraft carriers are obviously a joke I said that like 15 years ago I think the first time 10 years ago 10 years ago, five years ago. I had a lot of meetings about it in number 10.
Nothing persuaded me of anything other than that the whole thing was a massive waste of money. And that's just becoming more and more obvious, right? I mean, all over the system, all over the West now, people are starting to face the music that a lot of these things that they've invested billions in are just totally vulnerable to go asymmetric technology and asymmetric costs.
Where very cheap systems are going to be able to destroy a platform worth, you know, 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,

but I think there is growing realization behind the scenes of what the reality is.

But the situation in Ukraine

should make us even more pessimistic in various ways, right?

Because if you'd said in advance,

okay, Putin's going to invade Ukraine, we are going to do simultaneously, encourage Ukraine to fight, arm Ukraine, push Ukraine into a war of attrition. 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, even for you, Dominic, that would be just too ludicrous a scenario to happen.
I mean, nobody in their 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 have escalated a war of attrition. And we have left a completely rotten dysfunctional procurement and manufacturing system for defense continue.
The same set of people in charge of the decisions in the mod and the pentagon same set of bullshit pushed out about the advantages of aircraft carriers and blah blah blah but the whole thing makes absolutely no sense at all what happens when we have to face the music and when does that happen so i don't know there's a there's a conflict and like immediately whatever however many personnel on the aircraft carrier drown. Maybe not even like with defense specifically, just like in general, all these different parts of the government are not only dysfunctional, but are getting more and more dysfunctional.
Yeah. Is it just going to be a slow degradation or will there be another very clear inflection point like you had with COVID? Well, my assumption is that there'll just be repeats of the covid experience and lots of the worse i mean i assume that there'll be you know if you look at it like roughly every decade or so there's some kind of financial crisis yeah would do another financial crisis uh it could easily be worse than the last one wouldn't surprise me that if in the next like within the next two years there's a 2008 crash, perfectly plausible.
Lots of hedge fund people I talked 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 are going to launch a counteroffensive.
They're going to sweep all before them. The idiot Russians are all going to collapse.
Well, chickens are coming home to roost on that now. That's going to get worse.
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. I mean, you'd have to be Sun Tzu to figure out that from China's point of view, this is like an absolute dream scenario.
And if America gets into, was insane enough to get into a war over Taiwan, then obviously a lot of these, a lot of this would be exposed. And there's a book by a guy who now works at Andrew Hill called The Kill Chain.
And like the truth is like a lot of classified Pentagon staff 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 that aside, just on a conventional basis,

it's going to be, it will be a catastrophe for America.

Okay. So in a hundred years time, I guess it would be 21, 23, what about what the government

does now will matter? I mean, when you read back history at like 1923, what has mattered most?

What would you say? be 21, 23, what about what the government does now will matter? I mean, when you read back history at like 1923, what has mattered most? What should be the big priorities? If 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 kinds. And if you think about what the 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 that they didn't understand at the time, but which clearly affected the next war, the next revolutions, collapse of various kinds?

Like,

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? Conflict matters a lot.
Technology matters. And they matter in ways that are very contingent and hard to predict.
Yeah. And very nonlinear.
And ideas matter most of all, but almost none of that really comes from government, right? Right. It comes almost by definition from people who are at the time fringe.
Why does democracy work or does it work? And why do some democracies work better than other democracies? Britain's been a, quote, democracy, unquote, for like, say, 80 years or something, depending on exactly how you define it. like say 80 to 100 years-ish.
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, you know, the year 100 BC, you know, asking questions about, or say, it's a 250 BC about the Roman Republic, right? Well, the Roman Republic has lasted for, you know, for a century or so, so far.
You can't, you certainly can't say't say now, democracy has proved to work. I would say the one thing you see in history is regimes are constantly changing.
And everyone thinks in their own time that we're not going to change. What we've got is going to persist, but it's always wrong.
Most of the things persist is a few generations, and then then there's always chaos and then there's always a change. What is the next thing going to look like and what should it look like? And the reason I ask that question is, I mean, one of the justifications of democracy is it's non-violent error correction and you can fix these mistakes.
But on this account of what's going on in the government now, I mean, not only are errors not being fixed, they're accumulating and constantly increasing. So then is there a system in which these errors are constantly pruned away? What would that system look like? If 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 all 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.
Yeah, like pretty much what we'd expect historically. If you brought back the people from, you know, if you look back at the, like a big inflection point, I think it was like mid-19th century, around about 1848.
Before 1848, you have a bunch of conservatives like Metnik who had watched the French Revolution, who had watched the guillotine and the terror and bloodshed. And they said, wait, 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 called themselves conservatives basically thought, well, how do we use democracy or universal male suffrage anyway to try and smash the liberals up, who were their real enemy at the time, right? How do we use, which is what Bismarck and Napoleon III both tried 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, they'd 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. How does that chain necessarily imply the catastrophes of Stalin and Hitler? Well, I think 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 But how come, like why is that the implication of democracy? That it'll implode. I mean, look what happened in Athens.
They 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 like a reasonable perspective is, the old system worked because kind of the old aristocracy managed it and Pericles being the obvious example from the old Alpionidae family. Once they lost their grip and demagogues like Cleon took over, well, chaos, demagoguery, and endless demands on the treasury, the people voting handouts for themselves, collapses, the cycle repeats.
So 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. Right.
So maybe an interesting question is then, you know, if you look at Bismarck, who you've done a huge dive on, or in that case, you have a system where after him, the system he set up couldn't survive and yada yada yada world war one whereas lee kuan yu another person you've studied deeply you know he he had meticulously set up a system so that even after he gave up the leadership it would be a competent successful government and i guess we'll see how it turns out but Singapore seems to be running fine. So then is it just a succession problem of figuring out? Well, first of all, I mean, Bismarck and Lee Kuan Yew, I mean, they both are like these strong figures in the context of a democracy kind of.
What is the correct model here? And then how does it solve the succession problem? 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 Yew has created a system where 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 like, without that, everything else doesn't 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 haven't 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 of, 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 will be promoted from now on.
You'd always expect that as the default, right? Because that's just what entropy does. It brings us back to what is a system in which not only is a leader somebody who the person who is initially leader, there's somebody who understands how to take control of the government and does it effectively, but reliably hands off power to people.
There is no such system. 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. You know, 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 fishponds.
And if this carries on, then the Republic is clearly doomed. 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 around an elite culture? I mean, 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?

Yeah. Will Durant has this quote that Rome fell for longer than most empires have lasted.

But we have these crises constantly, and one could have imagined covid could have caused this yeah i guess a rejuvenation will have to happen with a with i guess a different generation since you've brought up silicon valley by the way i do want to ask about i think last year or maybe was it the year before you had a blog post about how in america a silicon valley led or funded campaign in 2024 could have a big impact and get rid of the Trump v. Biden version two disaster.
What happened? It seems like now you're more focused your efforts back to the UK. What came of that attempt to look into what you could make happen in the US? To 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. To what extent can one try 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 my point was, if you leave the old system in Washington and New York to itself, then it's going to produce Trump v.
Biden too, probably. Obviously, people could 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 are the 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, the 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 to their fishponds.

They look at, 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 are trying to insulate themselves and other people they care about from the chaos. And as a lot of them said to me personally, if I tried to 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. The 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 disincentivized 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.
Super villain. 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 Elon's abilities.
Now, for them, they all think that they're all sensible and they're all rational. For others of us looking at it, we think that's just a wonderful sign of the oil 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. Let's say if you did something in the UK, US, wherever, and suppose it succeeds, and it's not somebody like Boris where it's somebody you have qualms about but better you than somebody else.
Let's say it's a hand-picked person you think super competent, you put in your, your now chief advisor again, winning the election sounds like the easy bit, given the challenges you've talked about in terms of actually taking control of the government. What changes? Because I mean, last time, ADC majority, COVID crisis, a huge mandate on both counts.
Still, the things couldn't happen. I mean, you know, planning reform reform didn't happen a bunch of things what what would actually take on the next iteration for you to actually take control of the government and yeah like i mean if you have to like do a natural regime change as you've called it take me out of the equation like sure let's answer answer let's think about the the general thing.
Winning an election, in lots of ways, is the easy part, right? Because in lots of ways, 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 did 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? Because we focused 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. Wouldn't you just expect some sort of basic evolutionary or almost selection argument that if even one politician, forget about a policy, just actually strategically trying to win elections, wouldn't the system at least select for that? Because that's presumably who's getting elected.
Totally not. No, it doesn't select for that at all.
I mean, the whole history of Britain since 2016 is a perfect example of it, right? No, we won the campaign. Did the establishment go, oh, like, 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 to 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 Sunak and Starmer. They 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 Rishi Sunak say, judge me on whether or not I stop 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 totally makes no sense if you think they're optimising 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.
What should his message definitely not be? Arguing about the 2020 election and who won. What does he do? Keeps arguing about 2020.
So these people just constantly do things which are just like 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 that they are focused and optimizing for win election. But back to the question of, okay, you won, the other politicians aren't even thinking strategically about how to win.
Something that hasn't happened in a Western government in a long time. Actually, when would you say, who was the last US president who was in who was in charge of the government? Who was the last U.K.
prime minister who was in charge of the government? Probably FDR, you'd say. Not even LBJ? 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 the Pentagon and the intelligence services and had all kinds of problems dealing with them. I mean, obviously, in some ways, LBJ clearly had an unprecedented grip at least since 1945 over parts of the system, for sure.
But his was a legislative talent, not an executive. Okay, so, and then who in the UK would you say? I'd say Churchill, probably.
Not Thatcher? No. I mean, Thatcher just objectively very clearly didn't.
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-hearted, less than half-hearted, ineffectual, and contributed to her downfall. It's been since World War II.
The problems you've highlighted, everything from the media to the legal challenges to the civil service itself pushing back. I mean, we went through the entire list.
How is this actually going to work? How do you actually have a government? The person is in charge, but what happens next? 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 its 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.
All of that can only change if a set of people 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. How big does that group need to be? So it's not just the PM.
Is it the entire cabinet? Is it the undersecretaries? How big does that minimum group need to be to take charge of it?

I mean, everything depends on particularly 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. It can never be no kind of coup or no kind of regime change ever happens if the small group of people that start stays small.
By definition, you have to convert people forcibly or through persuasion or whatever. So what is a new equilibrium for these existing institutions, whether it's the civil service or the media or whatever? Suppose you successfully reverse a lot of these trends and there's a bunch of successes that ramp up.
Do they keep opposing you or do they support the sort of new regime? What is the new equilibrium for the blob? Well, by definition, I think all bureaucracies end up operating for themselves, right? So you should assume that 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 re-founding of things. It's the only conceivable way that over a time period like 100 years, you could imagine...
If you go 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 are adapting.
And we try and face our failures, honestly, like their report on what they got wrong on COVID. Unlike Britain, already published, actually accepting the errors and trying to fix them.
Already happened. Britain, we're 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 constant rejuvenation. And that's a mix of basically sunsetting, closing, and rebuilding.
Let's get more specific. So I don't know, let's talk about the Ministry of Defense.
Would you just lay off a huge chunk of it? And there's specific projects you've talked about, maybe you'd sunset, but what would it look like to refound the Ministry of Defense, for example, or any specific department? So what you wouldn't do and what's doomed with that, as soon as with the Pentagon, is going into those buildings and say, right, let's sit down and talk about a reform program for your procurement system. It's just 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, you know, like 95 to 99% of the people involved with it.
It's the only thing that has any chance of success. Right.
But so like what percentage of the people in the current Minister of Defense would keep their jobs? How bigger of a change would it require to have something? I mean, on the order of like 90%. Wow.
Okay. But 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 is in everything to do with communications. Everyone has massive communications teams.
Everything is worse as a consequence. Lots 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 to the Department of Education, the communications team was over 250.
When we left, it was less than 50. Everything had improved.
And if it would have been less than 10 it would have improved again well the examples you gave of people like groves and everything this is a very particular time in history wartime and also depression so there's not many private sector alternatives how would you have a situation today where you were able to compete for that talent not just for these these really ambitious, you know, people in number 10, but across the civil service, the best and brightest are going there. And until that happens, is there a way to get the best possible work out of the people who are in the civil service now, or maybe not necessarily like the top of the top of the class, but, you know, certain things need to be done.
Very able people are extremely interested in politics and extremely interested in government. I don't think the problem is 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. 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 stupid meetings?

And similarly for, you know, whether it's health reform or anything else,

could you get some of these very able people to do it? Yes, you could. And we saw in summer 2020, when we actually, you know, when briefly for a few months, the whole system opened up amid chaos, there was actually incredible interest from all over of very able people wanting to come in and get involved to help, which I think is a sign of what I'm talking about.
It's not just hope. We could actually see it happening in 2020.
But also what happened in 2020 is another sign. Once the system started to close back in, 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. So in the UK, for, I don't know, the next four or five years, at least, you'll have labor.
So if you have a new startup party, and let's say it takes control after that, you have another sort of Brexit-like political machine. Is that too late for some of the big crises you're worried about, whether it's if there's going to be like a financial crisis? uh but one big thing that i mean people who have been listening to my podcast will the previous guest um dario amuday ceo of anthropic said yeah he had an exact phrasing i don't want to mess up but something like that could emulate a human was two to three years right okay so you have a government in five years that starts working on it in a correct way.
Is that too long to solve the crises that are... Could well be, yeah.
Yeah. Maybe.
As you know, 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? Yeah.
Their behavior almost only makes sense if they actually wanted to do that. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism optimism of the will my overall assumption is failure the the western world will go the same way that everyone else goes in history uh in failure collapse and bloodshed it's probably what will happen but still you go try yeah what will you personally be doing in these four to five years of uh before this ramp up? Are you more reading and thinking? 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-22 problem.
The worse the system gets, the harder it's becoming to get able people to get involved with politics, not easier.

And you can own 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.

Thank you. 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. Speaking of which, how would you get to, if you were doing a new party, you had to get these political talent to hop onto your party's label.
And I mean,'s sort of a catch-22 because you need voters probably to convince the people to like join your political talent to join your party you need the political talent to track the voters exactly what is the trick to getting these people to ditch the existing the existing system well in the first past the post system right it's it's extremely hard i mean so when i did when I did some research in America recently, 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.
Oh, right. Okay.
So imagine the following party comes along and it's got the following people and it says the following things, what you think, and people go, oh my God, that would be so great. But 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. 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 you.
You see, so there's a fundamental structural problem with the first-past-the-post system. Now, I'm in favor of the first-past-the-post system.
I'm more 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, having the majority, you know, like we kind of like maneuvered 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? On Brexit, so if it's possible to build a new political machine that's relatively cheap to do and is much more effective than the current political parties at winning elections, what is it that you did in Brexit and that you would do? Maybe this is a separate question of what you would do or what somebody might do in a future election, whether it's like political modeling, whether it's the use of new technologies or, I don't know, like testing things out with social media. What are the tricks that you would use to win elections? I mean, obviously, all the AI stuff means 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 an 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 want to focus on the voter? If you can build that culture, then that culture will then build the technology and will exploit the tools 100 times better than than the old parties will right but it's that that comes first not the not the technology uh with brexit afterwards on your blog you're writing about why you did brexit and similar to the things we're talking about where like the government is dysfunctional in these ways we've got these crises that can happen in minutes how similar in retrospect do you think that is to the message that vote leave the organization you chaired advert the reason for brexit one way you could say is like oh it's customer obsession like what is what is the customer here interested in is it important for the two to be the same like the the reason you want to do brexit versus the reason that you might advertise brexit should be done 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 and Brexit, anybody doing politics, there's always like...
Say we're basically running Amazon. Yeah, it's customer assessed, but there's also a whole bunch of stuff that he's not talking to the customers about.
Right. 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. So how do you think about the bargain with voters? Is it like I have these long-term priorities and the voters want this thing which I don't really care about, but it's almost like a trade where help me achieve these long term priorities or give me the power to achieve these long term priorities.
And these are other sort of like smaller things, which I don't think are the most important thing. We'll also accomplish those.
Is that the way you think about it? To some extent, that's always what politics is, right? Right. Because, as I said before,

that you could only ever talk about a relatively small fraction of all the things that you think are important.

Also bear in mind, right,

take some... Because as I said before, you could only ever talk about a relatively small fraction of all the things that you think are important.
Also bear in mind, take civil service reform. Civil service reform isn't even a subject of interest to the insiders who have to live with it all day.
I mean, I actually have more conversations with people outside politics about that than I do inside politics. Seems very weird, right? But the people inside the system are so completely,

just accept the existing system, that they don't even really talk about that.

So like, are you going to, is a new party going to spend a huge amount of time discussing the

intricacies of HR for how some kind of new civil service should work, how to create red teams

inside Whitehall, how to create a startup for a drone army to replace parts of the MOD? No, because most people are not interested in all of that. But neither are the insiders, right? Neither are the people currently, the thousand most powerful people in the country now also don't think about that.
While we're talking about talent, you obviously put out that famous post saying, we want weirdos and misfits to come into government. There's lots of weirdos and misfits out there.
What is a specific kind that is really effective in government? So there are lots of different kinds, right? It depends very much on what you're doing. I mean, some of the people we brought in were very technical.
You know, for example, you're interested in the whole AI world. There were some very, very technical AI people.
It massively depends on the particular roles. I mean, there's another set of talent which is rare inside government, which is just a kind of like entrepreneurial project management typey, actually getting things done character.
no surprise that we ended up in a crisis having to use British Special Forces for a lot of those

kind of things, because they're pretty much the only, like, one of the few elements of the British state that is still extremely able and has that kind of, like, operational, punchy, can-get-things-done-fast vibe. So it's just highly dependent.

Is a war over Taiwan with China worth it for the US and the UK and the Western together?

Obviously not.

It's a completely insane idea.

It's an island that you can see from the Chinese coast.

It's full of Chinese people.

The people in the army are cousins of the people in the opposite army.

For decades, we've had one China policy accepted by Democrats, Republicans across the Western world. It's going to be unified, but it should be done peacefully, not violently.
That was the right approach. It's completely crazy for us to be ditching that approach and to be willfully antagonizing China over a place filled with Chinese.
Right. It's fucking stupid.
But it has worked in the past where, you know, with the Soviets, they had the huge Red Army on Europe and with, you know, nuclear deterrence, we were able to keep them from conquering the rest of Europe. Why not just have this sort of...
Hold on. So what your parallel is that, so we threatened the Soviets to say you shouldn't invade Germany and France and Britain.
Is a parallel to say that Taiwan shouldn't be part of China. That's a really bad analogy.
What's wrong with the strategic ambiguity where we haven't committed to defending Taiwan, but just making China think twice about invading Taiwan? Britain gave strategic ambiguity a great run out in summer 1914. How did that work out? So you want to repeat that with nuclear weapons, where the crisis can kill like a thousand times more people and happen like a hundred times faster than happened summer 1914.
Right. Over an island filled with Chinese people.
Having lived through a hinge point in history, how does that change how you read, let's say you're reading about World War I or something? Well, also, it's just not credible, right? Like, do you think the Chinese are sitting there thinking, okay, we know that Taiwan is completely existential for us. And America also thinks it's existential for them.
No, of course not. Of course, that's not what they're thinking, because it isn't.
So you can't go around threatening nuclear war over something where it's not actually a credible threat, where people think either it's complete bullshit or they are actually insane. Oh, but that is the entire strategy behind mutually assured destruction as well, right? And that worked.
Like to actually retaliate is kind of insane. But there, it was credible for America.
Like there, the argument for America was, we are defending the Western world. We have NATO.
There is a NATO agreement on mutual self-defense. And if you breach that and you attack one of us, then it means war against everyone.
That was a lot, lot, lot more credible than there's a little island off the Chinese coast of absolutely, it's nothing to do with us historically at all. It's full of Chinese people, but we're going to threaten potential nuclear war over it.
It's totally non-credible. And doing it makes you sound mad.
I was talking to a friend about this and he was defending extending the nuclear umbrella to Taiwan. And even if it works, it's kind of like having a girlfriend who says, if we break up, I'm going to burn down your house.
We better not break up. Yeah, I'm going to kill myself or something.
It's like, okay, well, I mean, okay, maybe you decide that day to do what she wants wants but you're also thinking she's mad and this is not sustainable yeah and not responsible you spent time in russia uh when you were a younger man uh you were trying to start an airline there right yeah what did you learn about russia and do you think the regime there is long run stable i learned a lot of things doing it i learned learned that Russia is a mafia state. I learned that London is treated, was treated back in the mid 90s as the Moscow taxi drivers called it, the laundry for the mafia state.
Something which people here have not wanted to face because there's a lot of money to be made out of the whole enterprise. Even in 2021, when I said that it's just crazy that we're still doing this, there was a lot of pushback, literally months before the Ukraine war started.
It was completely normal in London to defend the way in which we've handled the whole thing for the last 20 years. I also learned about incentives a lot.
So everything I had to do with the airline was a total fiasco. And one of the things I figured, I learned was, I, like many naive Westerners, got involved with it thinking, well, the people obviously want to make the airline work, right? Like, that's the whole point of having an airline.
It's a successful airline. Wrong.
Actually, what most Russians wanted to do was steal from the airline and move the money offshore. And I never realized that.
And a lot of the people involved with it didn't realize that. So it's very easy for Westerners.
Russia was full of Harvard MBA types flying in from JFK and arriving in Russia thinking that it was some kind of vaguely normal country. And they, like me, learned the hard way that it is not.
That lesson with Incentive, for example, is it like isomorphic to other institutions you've seen or is that specific to Russia? I mean, it's more crazy and insane. Everything is crazier and more insane in Russia.
But I think, I mean, it definitely helped me deal with, you know, you always learn a lot, I think, from total failures and having to confront the fact that you just like totally misunderstood what on earth you were getting into. And I completely misunderstood what I was getting into there at every level.
So I think it was very useful for me, actually, when I came back to Britain and then got involved with politics. I was much more careful about trying not to fool myself and trying to figure out what's real.
And not question my own assumptions about things. Right.
Speaking of which, a character you've highlighted who exemplifies that sort of epistemic humility, Bismarck, and you've done a deep dive on him. So I just want to ask you a bunch of questions, not only about him, but maybe just a study of history in general.
First of all, where in the world do you think Lee Kuan Yew or Bismarck type figure emerging as the leader of that country? Where do you think that's most likely today? I can imagine someone like that emerging in, I mean, actually, I can imagine someone like that emerging in China or Russia. Actually, it's much harder to imagine someone like that emerging in Britain or America or the Western world.
How come? I mean, they'd be crushed by the sister, right? You can imagine in China, some Machiavellian character coming through the CCP. I mean, in some sense, you could say, like, you know, she's like, has done that to some extent.
A Machiavellian character comes to exploit the system in a somewhat mafia way, manages to take over, and then Stalin style starts purging people

and manipulating the whole thing so that they acquire more and more power. The good thing about

the British and American system is that it's proved quite resistant to that sort of thing.

I love you. more and more power.
The good thing about the British and American system is that it's proved quite resistant to that sort of thing. But that hits upon a fundamental paradox, right? That our systems have been good at preventing the kind of catastrophe of Stalin-type person taking over.
But the very characteristics that make it very hard for a Stalin to take over also make it electronically incompetent as well.

Yeah, yeah. Or hard for a good statesman to take over as well.

When we're talking about different periods of history, you are somebody who's actually lived

through and participated at a high level in a hinge point in history with, you know,

masterminding Brexit and then as chief advisor doing COVID. What is it that you now understand

And I'll see you next time. at a high level in a hinge point in history with, you know, masterminding Brexit and then as chief advisor doing COVID.
What is it that you now understand about how history is written that you, when you were looking back at previous periods, how do you like think about what is written versus what actually happened, knowing how your time has been described in the press and in contemporary accounts? So almost everything, like close to 100% of the things written about me, what I was trying to do, what I thought, what I said, what I wanted to do, what I actually did, like approximately all of it is complete garbage. So it obviously affects how you see everything else.
It can't have any other effect. It was true in the Department of Education.
It was true in the referendum itself. It was true in Number 10.
So it definitely makes me much more skeptical about all kinds of details, I think. Whenever you read history, it definitely makes me think all the time, yeah, but that might easily be wrong and what else was actually happening behind the scenes.
Also, just how much is lost to it, right? If I think about my own time in doing the referendum or in number 10, close to 100% of the reality of conversations and motivations and calculations, it's basically lost to history. Like none of it was really recorded anywhere.
I mean, there might be some sketchy WhatsApp conversations here and there. The odd person keeps a diary, which can be useful for sure, but it was pretty rare, certainly amongst top people.
I mean, even if they keep it, I think they destroy it, right? Yeah, yeah. And I mean, especially we're in an age where so much is recorded, even if you don't try to.
Whereas if you look back at like Bismarck's time, there's not, you know, emails and so forth that you can dig up. Yeah, but it's a bit paradoxical out there.
So now those guys guys will constantly sending letters to each other right and a lot of those letters didn't do end up surviving because they just defiled in some paper archive somewhere and then 60 years later there's a war and people get their hands on them for us though like how much of key people's whatsapps between you know jared and trump or me and boris or all these sorts things, like how much of that digital archive actually will be saved and accessible? Like arguably less than in the old days. You were at the Give a Talk or participated in a panel at the Orwell Foundation about Bismarck.
And you had a quote there that I thought was so interesting. And I want you to explain it.
Bismarck's partly a story of how intelligence tries very hard to escape all constraints and all attempts by less intelligent people to force higher intelligence to align with certain goals and values are at best highly uncertain and dangerous. What did you mean by that? So it was prompted by studying Bismarck at the same time as having a lot of conversations with people about the whole AI alignment problem and whatnot.
And it just occurred to me one day that it's an interesting exercise to consider Bismarck's career through the prism of the AI alignment arguments. So here are all the safety features that we're going to try and create.

We can constrain it in this way. We can constrain it in that way.
If all else fails, we can try and kill it. Can we switch it off, et cetera, et cetera.
But if you look at his career, you basically see the AI alignment problem just actually living. You see something that's much more able than its competitors.
And it defines success fundamentally as expansion of its own power, which also means its own freedom of maneuver. And it treats all attempts to align its goals with broader goals as enemy action to be destroyed.
And it's highly effective at preemptively destroying them. So it deploys people trying to send the intelligence services to close it down.
It ends up taking over intelligence services and using them to blackmail its opponents and force them into suicide and exile. At every stage, every attempt to create safety features is defeated.
And the ultimate thing of like, just switch it off, switch it off as people start writing letters all across Europe. Essentially, they're saying switch it off, but they can't switch it off.
Well, it kind of works at the end, right? Well, it's human, so it gets really old. Right.
But who was the Kaiser that kicked him out? And in the end, the Kaiser says, you know, I think I can do without you. The Kaiser was wrong, of course, and everything immediately started going downhill for Germany thereafter.
And in some weird ways, also parallel to the AI argument, a lot of the key people around Europe started sort of wistfully saying, well, you know, it was a nightmare to deal with this terrible superhuman AI, but it wasn't a pirate. It wasn't insane.
Like, you could at least negotiate surrender, right? It wasn't just a berserk pirate. Yeah.
And some of them almost felt nostalgic for its rationality after it had gone oh you know you notice a really interesting another analogy here um is it's set up all these things that nobody understands these systems of alliances and relationships in europe and you can imagine like an ai advisor and you're like not sure what's going on but it's making i don't know maybe it's like a hedge fund manager that's ai and it's like making a lot of money and then you're like but i don't trust it i'm going to shut it off and then a few years later there's like a huge financial collapse because it was doing something you didn't realize that was super important you shut it off you didn't understand what it was doing that was super important you shut it off certainly all the shit that it tried to do goes to shit and you have world war one your interpretability program that's running across across it doesn't really work it doesn't It can't really explain to you right why it's doing these things yeah um and then you think oh well it all looks a bit murky i'll close it down and then yeah then you find out that actually the structure it built was super valuable yeah yeah that's such a great why is there not a definitive biography of bismarck out there well i think i would say there is really there's one by um there's a three volume one by a guy called Otto Flans. Oh, okay.
Done in the 80s, I think. Not very well known, but it's by far the best.
Okay, big picture. What is the cause of Britain no longer being the global superpower it once was? Is it decolonization? post-war socialism? Is it the war itself?

The productivity stuff started happening after 2005, but people have been talking about England declining for a long time. What is the big picture cause of that? Well, the most important thing, obviously, is World War I.
At the end of that, naval dominance gone, huge financial reserves poured into the mud of the trenches in France. I mean, all of Europe.
I mean, Europe's never recovered from it. Never mind just Britain.
So I think that was the single biggest element to it. Yeah, wasn't it like one in eight British men between like 20 and 40?

Or it was maybe even higher than that, died? In the years afterwards, saw the biggest transfer of property in Britain in basically 500 years, since Henry VIII separated us off from the Catholic church, the dissolution of the monasteries, and that huge shift in the 16th century. It was 500 years, and immediately after World War I, was a similar kind of epic shift as a consequence of that, the scale of death.
And also, you also see that echoed in, I did those blogs on Alan Brooks' diaries through World War II, and it's interesting, he keeps referring back to it as well, when he's constantly bemoaning another military disaster, and why the British army is not working so well. His answer is, well, of course, like a whole generation of great leaders was destroyed.
I'm curious why the opposite thing isn't more common, where you have all these generals who have seen World War I, maybe they're better at fighting World War II as a result. I mean, it seems like, I don't know, Hitler was a World War I officer.
And yeah, I mean, the World War II generation did seem special. Did the World War I experience help with them in any way? I mean, I don't know, and I'm not an expert, but it's striking that the view of contemporaries was lots of the best young people were killed.
And that's why now a lot of the senior echelons are not up to the job. One thing you've emphasized a lot over your writing and throughout your entire career is the need for basic research as a way to move England forward and maybe move the West forward.
But when you look at like England's GDP per capita, it's far behind the US. And one thing I was wondering about is like, maybe it makes sense for the US to be doing a lot of basic research to expand the frontier, but Britain doesn't even seem to be on the frontier.
At this point, if it's just about economic growth, it shouldn't just be copying the things that already work in the US instead of doing a whole bunch of basic research and hoping in like 20 years or something, it contributes to productivity growth or something. The answer is not simple, right? Britain needs to do a whole bunch of things so some of it is uh frontier research but that's only part of it part of the reason for that also is not just economic growth but also you know security and national independence etc etc like you know how much of europe in 20 years time is actually going to have meaningfully independent um capabilities in lots of.
And how much of its choice will only be, do we buy American or do we buy Chinese? Like if Britain wants to have its own choices, then it's going to have to build things. The science and technology staff is important for us to develop, but not just for economic reasons.
But it's also very, very far from a magic bullet, right? There's a whole bunch of stuff that we have to do that we started work on in 2020. The zoning laws are a crucial part of it.
The whole ecosystem around startups, right? So the applications of the research, that whole ecosystem is a nightmare in all sorts of ways. and it's one of the reasons why constantly great startups here end up selling out early to American companies.
All of that needs dealing with. There's just massive regulation of area after area after area, which throttles growth.
The whole housing market is a complete shit show. I mean, everywhere you look is bad.
Given that most attempts at fighting NIMBY and red tape and over-regulation have failed, even the one you attempted to fix planning, aka zoning in the UK, when you were chief advisor, what is the correct strategy to fighting NIMBY? Because it just seems like really hard to fight it head on. So I think a lot of people look for a magic bullet of communication whereby we come up with the way, we've come up with some equivalent of take back control, but for planning, and then we persuade everyone and the public will shift and start cheering house building.
I don't think that's realistic. And I don't think that's the answer.
In fact, in 2020, we did actually make some changes to the planning laws, but I think it's instructive how we did it. We didn't talk about it at all.
I actually basically had a communications blackout on the whole thing. And it's because talking about it is extremely hard to do, even if you're very good at communications.
So it was completely pointless trying to do with the current, that number 10 and that prime minister and that conservative party. So my approach to it then was just do it, don't talk about it and talk about other things.
And so we did actually manage to get various things done then, but without most people even noticing.

I think overall, though, if you're really trying to do at a big scale, the actual answer is that you just do it.

You focus public communications largely on other things.

When people actually see the effects of it with growth and houses they can afford and businesses starting and growing and thriving local areas and whatnot, then you can point to that, but you're not doing it in a theoretical way. It's not politicians promising things.
It's being able to point to real change in their areas and say, look at what's happened. Now, do you want to go back? Do you want the people who don't like this to take over? You see what I mean? I think the idea of coming up with some kind of agenda on it and then trying to persuade the public about mass deregulation and mass housing is a fool's errand.
Yeah, let's talk about education a bit. You mentioned earlier that that's one of the things you're working on now, but also you have a big history here.
You were at the Ministry of Education.

And while there, you wrote a very interesting report on an Odyssean education. And this is one of the quotes from that that I thought was pretty compelling.
we need leaders with an understanding of Thucydides and statistical modeling

who have read The Brothers Karamazov and The Quark and the Jaguar

who can feel Kipling's Kim and succeed in Tetlock's Good Judgment project. An edition education focused on humans' biggest and most important problems and explained connections between them to train synthesizers.
This is a very interesting idea. Do you want to explain a bit about what the idea behind the education was? Politics is the hardest thing, right? It's the most complicated.
There's a reason why it's just constant failures, much harder than the hardest startup. The people who can do well at it at the top level, you need to be able to look at lots of different things and have some kind of sense for them.
If you're just looking at it from a narrow perspective. So generally speaking, the people who are doing it have done history degrees or politics, philosophy, economics degrees, Oxford type stuff.
and then they've gone into the world of politics and government and it's just an incredibly narrow way of looking at the world.

It means there's huge skills that you don't have. then they've gone into the world of politics and government.
And it's just an incredibly narrow way

of looking at the world. It means there's huge skills that you don't have, intellectual skills you don't have, practical skills you don't have.
You don't understand how things actually get done. You don't understand how regulation actually has its effects because you don't see at the coalface what it's like starting a business um or scaling a business my view is much stronger having been in number 10 that uh that what i wrote 10 years ago was correct that um especially having gone through covid and the horrors around that the way to deal with that is to have different kinds of skill, different kinds of people with different kinds of skills.
But you also need some people who can look across multiple domains at the same time. So I think it's not a surprise, for example, that one of the most useful people in COVID was someone who'd done a physics PhD, was now working in AI, but had also built a business and had worked with that business in Whitehall.
So they could see, they could understand a lot of the actual, they could understand some of the difficult science around COVID. They knew what it's like actually running a business.
They understood the interface between business world and the government. They were familiar with all of those different worlds.
And that meant that they were much better able at looking at the overall problems than the average MP, the average senior official, the average special advisor, et cetera, et cetera. Is this ability to synthesize across fields something you can actually train in something

analogous to Plato's Academy?

Or is it just that you have to hire people who have it?

Because the reason I ask is, one thing I was thinking while reading this, you have a lot

of famous examples in history of scientists and mathematicians.

You know, there's scientists who understand like very complicated things, but they don't understand like the very basic insight in like Hayek's knowledge problem and they're socialists, right? Or they don't understand the basic game theory and they're pacifists. Whereas it's just like, you know, they understand, they can understand complicated things, but having that sort of ability to transfer between, I understand power laws, therefore I understand like the power of scaling in AI or I understand exponentials, therefore I understand how bad a pandemic could be.
That's an additional thing that's hard to train. It totally depends on temperament and personality, right? Two of the most interesting intellectual people of the 20th century are John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel, who were both friends, fled Europe because of the Nazis and ended up in Princeton.

Both extraordinary minds. Both did things of stunning originality.
Von Neumann was completely at home in the world of Washington, could also go and deal with bureaucrats and navigate the corridors of the White House, give presentations to politicians, understood how let's have a pre-meeting about this in order to make sure that so-and-so understands that. And so then the question is presented to the president in the right order so that this guy doesn't say that before this person says that, et cetera, et cetera, right? All the kind of political skills you need to actually get something done and avoid your meeting turning into a shit show.
Kurt Gödel is like the opposite. If you're going to put people on a graph, Kurt Gödel would be like the exact opposite end of that, right? Famously, totally useless in every practical way and menace to himself.
So yes, you want people with great intellectual ability, but as you say, some of those people can be highly functional in a political environment, and some of them are completely catastrophic. Yeah.
But it seems like, I don't know how you train a John Mann Neumann, because then he also assisted the US in thinking about like Cold War game theory and things like that. Whereas is it just easier to hire those people? And actually, maybe a different way to ask this question is, does the UK train these sort of generalist, maybe journalists is not the right word, but like technical people who can synthesize across fields? Is it just that they're trained in the UK, but they go to the private sector or emigrate? Or is it just that the UK doesn't train them to the same extent as like the US does? I think elite universities now definitely don't train this sort of thing.
The way that I think about it is this. It's easy to imagine creating new courses for like 17 to 23-year-olds where they do a much broader mix of intellectual subjects, where they study a broader mix of intellectual subjects.
They read some through cities, but they also understand some basics about statistics and Tetlock type stuff. But also you shove, but instead of them just sort of going off to do, you know, waste their time and some holidays, they also go off and work at SpaceX or some kind of startup or with the military or in a hospital ward, ER room.
And they're moving between these worlds of the theoretical and the intensely practical constantly. Now, that won't be to everyone's temperament, right? Some people have a temperament where they find that interesting and they'll get a lot of value out of it.
A lot of people won't. But so you have to think of it in multiple legs.
So one thing is create those courses and that will find you a set of people. But there's another set of people who are, let's say, Tim Gowers, a Fields Medalist mathematician at Cambridge, right? He's gone through one whole thing.
Now, are you going to send him off on some course? No. But could people like that be brought into government to help in all sorts of ways? Yes.
If they spent time working in government on some practical problems, would they develop a much better understanding of how government actually works and therefore be able to come up with new insights about things? Of course they will. I don't mean they all will, because some of them would be like, good, all right, and just completely hopeless in that environment, and it would be unfair on everyone and them to involve them in it.
But Tim Gowers would be a good example of someone who personally could cope with the environment and I think would bring great value to it. So it's not, I don't think there's just one thing, right? What we need is multiple experiments with different pathways.
Some of it is bringing in older, established elite talent and then mixing them up in the system. Some of it is training younger elite talent differently.
There's no magic, there's no magic bullet to it. You have to try a bunch of things at the same time, some people will respond very well to an odd mix of theoretical intellectual pursuits and intensive practical things.
And that is definitely something worth trying to train and definitely can be trained. How does PPE, politics, philosophy, economics, how does that fuck up the people who go through it? Because I mean, basically, is it like almost every prime minister has gone through it? And even US presidents, Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar, and he went through it.
What is a way of thinking it instills that you find problematic? I think it just it encourages this whole kind of word cell bluffing, basically, right? That everything becomes just a sort of that that is like, oh yeah, like you,

you spent a week, you skim through a few books, you come up with some like vaguely plausible stuff. And if you seem, um, you know, with a bit of, you know, with good manners and a bit of social polish, then suddenly it all seems plausible.
And, and, and you, and you're all surrounded by people who operate in exactly the same way.

So you have a room full of polished social word cells. It's just a very, very, it's a very bad set of people then to throw a problem like COVID.
And also it encourages them to think that the kind of like the plausible sounding few sentences to get through this conversation is actually what's important rather than what's the truth, what's the actual answer to the problem, how you actually get to implement this over many years. Everything like that is completely disdained.
And it points to a general problem with our system, right? I found it just... One of the most important things is that everything to do with operations and management and actually getting things done is the lowest status thing in Whitehall.
The highest status thing is, A, bullshit about political strategy and inverted commas, and media and giving interviews. Everyone wants the word strategy in their job title, and it's practically always like bullshit in their job title and shouldn't be in the job title.
The job will be approved by removing the word from their job title. And nobody wants to be on logistics, operations, and actually making sure that something happens.
And that's at the core of why so many things work the way they do. And you can even just see it in the whole policy process, the high status thing is writing the policy and then spinning it to the media.
The totally low status thing is, what are the actual implementation details? Has someone already tried to do this in like eight different countries in the last four years and each time it's been a disaster like no one cares about that that's left to the much lower status jobs and none of the senior people will pay attention to it and they're actually just like formally separated so one of the things that we did in 2020 was we said in 2020, one of the ways in which the number 10 system should change is the policy people should be brought together and actually physically sit with the management people, which is a completely revolutionary idea. Because that way, when you're thinking up the ideas in the first place, you're immediately from the beginning talking to the people whose job it is, like, will this actually work? Rather than what happens now is these people sit around, they go to bullshit seminars, they talk to journalists, they talk to MPs, they publish a paper, it's actually full of holes, it doesn't work.
That paper then goes off to the implementation people, the policy people then move on to whatever their next thing is, the management implementation people look at it and go, well, this is just not going to work for all the following reasons, but it's their job to make it work. They then have to go back and then start arguing with, but we already decided that we were going to do this like nine months ago.
Yeah, but it can't work. But so our idea was, if you put it together, then you actually find out on day one or day four, oh, actually, this is a stupid idea and it won't work for the following reasons.
We have to do it this way instead. No one cares about that.
It goes back to what do people care about? No one actually cares if it doesn't work. Yeah, the OODA loop is broken, right? It's like you're debugging a program, but you can only do it a month after you write the program or something.
Yeah, exactly. Imagine if you could only debug the program like 18 months after you wrote the program.
What do effective altruist and rationalist types get most wrong about politics? They don't understand how low the caliber of the people are in politics. They don't understand like a fundamental golden rule, which is the people in politics are almost never actually trying to solve the problem and don't care about solving the problem.
I have constant conversations with ER types where they think that the political people they're going to talk to really care about solving problem X, which is fundamentally incorrect. So it's not surprising that a lot of their plans go wrong.
I think that they are also susceptible to the idea that elites are more rational and the voters are more dumb and easily manipulated by emotions. Whereas in fact, the truth is the exact opposite, in my opinion.
That it's educated elites are by far the easiest to manipulate with emotional propaganda. And the voters are much tougher to fool.
But I think the rationalists think it's the other way around. Conventionally, you're seen as or thought of as combative.
I mean, in this interview, you've been very polite and pleasant and everything. But does the fact that you're seen as combative, does that help you, you know, maybe get your way when you're in government or something? And is it calculated? It's not calculated.
I don't know if combative is the right word. I think like, I think the fact that people inside the system know that I actually do have priorities and I do actually care about them and I don't care what the media says.
And I have an extremely high tolerance

for everyone going crazy

in order to actually get what I want.

Definitely, obviously has an effect

because people will think,

well, maybe we should do a deal with him.

He cares a lot about blah.

Maybe we should just let him do blah

and see if we can persuade him.

We'll help you with this

and maybe you could help us with something else.

Having priorities,

These are the best practices. see if we can persuade him to, you know, we'll help you with this and maybe you could help us with something else.
Having priorities, actual priorities, is incredibly rare in politics. Almost no MPs have them, or practically by definition.
Not worrying what the media says and not worrying about everyone hating you, I think, is a very powerful advantage. Insiders constantly say, all the way through the referendum and all the way through number 10, these people are just completely crazy.
They don't know what they're doing. It's all going to fall down on their heads.
That definitely was an advantage because it just means that they constantly fooled themselves and undermined what they were doing. And they didn't learn from 2016.
The mistakes they made in 2016, they just totally repeated in 2019. And in a system where people don't have priorities, don't actually care about policy, somebody who does, it's got to seem strange to them in their world.
Okay, final question. What does pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will mean to you? If you look at history, then you have to expect that what happens to everyone else is likely to happen to us, i.e.
disaster. Yeah.
But that's not a reason for giving up. You have to try even though you don't think it's going to work.
Dominic, this is a huge pleasure. I honestly learned so much.
I mean, you really can't get this anywhere else. Having somebody who is as thoughtful as you inside government so that you can have both a sort of a higher level intellectual picture, but also the level of detail and knowledge of what actually happened and the strategy and information of it.
It's just like, I couldn't get it from any other interviewee. So this is a, this is a huge pleasure.
I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much.

I really enjoyed it.

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