#819 - Dominic Cummings - The Secrets Behind A Crumbling British Government

26:51And these institutions are pathological. The institution has destroyed the good things. So what happened in 2020, we built the vaccine task force, world leading, white all saw this is terribly embarrassing so close to down. We built sewage monitoring for pathogens, crucial not just for COVID, but for all future pandemics and for bioterrorism and everything else, right. World leading thing everyone says, we've got what we did is brilliant, what happened, they've shut it down. You go through like valuable thing, have to valuable thing now, the institutions actually attack it because it's embarrassing to all white told.

27:32So I think tourists keep failing, labor keep failing, white told keep failing. There'll be some improvements of labor over the tourists here and there, but I think the picture generally will be pretty grim. Not as grim as in inside the EU, but I think it will be depressing if the system is left to itself. So then the question is, the question is, is it, will Brick and obviously is in many, many ways constantly downstream of what happens in the States, we have the kind of communist transmativeness sparks off and grows in San Francisco go and then head to West, head east and then hopso over the Atlantic and get to here and then similarly you have like the backlash started to California, head east and then the question is like will that benefit, will that help across the Atlantic?

28:29So will there be something in sort of equivalent to what you've seen with Elon and the other people, another part of America saying okay, Washington is so dysfunctional we've got to get involved. If Britain's going to change the course, it needs a subset of elite talent to stop what they're doing now and to say, okay, we're actually going to get involved with politics and government and force the Bromant and Old System to change. How would you make politics or government more attractive to young talent, to the people that you want to bring into it?

29:14Well, so at the moment you have these old civil service hierarchies, right, which are they're run by the absolute worst elements of the HR department, and they recruit almost entirely internally. And one of the way, what this does is it creates a kind of like anti -talent ratchet. So if you deal with a British civil service, what you see is you see a whole bunch of people between like 25 and 35 who are really, really able, a lot of energy, a lot of brains, a lot of kind of can -do spirit. What happens is these people are almost all leave between like 35 and 45 and the reason is they spend the first 10 years looking at it they do a bunch of stuff and then they look at their bosses and they look at the HR system and how everyone gets promoted and they basically recoil with horror and they leave.

30:14So almost every single one of the most able young people in the civil service that I've worked with over the last 20 years, almost everyone is gone. It feels like the reverse of the Peter principle in a way, you know how people get promoted in positions where they're good at their job until they suck at their job, which is why the world is filled with people who suck at their jobs. This is almost like an early warning system against the Peter principle. You're seeing all of these people this slow march toward potential promotion toward potentially a position of power or respect or remuneration or whatever.

30:50And these people are just ripping the ejectic cord to get out before that happens. Yeah, that's exactly it. That's exactly it. And that's why you have this kind of like collapse over COVID, right? You certainly, you look around the room and the whole bunch of the senior people actually responsible for crisis management in a pandemic. There just a lot of them are completely clowns and the whole system falls apart. What's the reason for this ossified old guard worst parts of HR department being in charge? Is it just that there's no market forces acting? So the sort of typical competitive dynamics that would happen in a world of business, entrepreneurialism, capitalism and stuff.

31:32They're just not acting. It's that kind of the primary force. Yeah, I think so. I think a lot of people on the right make a mistake and they think like the big difference is private the public. But I don't think that's really the key thing exactly. because you see, I think the first thing is all really big organizations after a bit of time end up having very similar dynamics, right? You look at Google now and you listen to people talking about Google, right? What do they say? They're basically like, well, it's like a sort of dead government bureaucracy. It's incredibly hard for anything to get done.

32:06The founders are no longer involved. Life pages often is yacht, whatever. So this happens in the private sector too, but of course the huge differences that, okay, Google ossifies, but then Sam Altman is over at OpenAI, releasing the papers produced by Google and so it's only shit. Like, if you see this paper on Transformers from the Google team, like we can go to the following things, right? So he's got this very dynamic start -up, very dynamic character, Sam, and they go and build something in a short period of time. That's like the big difference, right? You haven't gone by kind of start an ecosystem in government where people couldn't go, right, okay, it's a bottom of the file, There's a joke or the Ministry of Defense's joke we can build something different in government It's not how it works and therefore the only real creative force or disruptive force that can happen is political The only people with the power to change it the civil service can't change themselves And the civil service system because of a HR system only promotes internally So it just gets worse worse over time the only force to can change that is a political force that says because we demand and we are going to insist and use our political authority to change out these things work.

33:14Historically, the only way you can really do that is you have to just keep closing all of stuff down and you have to create new things that can bring in new talent from outside the system. But that's very threatening to the people that are in there. Exactly. A, it's very threatening to the people that are in there. So they fight like hell to basically blackmailable additions into, well, if you try and do this, it'll be war. But you also have the other cultural problem which we discussed earlier on, which is the MPs have just lost interest in it, the MPs have lost interest in the business of actual government, and they're actually happy not really running things, right?

33:56So British government now is basically a pretendkin show. So the ministers walk up Downing Street, they smile at the cameras, the media pretends that the cabinet discussions are actually where power is and actually where the big disc, and it's like big rowing cabinet about, you know, policy X. But the reality is cabinet is a completely potemkin exercise. X is not decided in cabinet. X is decided somewhere else, but the MPs are okay with that. Right? Everyone's kind of in on the game. The MPs are okay with that, the media is okay with that, and the officials are okay with that because the officials have the real power, and they will want to actually charge with it.

34:34So they're perfectly happy for the crown show to focus on the ministers. What do you mean when you say the officials and elsewhere who are the officials, where is elsewhere? Who does run the British government? So a huge amount of... So if you want to ask that where's the real power now, but the cabinet secretary, right, an official in that originally the job was literally the secretary to the cabinet who would sit there and write notes on what the cabinet ministers are saying, right? When the job was created in 1917, now that cabinet secretary is much, much more powerful than any government minister of Paul from the prime minister.

35:13Right, so the cabinet and his deputies in all sorts of ways are like 10x more powerful than government ministers are. So cabinet is normally the place where power is, and normally the place where critical decisions are taken, but in fact, now vast amounts of the most important things are actually done in the cabinet office and the power is actually wielded by the cabinet secretary. If a bomb goes off in London tonight, the cabinet secretary will be called before the home secretary is called, A whole set of wiring of power goes links to the cabinet secretary, not to before a secretary or to the home secretary.

35:55And the cabinet secretary decides what information is allowed to be seen. If someone's got to, if M .I .5, I've got to tap the phone of some of the secretary of state for defense, because people are worried that that person might be like shaking some Russian agent or something. then it's not the whole secretary that like you know gets to see all of these intricate operational details with the intelligence services This is like compartmentalized and it's done in the cabin office and there'll be a few words with the with the PM But the PM will be the only political person essentially has any involvement with it So power is like unseen power is shifted inside the system Very largely to officials doesn't I'm not saying it's all Potemkin's not purely Potemkin in the British system The Prime Minister does actually have a lot of power constitution if they choose to exercise it But since Mr.

36:44Stature PMs have basically given up on using vast amounts of their power and don't actually exercise it What is Potemkin you mentioned it a couple of times? It's the so it's a famous Russian Russian guy like centuries ago essentially it means So in this process, what would happen is the saw would leave Subitrisburg and go and visit somewhere to see what was going on. But instead of actually sorting out the village, they kind of paint a facade down each side of the village so the saw would go through the middle and he'd look left and right and the saw would go, oh right, yeah everything in the village seems to be fine.

37:21In fact it's just like they paid the front, they paid the front, the picture is completely fake, right? behind the picture, the village is actually a complete... So, couldn't you hear about these tours of North Korea where the journalists are being taken right? If you imagine that North Korea photo shoot is what I mean by... I'm not... ...by sort of... ...potemkin politics. Cool. ...where the picture that you're shown on TV on the BBC is essentially completely or largely fake. What was being in British government like you step into those doors as someone that wants to make things happen that you know has desires and ambitions capitalistically for success in terms of technology what was it actually like being in the midst of that machine it was um was basically very depressing um because

38:29Because you have on the one hand, you have this incredibly centralized system that in all sorts of ways has too much power. But in all sorts of other ways, it's very hard, it's very hard, it's a special advisor which is what I was to actually get things done because you don't have actual executive authority yourself. So, although if you look at the media, the media reports about me are like all powerful Dominic Cumming, second -most -partful person in the country, blah blah blah, a lot of, if you'll see endless things in newspapers to that effect. But that's just not, it's not true, it's not how the thing works.

39:04It's not a single big, the most junior official in the country, I could not give a direct order to and say, you should go and do the following thing. So your kind of influence is all very, very indirect and it only exists to the extent that people think you're actually speaking for the PM.

39:25It was fundamentally depressing because on the one hand you have a sort of, you have a depressing piece of things. On the one hand you have ministers in a cabinet that's just not interested in the most important questions. They're completely obsessed with all the bullshit in the media every day. That is their only life and only, only interest. And you have, as I said, you have a lot of very able young officials, but then all of bosses or most of their bosses are in nightmare. And you have just these broken bureaucracies that can't actually get anything done and which spend almost all of their time just trying to defend their own power and budgets, not actually doing what they're there to do, to serve the public.

40:13And that's, it's very depressing when you see that, when you see that up close of me dying. Well, I suppose from the outside, everybody hopes, even if the government appears up front, you know, Biden decrepit and unable to speak correctly, or Boris is this kind of blabbering big, bifurny guy that's sort of rolling through press conferences, you hope that behind the scenes, there's some competence somewhere. And I suppose the magician showing you how the sausage and you're getting in there and going, oh, it's just as competent behind the scenes. I imagine that that must be quite disenchanting and dispiriting.

40:53I think. So you know, like, you know what happens in J .S. Bonfield, right? There's like, often a senior J .S. Bonfield but a bond is like walking along and then suddenly someone opens the door and then suddenly there's like a hundred ninjas doing their martial arts exercises. So like, you know, we're like, oh, right, that's where the ninjas are. But when you go to government, you realize there isn't a door and there are any ninjas either. It's sort of sitting there. And it's actually literally just like, yes, minister, right? You see what's the old TV show from the 70s? Yes, that's basically like a documentary of like actually how government works.

41:27So of course, I'm not being completely, you always have to remember that like what I'm talking about is like 98 % of the picture, right? There's like, obviously, always a few brilliant people, one of the privileges of doing my job was, I spent a lot of time dealing with some of the people in the armed forces. I went and had meetings with British Special Forces. There's extraordinary people there doing extraordinary things. Obviously, I'm not saying that every part of the British system is rubbish, there are obviously pockets of extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. But that kind of height was the tragedy because you look at these people and the system is the enemy of them.

42:05right wherever you go, like the M .O .D. is the enemy of special forces. The Department of Health is the enemy of these police officers. Exactly. Competence is kryptonite. Yeah. Exactly. One of the most surprising things that I learned from you is just how much of Britain is run via WhatsApp. Yeah. Yeah. And that's partly of course, that itself displays like a really weird thing. So when I arrived in Dallas, we in summer 2019, like no, basically no one ever believes me when I say this. I put it in my COVID evidence under oath, but no one believed it. When I arrived in in in in in in in in July 2019, there wasn't even a file sharing system, right?

42:48There's not even so. If you go back and look at all of Boris's statements on COVID, right, like announcing locked out huge huge dramatic things that don't want to see in 70 years, they were done literally on my private Gmail account because the only way you could get the Prime Minister crucial advisors, the crucial scientific advisors, the press office, all able to end at the same document at the same time was to use someone's private Gmail account. So a one -man starter, a lot of ways, Chris, your starter, doing your podcast has better tech and tools than are available to the British Prime Minister, spending like a truly in the equity and British taxes, right?

43:25That's the insanity of the system. What is the state of information flow efficiency in the British government? I have friends that are doctors, they tell me that the NHS still largely runs on Windows XP and that you've got to fax things around. And you think, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you know, that's only people's health and them staying alive. What about government? Surely government can't be so inefficient. No, no, it's very much the same. it's like the computers there look like they're out, you know, they look like they're sort of like 2005 windows, you know, windows offices where it all looks like it's like or anything like that is basically, it's basically pretty shabby.

44:08Now there have been one of the few good things about COVID. So obviously I wrote about a lot of this before going into number 10 to 2019, everyone pooped, we don't care about data, we don't care about technology, Boba. One of the good things about COVID is that some of these issues did go more mainstream. It's spring 2020. So when the first wave COVID hit, right, and you're approaching the first night map, the thousands of people starting to die a day, the actual information system for the British Five Minister was, I would go into a little office, I would wheel this whiteboard along the corridor number 10.

44:46I'd put it in the cabinet room and the British Prime Minister would sit down and the head of the NHS would read out from scraps of paper on a bit of paper that he'd written down from fax machines. The last fax is operating. You're kidding me. I am not kidding you. Right? I said this under oath so you know like perjury if it's not true. Simon Stevens had the NHS is reading things out from scraps of paper. He's got a form faxes and I am scribbling on a whiteboard. These numbers that he's reading out and then And getting my iPhone out of my pocket and going times two times two times two, then scribbling out the numbers from these and then saying, try minister, that means the number of people in hospital in three weeks is going to be, I don't know if we're looking around guy, what the fuck is he, that can't be true, what's he run about?

45:28Just like double it for four times and that's what that's where we're going to be in two or three weeks. That was the information system. Now we brought in a bunch of people who to work on this and within like eight weeks, So normally, if you say, how do you fix this without the NHS, right? It would take five, 10 years, cost 15 billion quid, and then be a total shit show. That would be the normal story. We actually built this new system completely for the NHS in about six -ish weeks, and actually had a state -of -the -art system. So we went from faxes, scraps of paper, me scribbling stupidly on a whiteboard, like all the beds, all the ventilators, how many beds were freed, and we managed to do that in like six, eight weeks.

46:19So one of the few good things about COVID was that some of these things went more mainstream, and officials actually saw for themselves the power of technology, the power of actually having modern tools, how it helps decision makers, how it helps better management. Also the danger of inefficiency, I suppose, because the consequences are actually dire for once. Exactly. Exactly. They confronted with the consequences of shite .it. We have basically blind what thousands of people die and we don't understand where, where, how, or what to do about it. The UK COVID -19 inquiry released its module one report only a few days ago.

46:56Did you get chance to read that? What do you think? No, I haven't read it. I'm afraid. I've been the inquiry has been incredibly depressing and in lots of ways it's just like adding misinformation and like another layer of fake to the whole thing. I mean you have the extraordinary sight of scientists have tripped in one after the other, saying under oath, well on Friday the 13th of March I believe the following thing and I didn't understand why number 10 was blah blah blah blah, right? Saying this under oath. But sitting on YouTube is a video of them on BBC News on Friday the 13th of March. That is like they say literally 180 degrees, I'd opposite.

47:41Not once ever in the entire inquiry to the lawyers and the judge have a say, your statements to us today under oath, Professor So -and -So are 180 degrees opposite of what you actually said that day. So we'll not say you're lying, we're not. Say you've got to go to prison for burjory, but like we have to get to the bottom of like this has to be explained, right? Instead everyone's just gone, oh right, okay, I just accepted it all. And And there's an example, after example, after example, unfortunately where the inquiry, the inquiry basically wants to say the whole thing is the product of like more on Boris and more on my handcock and they want to blame those two for everything.

48:22Now of course those two did make a lot of mistakes and like but no one's been more critical of those two than me. But if you actually want to do government better in future and if you actually want to get to the truth, you can't just have this process where you say, you know, where you try and dump all the blame on them and then pretend that the rest of the system actually worked fine. Is that the inquiry being incompetent or are they willfully allowing a narrative to permeate that is appropriate for the outcome that they want?

48:58It's very hard to know these things right, unless you're in the room talking to them, it's very hard to know. But you mean in the room, it seemed like they pushed and poked and were able to sort of throw some sharp things at you. Yeah, they did with me, but they haven't with the officials, and they haven't with the scientists, right? They've let a whole bunch of people give evidence without poking holes in it. And also, they just haven't called a whole load of people. So there's a whole bunch of people who were in critical roles who have just never been asked to even to give a statement, never mind to turn up and be interrogated.

49:39So it's very hard to reconcile that with a set of people who are actually trying to get to the truth. Like the head of the Civil Continuities Unit, the actual cabinet office entity in charge of course is management for a pandemic. right? Obviously you have to have that official in and you have to question very carefully what they say. Never even appear. Never mind question badly, just hasn't appeared to answer the questions in the module that I was in. I found it so funny watching the highlights from your, maybe one of your multiple run -ins with the COVID inquiry where your WhatsApp messages or your text messages get brought up.

50:22And there's some spicy language in there. It's the kind of language that you send to people when you just need to get things done or when you're in a mate's WhatsApp chat or whatever it might be. It did read quite a lot like a thick of it sketch. It read like, I'm under a new Chi, had actually put it together. But on the flip side, obviously I don't know the ins and outs, but I can imagine if you're a northern guy working with a bunch of fucking incompetent people who seem to be incapable of actually getting anything done, that you're going to begin to dial up that rhetoric and just speak unencumbered, sort of straight from brain to fingertips into WhatsApp chat to try and say like, this is what I'm feeling right now, I'm in wartime, don't get in the fucking way, it's not time for airs or graces.

51:10And yeah, I just, it really resonated, I think, with a lot of the, I used to run nightclubs in the Northeast of the UK. And if we're doing Halloween and there's 5 ,000 people trying to get into two nightclubs on the big mark in Newcastle, you know, that is the sort, that those are precisely the messages that I'm sending to the boys. Like, where the fun of the barrier is, who do I need to kick in the nuts to be able to get this to be sorted? It's just, it's that kind of style. Now, in the, in the cold harsh light of day, five years later or four years later, doesn't sound great when it's read out with some guy's student Ty on pointing at you who's sat looking sheepish in front of a microphone.

51:48But yeah, I just, I thought it was a very reminiscent for me. So I think it's well right. So if you take, you know, a few of those messages that got the most attention. I'd say two things about those messages, right? The major presented into a lot of them as if I was swearing at officials, but in fact, they were one -to -one messages between me and the Prime Minister. They weren't me shouting at some official, you fucking idiot, do blah blah blah, right? It was me screaming at the PM saying, this is what. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, the whole kind of media focus on that itself was very revealing right because it's like, oh, coming to this language is a poorly to the Prime Minister.

52:31But no one paid attention to the actual content of what I was talking about. If you take the one that was people were most appalled by, by me, me, me criticizing a particular official right, the actual issue in play there was that the cabinet office was taking officials working on vaccines and testing as we went into the second wave or vaccines and testing to deal with a cabinet office HR fuckup from a year earlier. Right? So you're like, you're facing thousands of people more dying in the way in wave two in September. You're desperately trying to get vaccines going and testing going to try and stop the Saturday.

53:09And the people actually in charge of doing this are coming along and taking the staff away and say, oh no, we've got this HR fuckup with a bunch of lawyers and we've go work on that instead. Right? That's the actual scandal. Not me, you know, using, using swear words to describe someone to the prime minister. The actual scandal is the actual scandal, right? But again, neither the the inquiry and the media want to, you know, want to focus on, want to focus on my background, which rather than how the system works. I don't know, it's so this sort of weird, performative empathy, upstanding, prim and proper approach to decorum.

53:48And I don't know, it just seems so detached in many ways. Can you deliver these messages without the requisite swearing that goes along with them? Yeah, you can. But you're right, it just seems to me to be another example of people focusing on all of the wrong things. Now, that's not to say that they've not focused on some of the right things. It's at other points, but fuck me. Like, is that really the most important thing? Think about the language that was used here. God, there was people dying. Does that really matter? Does the language matter? Exactly. And of course, like, as I said, you know, when I'm actually in meetings, having meetings with people, of course, I'm not like, shouting and swearing at these people, they're They're part of meetings and it's like, right, you do this, you do that, you do the other.

54:35But the carbon, the way in which the inquiry in the media tried to present it is, is here. Like, oh, that's how meetings are conducted at number 10. And again, like, it's all part of a fake story. So they want to show me, oh, well, because number 10 has these crazy meetings with coming shout, it's very people like, that's why things went wrong. No, the messages will want to almost just the PM. They're not meetings. And you're not focusing on the actual issue. So it's like a double fake away again. And it's like, they want to create a fake story. They want people to focus on the fake story. They don't want to get to the heart of why on earth is the entity responsible for crisis management and saving thousands of people's lives?

55:12Actually, like ditching that to work on HR cookups from the Earth completely around them. Yeah, speaking of fake, you've got this new breaking K -fabe series thing where you say that the news is faker than WWE. What do you mean by that? So it's like, you'll know who I mean, but I'll just explain for some of your audience. So this is a legendary music producer in LA, as you call it, Rick Rubin, obviously you'll know. And it was Rick Rubin who actually said this. Rick Rubin was asked about how he would be like this and about politics and then used what, and Rick Rubin said, well, I can't think of a big WWE fan, but the more the older I get and more of the political news I watch, the more my attitude is that wrestling is real, and it's the news that's fake.

56:04And what we should do is you should start watching political news on CNN or read video times as if it's a WWE script, and then you'll actually understand what's going on much better. And I thought, like that's, that's actually, it takes an artist to kind of get to the heart of the political issue. And it sounds kind of crazy when you first say it, but then look at just what happened with Biden. Right? For two years, if you talk to a swing voter farmer on 30 grand living in Missouri, in a focus group, you would say, well, the president clearly is like senile. He's shuffling around walking into walls.

56:48He's shaking hands with the air. I don't understand what these crowns are watching to do. like it's just ludicrous having a president like that is it's like my grandfather when he got seen early can't do the job right that was what the uninformed people who watched no news thought the story in the New York Times believed by the best informed people in Washington was the president super sharp in private like he smashes out sharp as a attack and then the first debate happens and all the and the New York Times are watching you post a full of full of people going oh my God, this is unbelievable. Like I'm shocked, shock, shock from staff as briefing from inside the White House, right?

57:25So you've actually got a situation in which staff as briefing from inside the White House are giving statements about the president's mental health showing that they're actually less informed than someone who watches no news and just watches TikTok for like five minutes a day driving a tractor in Michigan. Yeah, that's that shows that like Rick Rubin is right. Rick Rubin is right. he should have been the guy that was advising everyone. Yeah, it's, I realized during that period that to me, making jokes about Biden's senility on an episode felt so obvious that it was hacky. It was so old news and so...

58:05Yeah, exactly. That I wouldn't, I avoided doing it because it felt like a cheap shot, not cheap fake, a cheap shot. And then, and then to realize that the fucking veils fall from people's eyes when he has that debate with Trump. And then to hear this totally dickless set of assertions by people in the media who now can do this sort of like faux criticism thing where they can seem like they're stepping up and pushing back against the Democrats and the party and the president that they've been running cover for for the last two or three years saying that it's cheap fake, saying that it's whatever.

58:41Well, it's obvious. There's no cost to you holding this opinion now. There's no cost at all because everyone's seen that the emperor is wearing it, no clothes. Is this Ben? Ben Usher, Ben, somebody wrote this great article about common knowledge. And the common knowledge is not just, it's not good enough simply for people to know a thing. They also have to believe that everybody else also knows that thing. And when you have this huge, big fireworks display showing the problems that the president is facing at the moment, anybody that then comes out and says, oh, it's It's unbelievable. We can't support Biden with the way that he's going, well, yeah, everybody knows this now.

59:20It's the same thing with free speech. Free speech is only important for people that disagree with your view. Because of course you're going to want all of the people who agree with your view to have fucking free speech. Yeah, it was so, God, it really made me realize just how much there are kind of two worlds of people. There was one world of people who thought it was so obvious it was hacky to talk about and another world of people for whom this was a revelation. Yeah, exactly. And even more weird in a way, but it's like the world which is most diluted about actual core reality is the set of people who spend all of their time supposedly at the absolute central power talking to the power people, right?

1:00:03So the closer you were to being an editor of the New York Times or the Bosch Post or CNN Bureau at DC, the more likely you were to say completely insane things about mental health. I wonder whether that was running cover rather than being ignorant. Obviously, it's going to be difficult to know, but I get the sense that anybody that had been around him knew as opposed to them being ignorant and telling what they thought was the truth in the press. So I think at the very, very core, that's true, right? I mean, I remember having I had breakfast with one of the top five probably most powerful officials in the country in Britain in January 2023.

1:00:45And he just come back from one of these NATO meetings and he said to me they're all sitting around with like he was with um uh uh he was with the British by minister macaron shaltz by den blah blah and he said Jake Sullivan National Security Advisor was literally like kind of huge pad and would write every time like Sue Nack was someone would speak, it would be like massive letters, Sue Nack, Mackron, Jake Sullivan writing on this huge pad, right? I'm putting it in front of Biden and everyone could see this. Right, so that was said to me. Oh, so you knew who he was responding to? Yeah, because it's like a parade, right?

1:01:24It was said you had to be reminded that like what, who Mac, what, the guy there is Macron, right? That's how bad it was. And I was told that by this guy who'd watched the happening, like I think end of January 2023. And that's a guy in Britain, right? That's not someone who's, you know, sitting working in the White House and involved all the time. So clearly a lot of people around the core of the deep state who are in these meetings with Biden knew the truth about it for a long time and kept it quiet. But the whole kind of elite media, whose job is supposedly to tell people the truth to get to the bottom of the right, right?

1:02:03The Washington Post is people who broke war against. They're supposed to be the people to figure these things out. And it's not like this was hard to figure out, right? As you say, you could see it. It was so obvious. You didn't even want to talk about it. What do you make of the state of America right now? For all that the UK's maybe gone through some turmoil, pales into insignificance with the absolute furnace that is America?

1:02:28America is always just like so much more extreme than Europe in various ways. So it's got on the one hand you've got like hugely hugely interesting progress in things like AI and BIOS tech.

1:02:44Incredible economic dynamism in all sorts of ways, but then as soon as you turn to the political scene, then it's a sort of like just amazing car crash. I do think it's very positive though that a bunch of the valley people are getting involved. And I don't really mind if it's like if they're going to get involved in the Democratic Republic. Aside to me, it's less important than at an overall level, I'll be going to start seeing a shift in what we talked about before, where all the able people basically sort of often leave politics and government to become a clown show. Or are you going to start seeing a historic reversal of that and see more and more of the talented people say, OK, we are actually going to have to step up the play here and try and change it and get involved with it.

1:03:33So I think that's a hopeful sign for America, Washington and government can only improve if the most able people and building things get more involved in public service for sure. And I hope that that's a sign of, you know, I hope that this is going to be one of those things where Britain is downstream of what happens in America and that there's a similar kind of process here. Would you make of the JD Vance VP pick? Don't know very much about Vance. Never met him. But I think one of the most interesting reactions I've seen is the kind of small Obama people who actually like like Rano Bama's winning campaigns.

1:04:15Their reaction to it was, not the best pick for Trump for the point of view of winning the election, but it's a sign that Trump might be actually serious about driving things through in government because fans is friends with a lot of entrepreneurs. He actually believes a lot of this kind of economic, populist stuff. The Obama people were all very worried about whether or not in Trump's first term, he would actually govern the way that he said. and they were very relieved when he arrived and made a terrible blunder and basically followed Paul Ryan and tried to like whack about my care and stuff like that which was a political disaster for Trump.

1:04:55Newfound people now are very worried that the van's appointment is a sign that he's learned as lesson and when he arrives this time he's actually going to govern in a different way and actually focus on what a lot of working class voters want. So from America's point of view I think that will be good if Trump does do that, right? The system does need rebalancing.

1:05:20Across the Western world we can't just carry on with this economic model where it's stagnant wages for people on media and earnings, but huge asset price bubbles that help the billionaires, this whole think our curry on the way is. And give me your thoughts on Kamala going into November. So I think what's happening on her is like it's the same, it's the same. The way I describe it, the way that the media works now is the phrase narrative whiplash, right? So you have this narrative which goes along and then suddenly they just change on a dive. So like in Covid you saw Trump is racist to talk about closing the borders It's racist to close the borders suddenly narrative with plash We must shut the borders immediately, right and then The war in Ukraine.

1:06:12It's completely not to do with NATO. Nothing to do with NATO. It's not to do it You could join NATO narrative with plash you create must join NATO, right? So we see this poses over again. We've just seen it with Biden Super sharp in private Biden's CNIL is like literally Russian disinformation flip Biden's CNIL Biden's gone the next is Kamala's great super energy. We're all really excited. She's gonna be a brilliant candidate And I guarantee you that before very long people are gonna start writing oh shit like all the reports and focus groups are that she is not a good candidate Remember Kamala's 2019 campaign was a total shit show She blew herself up very quickly.

1:06:53She couldn't build a staff and keep it. She's very, very hard to work with. People don't like working with her. And politics, winning politics at an elite level, is a lot about can you mobilize talent and get people with different views working together in a harmonious way. And if you can't build a team that you can't get much done. and I think she's really going to struggle as a candidate. Of course Trump's not popular by historical standards, so it's likely to stay close whatever happens. I'd probably be decided by not that many votes in maybe three, four states, same as last time, same as in 2016.

1:07:39The narrative whiplash thing's so interesting, and I've certainly seen it too. It's odd that in a world where everything that everybody says is essentially blockchain for the rest of time, that no one actually decides to bring up the shit that you previously said. It feels like it's this odd blend of, you know, sort of puritanical language policing if it comes to your WhatsApp messages directly with the PM or Andrew Huberman's sex life. But then if it's articles and headlines that have been written that are then immediately reversed or positions that people have taken publicly, which they then publicly, perhaps under oath, decide to do a U -turn on.

1:08:21That bit gets to be learned. I really haven't worked out what this is. I don't know whether there's a particularly sort of protected class. I don't know whether it's certain people are allowed to do this and certain aren't. I wonder if you, if you align with particular points of views that you're more allowed to have this like odd non -retroactive skepticism and scrutiny of the shit that you used to say compared to the shit that you say now, but it is true. I thought about mass lighting as opposed to gas lighting across the entire board. It's like, no, no, no, no one ever saw this. Nobody ever saw this.

1:08:57You've got a, you did a little, in that article I was talking about before that K -fabe thing. You said, a herd immunity without vaccines is the science and the policy herd immunity without vaccines was never the policy. The central question The referendum is about whether we're in the single market and customs union. The referendum was never about whether we're in the single market and customs union. The war is weakening Russia so we must continue. The war is strengthening Russia so we must continue. Exactly. You just see this process over and over again, but as you say, it's kind of an invisible process to when everybody involved with it and they don't didn't point out to each other.

1:09:34It's like, it would be just like terribly bad form. So the flip happens, but then everyone just talks like that's what we've always said. And no one goes, I'm going to second, but like the wall was supposed to be Whitney Russia. How the fuck are we now? What do you mean? We've got to carry on because it's straight through it. Like, that means like a whole plan has gone totally wrong, right? It's the easiest solution. It's a much easier version than 1984 where they have to retroactively go back and actually change what happened. Yeah, nothing of a bother. Yeah. For some reason. We just leave it there in the public domain and nobody from there will pick up and pass out.

1:10:10So I really wonder whether this is contributed to by the pace of just news, the sheer velocity that we're being, you know, pepper sprayed in the face with everything that's going on, this pressure washer of information that's coming out. Like, Trump getting shot feels like it's over. The president got shot in the head, the presidential candidate got shot in the head. And now we're talking about Biden's, oh my god, Kamala Harris, Kamala Harris is doing it there. And everybody who's talking about the Trump thing now, it's wild. It's wild. Yeah. Meanwhile, all these details come out about the Trump thing, right?

1:10:47Like turns out the Secret Service agents were actually watching the guy for like 15, 20 minutes through the scopes before he fired when he had a guard and left him on stage. Like, I'm fucking believeable crazy shit. But as you say, it's just like, oh, that's like, that's now PJT. Oh, dude. Have you, did you run in your mind the model of what would have happened if Trump's head had been an inch to the right? I mean, there's got to be so like, if you look at the whole thing out right, like the The event is just about explainable by total systemic incompetence. If you just look at it and go, okay, well, we know from COVID, we can see in Ukraine that Western institutions, like one after the other are just shot and they just do pathological crazy shit.

1:11:37Well, okay, you can sort of imagine how the Secret Service would have like decayed to this point where they can allow this sort of thing. You don't have to pause at a conspiracy. But if you imagine that Trump's had it exploded live on TV and then you'd ask people to believe the current official story, right? Millions of people are not buying any of that shit. Why do you think that's the case? I think, well, if you look on the flip side now, I was looking at Paul the other day and it said something like a third of Democrat voters believe that like the thing was basically staged to help Trump. Now imagine if Trump's hadn't exploded.

1:12:18I think like at least a third of Republicans, maybe more than a third of Republicans and more than a third of the country would have said what like we're supposed to believe that this is just all sunlight, it took like just a competent IDSE that the Secret Service looked at this for 20 minutes, didn't shoot at them, and then just let them shoot the president in the head. I'm not fucking buying it. So I think it would have been, I think it would have been, people would not have bought the idea that this is just stomach pathological incompetence. I think they would have a very, very large fraction of the country, quite also be over half the Godly would have said clearly this is this is this is some kind of conspiracy and they've tried to lock him up with the law fair they've lost these cases this is really cool throwing everything out okay well they've shot him so that they so that they've got rid of that way so I think it would have been really really bad and quite possibly sparked a lot of violence right you know you could think back to 1968 when you have assassination and Martin Luther King the terrible assassination of Bobby Kennedy, or like eight weeks later, or whatever it was.

1:13:33That was the right serious profound shock for America, sparked a lot of riots, a lot of violence. I think you'd have to, in the parallel world, I think you'd have to, you'd be pretty lucky to escape that, I think, the darkening. Isn't it fascinating that the consequence of the action is indicative of how the action came about. The Trump getting clipped in the ear changes the story that lots of people believe about how it had actually happened. Because there's no chance that the Dems would say, oh, this is, or whatever, is the third of a Democrat vote is that would say, oh, this was to improve his chances to become president.

1:14:16I mean, obviously not. Yeah. Exactly. But it's just an odd quirk about human psychology, I suppose, that we look at what the outcome was and then retroactively make an explanation from there as opposed to trying to walk through it step by step by step. And obviously the secret service, ladies, now gone. I mean, did you watch any of that hearing? I didn't, unfortunately, no. I meant to. But it sounds like another shit show. Oh, she got, it was, it was like really, really, really aggressive, just the most vehement. You can't think of, you know, this woman incompetent as she may be and driven by DEI and blah, blah, blah.

1:15:04She doesn't care about Trump and all the rest of it. You can throw every accusation that you wanted her, but this woman was eviscerated on TV forever. And they basically lined up every different person that was going to have it and every single one of them had a tightly defined five minute segment where they just punched her in the face over and over and over and over again. I saw it even and the only thing I saw was on Twitter, I think I saw like AOC asked pretty like very, very, very good question that I just obviously doesn't have any kind of respectable answer, right? Yeah, it was, it was rough, but yeah, I mean just thinking about what would have happened if Trump's head had exploded.

1:15:45I still, it blows my mind that were over this already. The fact that it was so close to happening, like as close as it's possible to be without it happened. Not literally. And it's just a story now. It's a meme. There's t -shirts about it. He kicked the hop tour girl off the top of the meme of us for a couple of weeks. And now we're talking about Kamala Harris and always this, this is the real insurrection because they've subverted the democratic process of getting a candidate in and a blah, blah, blah. I'm like, hey, what about the guy he got shot in the pad? Only in a little while. Yeah. Yeah.

1:16:27It is. And wait till I tell you the next thing that's going to happen is you know you can see in Ukraine now what's happening with these we're with the incredible growth and sophistication of these drone attacks right like that's coming to domestic terrorists and of course the western world right you don't you don't develop all this technology and then it just stays in fucking Ukraine so at some point we're going to see that crazy shit happening over here and then you can start asking questions like the whole format of how Trump had that event, right? It's just not doable. Assured that the Secret Service actually had a slight improvement to which they should have done and they handled the whole thing competently, right?

1:17:04You do all that the way that you actually should do it and did do it competently and they made you know what? It doesn't matter anymore because you're just someone's just going to fly a fucking FPV droid in and and and and it's happened with that, right? So the whole way in which we think about these events and how politicians interact with the public, I think is going to change sharpish. I mean, hopefully, the tragedy is normally historically these things only happen after a complete disaster and sadly close enough to the disaster that you get all of the consequences without any of the disaster.

1:17:38So ideally what happens is, like this prompts a kind of like complete root and branch we think of what the hell, how the hell do we do the IP security in this age and then the drone stuff comes into that and they get ahead of it. That happens, like that's pesky scenario, right? But if not, at some point, this is going to happen. Yeah, I had Eric Prince on, Guy, that founded Blackwater, private military contract again. He was telling me about how I think previously to take down one of the Russian tanks, you need, I think it's a javelin missile and they're about 300 grand for the missile. And then and you also need all of the apparatus to be able to launch it plus the team to be able to do it too.

1:18:21And once you've launched two of them, the heat signature is so identifiable that your position is then given up. So you have this sort of whole, you're already, you know, javelin missile. Like when I hear that, I think black hawk down, you know, hardcore advanced military technology. And he's kind of making it sound like I'm referring to a fucking Tribusche or something. We're gonna pull pitch off the top of the ramparts onto them or something. It just sounds ancient. And then he's saying, you know, you can do the same job as, I don't know, let's say, to a couple of mail plus the team, plus the exposure of all of this stuff with an FPV drone, which I think all in including the Bikan sized amount of C4 or whatever, pick your explosive of choice, strap to the front of it is maybe 1500 bucks or 2000 and you've got a guy with a set of goggles on and if you've got a repeater, a signal repeater, you can do it, I think up to four miles away and you can destroy a tank that's worth millions and millions of dollars and then the tanks, they're now developing these nets.

1:19:27Sort of around them, they've got these special nets, they're finding the weaknesses that the FPV drones are exploiting and they're patching them. So then the drones are getting bigger or stronger. So they're, it's literally a literal arms race that you're observing happening in real time here. And yeah, when did that video about the kill bots thing? Do you remember that where they? Do, yeah. Ted knows a kind of auditorium. I would guess roughly, yeah, like roughly seven, eight, 10 years ago, yeah. And exactly. For the people that hadn't seen it, it was basically talking about sort of micro drones that would have some kind of biometric signature.

1:20:05Maybe it was DNA or walking gate or facial recognition or something. and they would just be poured out of the back of some airplane and they would fly down with tiny little seafore charges, land on someone's head and kill them. And it would allow you to do that. And then there was, you know, this sort of nightmare scenario, maybe it was a black mirror episode where you would have a dark web sort of ransom attack thing where this drone would be released if this money wasn't given and then it doubles and it doubles and it doubles and it doubles and you know, I you're right. I mean, I hadn't thought about it before, but yet the drone warfare is not just going to be kept and taking down tanks during an active military campaign.

1:20:44It's going to be for everything. It's going to be a risk for everybody in the same way as the original iPhone, I think cost sort of per adjusted for inflation, something like $5 ,000 or $10 ,000. And then all of the rich people that wanted cool technology brought it down so that the normies could buy it too. We're already at that stage with these actual drone. So they're only going to get cheaper. And to roll on top, I hate to bring up China because it feels like an obvious thing to say, the US government shutting down all domestic drone production from all of the different producers and companies that were wanting to do it, because they were worried that it was going to create a flight risk, which completely opened up the market for DJI to come in a Chinese owned company.

1:21:27And now DJI is some obscene amount of the market share when it comes to personal drone use. So, okay, maybe the most important warfare technology of the next 10 years is owned, majority owned by one particular country that lots of us probably have some concerns about. 100%. And I remember I wrote a blog in 2014. I'd been over to California actually for one of these kind of like weekend conference things. I thought we'd do a bunch of people on the drone stuff then. I came back in a blog and I said then, like the future is, like, some, like a competent person with less than a million dollars is going to be able to, like, fly a bunch of drones over and blow up the house to Parliament.

1:22:16And no one will know what the fuck is just hit them. And when I wrote that, as usual, like the normal media was like, this stupid, what the fuck is he on about? Five years later, I was then in, I went, when I went into number 10. I sat down with one of the officials, a number of talents said, what is the actual plan for defending against drones in Downey Street? If we have a G7 event, and the PM is standing there with the US president and the Chinese president, the compute didn't, and whatever, how the fuck do you install? Like three small 15 -year -olds, right? Sitting in the James's Park, instead of going over a drone, and just whacking the entire G7 list.

1:22:56And of course the answer is, well we haven't got anything to talk about, like basically if someone wants to do that, then they're going to do it. I asked someone from the cabinet office about three weeks ago, is any of this changed? Like have they woke up on the road stuff? They're like, no, of course not, just the same shit show, nothing going on. So again, you see this pattern, you see historically where regimes just get caught short by certain technological changes. It seems weird now because we can actually see it on TV or on YouTube in Ukraine. So people kind of, the natural assumption is, well, we spend all of this massive amounts of money on administrative defense and all of this stuff like, obviously these guys must be on this shit, right?

1:23:43But then you go and talk to them and the people actually responsible for it, of course, I've heard in the hands saying, we can't get funding from the MOD, you know, almost to fund it. It's so difficult. People think it'll be embarrassing. If we start, if we make this public, then it will be just actually an admission that we can't really about it. So everyone wants to keep it quiet. But yeah, but then all you're doing is keeping it quiet until some sort of small, frantic or people take advantage of us doing nothing. And then we're going to be in big trouble, right? Until you can know. So it's very, it's very, exactly.

1:24:13It's very, all that stuff is deeply worrying. Hopefully, the best case scenario is that the Trump thing is like, I kick up the ass for everybody, but my fear is these institutions are so pathological, all -build -based, and just go back and sleep. It certainly seems that way, even if you take the public response to it, and you think, well, I mean, they've moved on. So, internally, there'll be some investigation, there'll be a, which is going to take away, by the way, from the precise resources that are needed in the build -up to the November election because it's going to be secret service agents, it's going to be internal meetings, it's going to be, you know, the oxygen in the room is going to be sucked out by an inquiry which takes it away from the very thing that they're trying to inquire about.

1:24:56Yeah. Yeah. I think the main thing, mate, learning from your conversation with Duac -Ech, mutual friend, and reading your stuff is just how fucking incompetent the inside of government really is. And you just hope that there's someone in there. And yeah, like you say, there are probably, you know, a few competent people scattered around and maybe they're holding it together, but the rest of it's sell it up and cable ties and fairy dust, just hoping for the best. And you, in that article I referenced earlier on, the five rules of how government really works. I want to go through, I want to quickly go through those.

1:25:34So first, not even nuclear weapons are taken seriously, so never assume the problem leading the news is taken seriously. Yeah, so I spent a lot of time in 2019, 2020, like really, really, really digging into the situation with nuclear enterprise and Britain. Obviously, most of the things are illegal for me to talk about, but the core of it is legal to talk about. And it's that over a 20, 30 year period, the country is basically neglected a whole bunch of the core infrastructure at every point pretty much of the whole kind of chain for how these weapons are deployed, the whole infrastructure. And they've neglected building what needs to be built and then they've classified all the co -cups so highly that it's like I can't not allowed to explain in detail to you what they all are, right?

1:26:33And this again is this pathological cycle where there's a failure and then it will fix the failure, it will cover it up and then the budget will just get bigger and bigger and it means actually that it has a ripple effect which is they basically have to keep stealing money from the conventional budgets inside the MOD to patch up this like unseen, unknowledge huge disaster of tens and tens and tens of billions of dollars and you can enterprise and my point there is like everyone sort of thinks oh well yeah they I might get that wrong and then I caught that up. But like the most important things obviously the system must be really, really focusing on.

1:27:06And my point is, that's the wrong way to think about it unfortunately. I think it's got so bad that it's sort of the other way around. The minister's run around spending a few weeks of time on trivia that's on the front page of the sun whilst actually just systematic in the collecting, really the actual core things like how to do, making sure that you get weapons to sort it out. And even since I said that, they've had a couple the very public disasters, right? They had that test in the Atlantic, which went to it's up and the missile just popped out and sank. They had a missile and you can just sub the nearly sank off the coast of Scotland.

1:27:39So, you know, some of the rot that I talked about a few years ago is now starting to come out and be open. JD Vance made a pretty interesting comment. He was asked about what does he think,

1:27:58where and he said Britain. Yeah, I didn't see exactly what he said. I saw like third time reports of it. Is that who's making a crack there about like the growth of Islam and he was in particular whatever he was indeed. Very interesting. Second one from your five rules of government, roughly all the most talented people at building things are excluded from our civil service. the politicians you vote for have roughly zero power to hire, fire or incentivize officials, so they have no real power. Yes, so if you think, you know, anybody who's trying to build anything, everyone knows like the single most important thing is for the CEO of, whether it's Microsoft or CEO of a private hospital or whatever, is can you actually build a team, right?

1:28:46Can you hire them? Can you hire them? Can you fire them? Can you incentivize them? Can you trade them? And a British government minister has no power to do any of those things with a single civil servant. So you have the the ministers are officially responsible to parliament for what the system does but they have zero power over the management of the system. So they nothing in the world that works works like that right it's like nothing. So we shouldn't be surprised that these things are are dysfunctional. Third, if you think of the most fundamental principles that lie behind the most successful organizations in history, principles like extreme speed and clear responsibility, then our government works almost totally on exactly opposite principles.

1:29:29Yeah, so, you know, look at Elon, look at how Elon did the SpaceX incredible intensity, incredible speed, incredible attempts to like simplify, to cut things out that aren't needed. And if you try and apply that, those kind of principles inside government, then the whole system reacts like you're a virus and it's an immune system and it's like, got to try and close you down. It fights to stay the way it is. One obvious way, which you see that happened now, is with the AI companies. On the one hand, the deep state is trying to talk to the AI companies and interact with them. But the cycles at which the British state or the Washington work is just like 10x or 100x slower than the speed at which some all the works, right?

1:30:13So some all the is like working on this speed and then he's trying to interact with Washington. It's just two different clock speeds. I guess that's why you see this sort of lumbarine behemoth in terms of legislation that falls behind. You only need to look at the workarounds that people have come up with for states that don't legalize weed. To go, oh, well Delta 8 is now, well Delta 9 is now available. If we just adjust one molecule here, we know that we can get huge runway out of a drug that essentially does the same thing that is the one that's prohibited, and we know it's going to take... They're basically factoring in the satellite delay for legislation.

1:30:53Exactly. Yeah, exactly. You see that everywhere. Fourth, the MPs are usually not focused on the election, which is usually far away, they're focused on what they think they need to tell the media today to improve their chances of promotion. Yeah, so as we discussed earlier on, the kind of the theory of democracy is that one of the reasons why we get sort of, why democracy is sort of trend towards improving problems is that the MPs want to win the election. But when in a situation where that sort of incentive is basically broken and they actually spend all their time just on this daily, on this daily news cycle.

1:31:34And once that happens, two fundamental things happen. One, they stop paying attention to actually good government. And two, they stop thinking about the voters and they think about what the other of the newer times thinks, or, you know, the Laura Coonsberg and the BBC, etc. And that fundamental dynamic is behind why we know why it's so hard to fix all of these things. Yeah, I think Tony Blair recently described the government as a conspiracy of distraction from what actually matters. I thought that was so funny. Fifth, the civil service and politicians' top priority is not doing a good job for voters.

1:32:15It's preserving existing power and budgets. If you don't share this priority, you don't get promoted. Yes, so if you look after COVID, what's happened? And basically, the officials, the people who approved right and who saved thousands of people's lives have almost entirely 100 % gone through public service, often hounded out. The excellent woman who ran the vaccine task force, for example, was trashed all over the media. Whereas officials who go completely screwed up, did a shocking job, cost many lives, cost huge economic damage, have largely been promoted and often given gongs. The nightmare woman who gave us tough advice, tough advice in February through March, like don't close the borders, masks, a counterproductive and don't work, all this kind of crazy shit.

1:33:12She was promoted and put in charge of the new biosecurity agency that was created to replace the complete chit -chote biosecurity agency that fell apart in COVID. Right? So it's like, oh, the entity supposed to do the job completely collapsed. We've got a certain you had to see who should put in charge? Oh, the woman who grabbed the last one, the person who broke the last one. And that's that is the system working as intended, right? That's that's absolutely that absolutely like something's up. But I wanted to ask you about sort of personally what the last few years has been like. It seems to me that you've been the sort of evil nefarious guy behind the scenes or in front of the scenes for a bunch of different things, whether it was masterminding Brexit, whether it's utilizing new kinds of digital advertising, whether it's driving to Barnum Castle, whether it's you know coming up with Covid, whether it's the language that you're And what has that been like being a human with all of the normal flaws and emotions that humans have to have sort of gone through this wartime public decry?

1:34:25So I think I'm lucky psychologically in that I've never been bothered. I've always just been interested in trying to do the thing. I've never been interested in, I've never been bothered about the media. And there's a sort of trade off in public life, right? I think which is that If you focus on the media, it's almost impossible to get anything worthwhile done like your social life with lots of ways is better You pot around you're not a hate figure But if you're optimizing for that like basically everyone you optimize for that it achieves nothing and their entire existence and politics is basically completely pointless.

1:35:09If you do what approach it the way I have, then you're able to figure, you mean you hate you. But what does that mean at the end of it? Like it doesn't really mean anything or to me it doesn't anyway. Like what is it actually? If you think about a lot of the problems that other people life have to face, are you getting shot at? No. Like is it real consequences? No. It's just people writing nasty things about you. So I've never really cared about that. The only exception to that obviously is you know in 2019, 2020, like a few times I had to move my family out of the house because of death threats from psychos and stuff like that.

1:35:47That's obviously bad when you've got a small child. But that's the only thing actually that was genuinely difficult I would say. Like that's obviously Tricky and you don't want to have no one wants to have to deal with that in their life. But that's the only thing I would say is bad, the rest of it never bothered me at all. You didn't mind being a hate figure for some people. No, I didn't. I think you have to, if you're going to try and do things on the historic scale of Brexit, you have to accept that a lot of people are going to be pissed off. You're a public figure, people have got a right to, you know, have use about you and be angry about it.

1:36:31I think What's the point of being upset about it, right? That's just life. It's never gonna be any different. So So why let it get you down? It's a very admirable approach, I think for anybody that's in public life, but yeah, it's just very it's very interesting. I think You're talking about K -Fabe and WWE and stuff. You may have had the the misfortune of kind of fitting into a slightly established role of the guy behind the scenes that doesn't maybe seem to be too touchy -feely that kind of doesn't really fucking care. And then, you know, Benedict Cumberbatch gets to play you in a movie about Brexit.

1:37:11Maybe the American viewers won't know, but there's an entire movie made about sort of that the Brexit process with Benedict fucking come like doctor strange. Yeah. He played you in a movie. I mean, there's not many people that can say that. How did that feel? So I've never actually watched like I should watch the movie. Yeah, you should watch the movie. Dom, I kind of I didn't at the time. I kind of said like I'm not watching the movie until Brexit happens. And then I kind of after that, I never, I kind of never got around to it. I've seen a few clips on YouTube and stuff. So I should watch it.

1:37:46There was a weird thing, I think the whole thing was like the odd to be honest, because I think there's a very nice guy who wrote the script for it, a guy called James Graham. And I think originally what happened is he kind of sort of bought the whole bullshit conspiracy story from Karl Kowaldron everyone, that this was some kind of weird, like the Brexit Trump, it was all connected with Putin, the whole digital advertising was kind of secretly coordinated with Facebook behind him. You know, you know how that whole kind of Russia get your hopes to go off and Britain and America right so the original premise of it was like that was sort of true But then James Graham spent time with us talking to us and then realized that like the actual story the media was fake and to give him credit He was honestly enough to sort of change it but so but therefore the movie has a slightly odd feel like because it starts off You started off writing it on the premise that the story was sort of true, but then realized the story Actually wasn't what what what would be in the media and Yeah, but it was weird having a kind of method act to come right into my house.

1:38:46He sort of sat there. My wife sat on the windows seat sketching him. I'd better think I'm about to start opposite me having dinner to like two in the morning. And as he was sitting opposite me, he kind of like started to become me. So he started mimicking like my gestures and stuff. And it turns out that like I've got this habit. It seems like I started like to sort of sit like that and I kind of like to sort of put my head over my arm of my own head. And then suddenly I was watching it, I had Benedict Cumbat just doing all the mirroring back by Jess, just doing that thing. And so I had to talk like me.

1:39:17So it was a very odd, it was a very odd experience. I wonder how much you learned about yourself watching Benedict Cumberbatch BU. You learned that you put your hand in every source. I'll talk to you in email, but when I watched the film, you've tormented me to actually actually sit down and watch the whole thing from the start to end, except watching a few clips on YouTube. Yeah, I think he was that he got the accent not bad. Yeah, it's really excellent not bad The thing was at the time I was just the whole thing like when they were doing the film The whole situation of parliament was so depressing right the the Tories had driven the country It's this cold cold the sack the biggest constitutional crisis in century.

1:39:57It just felt like no one could move and The whole they actually doing the referendum was a truly nightmare as experience like I've never recovered from it physically It fucked up my health. I kind of never, I used to be a brilliant sleeper. No, not like I got basically so exhausted, but like something basically broke over that, over that. Over that, yeah. What was that just intense stress, sleep deprivation, too many stimulants? I think it was like sleep deprivation, yeah. And then I had a baby about 12, 14 weeks or something before the vote. No, that was bad. So really, really by timing. And then he was ill.

1:40:42He was in a hospital. So it was like a horrible week where I was in the office from seven till midnight. And then I was going from midnight to the hospital and then watching him. And so I didn't sleep for like day after day and four started moving. And I started getting these weird ZZ lines in my head. Fuck. So yeah, that was, so when the movie happened, I was like, I don't want to go fucking stop. I don't, I don't any reminders of my life. All right, it's like PTSD. Exactly. I don't want any PTSD. So I kind of just ignored it. Jesus. We're talking about sort of retrospectively learning about yourself.

1:41:19Since moving to the US, I've learned a lot about the UK in comparison. I'd say I've probably learned more about the UK since being in America than I did whilst being in the UK. And I think the main one that I've noticed from a group perspective is the massive lack of patriotism that we have in the UK. You know, every Brit knows the Fourth of July and what it stands for, and almost no Brit know when St. George's day is. It's wild to me. It's kind of dispiriting. You know, the Fourth July is just being in gone. So maybe I'm still in the honeymoon afterglow of seeing all of these people be proud and happy about their country.

1:41:56Even for all that it's a horrible xenophobic racist, transphobic bigotids, you know, hellscape. There is a thorough... So many people on every single street that are just proud to talk about their country and what it means and the values that it stands for. And then I think about the UK, British culture, our history, our heritage, and it's... There's just none of that at all. And it's sad. It's sad to think that a guy that flies an America flag outside of his house is called a Patriot in America and a guy that flies an England flag outside of his house is called a racist in the UK Yeah, completely agree it is dismal you know there's there's a famous essay that all well wrote in Conner exactly but like 1940 to 1942 sort of period and He wrote in there about how Like this weird for the one aware by the British intellectual class that essentially become are so anti -British.

1:43:00Instead of people who had all been brought up to be patriotic 50 years before, suddenly with the exact opposite, in fact, they're all now, we're brought up in a coach to sneer at the country and think that was the sophisticated take.

1:43:16And that was true about that transition. I have Russian Revolution 1917, you have this wave of surge of support for the communist party after 1917. That really changed Western intelligentsia and intellectual elites a lot. And to a large extent, we're still living out the consequences of that process. And a big part of the reason it like you come from a very similar part of the world to me. You know that if you go back to where you brought up, There's lots and lots of working class people who are patriotic, you do think the bits are going to country. But the culture is like a thousand miles away from a lot of the dinner parties that you have in central London, right?

1:44:02If you talked in those dinner parties, central London, the way that you talk, where mean you go home to see our families, it's extremely different. It's talking cheese culture, right? Yeah, well, I mean, there's there's a lot of Below the surface criticism. I think now about what's happening with the UK There's a great great YouTube channel called Bold and bankrupt and this guy has done doctorism around the world He got traffic to cross the border from Mexico into the US He was held in a Russian jail for a while because they were worried about what he was whether he was some sort of spy there and then he decided to take on his final boss of very scary potential areas to travel through, which was British seaside towns.

1:44:47He's going through all of these, you know, just the classic dead high street, boarded up windows and graffiti everywhere and trash and there's no one and the few people that are there don't speak the language and there's just no remnant of British culture And I saw this phenomenal tweet basically referring to the same thing, which is I think Britain's got the whatever sixth highest economy in the world something like that And he said no, it doesn't like the the UK or England doesn't have the sixth largest economy in the world London does and The UK is a very poor country attached to a very wealthy city And that's the way to see it and again so many people everybody's focused on London, maybe a tiny bit on Manchester, and apart from that, the rest of the country is just elsewhere.

1:45:36So in terms of news, in terms of media, in terms of cultural significance, no one gives a fuck about Liverpool or Wakefield or Birmingham or Soli Hall or anywhere like that, no one cares. So you don't have the sort of cultural focus. You don't have the financial support at all. It's everywhere in the country is pretty much fucked except for London. And yet you can kind of hide behind this macro trend, all of the micro trends are hidden within the big macro one. Yeah, it's sad, man. It's sad. And like I say, in retrospect, just something that I've learned since not being there, you get to see it's the sort of fish going through water, asking the other fish, how's the water today?

1:46:20And you think, why is it that way? Why is it that we don't have the kind of support and cosmopolitanism and this other insight that I learned about how I think both the UK and America have two spots, two or three spots in the top 10 universities in the world. So we share the same number and yet the US produces a huge times more entrepreneurs than the UK does. Well, why? It's because America still encourages people to believe that you can go and do stuff. And the UK has just got this zero -sum water -locked mentality where our aspirations are as exciting as the weather. And I wish I could change it.

1:47:04I really wish that I could re -inject some of the enthusiasm that I've learned since being over here back to the UK. I think it would make daily life and the outcomes that we have politically, commercially, socially, I think it would make a really good difference. Yeah, totally great. I mean, what you say is completely correct. One of the weird and terrible things about Westminster is just like. The only part of Britain that they care about is London. They care more about what's happening in America than they do about what's happening in Birmingham or Manchester or Liverpool or Newcastle. Like, none of those places have any like no one cares or what's going on there.

1:47:44And these things become a vicious circle, right? Because it means that the money is sucked down to London, the infrastructure all points down at London. When I was in government in 2020, we went through this huge spending review on infrastructure and we were trying to say, look for decades, the infrastructure has been built around like serving London, we've got to start thinking about what infrastructure to build to help other cities, what does Manchester need, what does Newcastle need. And do you know that all these officials don't give a fuck about any of that? It's just like, well London's by the money is, so that's where we should focus in for structure.

1:48:20But yet that I take a self -referential, self -building thing, right? We're not saying that to the anti -Lundan, right? London's making money? Good for London. But you can't just have a country decade after decade where all the talent comes to London, you don't build anything out of everywhere else. and all these other places just end up getting boarded up and written off. And it's connected to the fact that the Britain... So if you look back at when Britain was number one company in the world, I go back to say 1850 or 1880. If Birmingham wanted to build something, Birmingham built it. The idea that whether or not Birmingham by building a train station or building a school or a hospital will be decided by some fuck -wit economic graduate in the Treasury who says, oh no, I don't think that Birmingham should do that.

1:49:14Right? If you said to people in 1870 Birmingham that in 150 years time, so 27 -year -old PPE student is going to decide whether or not Birmingham could build a hospital, then it said, well that's the future. I guarantee you the Britain is no longer in a war power, because that's clearly, it's safe. And that's what's happened. When Britain had a powerful maybe, when Britain was the centre for science, for technology, for industrialisation, etc, we were much, much more decentralized and there were different power centres all around the country, specialising in different things, and doing world -class things in different places.

1:49:56And since then, we've gone in this completely different direction, where the money has all be in sector London, we are more centralised than any other European state. Nobody else has a situation where so much money is raised at the centre and then spent at the centre. Everyone else has much more taxes raised locally and much more money spent locally. And these things are all come together. I wonder, well, it's an argument for becoming federal, right? You know, to sort of have these things chunked up and to allow local principalities to govern themselves at least in some form or another, because at least then people can campaign for the things that you're doing.

1:50:34Because even the whether you're the dude looking after Clackton or the guy looking after Bladen or whatever your particular counsel area of choice is, where do you work? Who are your colleagues? Who are you hanging around with? What do they care about? What's invogue for you to talk about when you do get down to White when you do spend your time in Westminster, what are they all talking about? They're not fucking talking about what's going on around St James's Park in the Northeast of the UK. I don't give a fuck about that. So yeah, I see that from... What are the things I try to do? So in 2020, what I think I said to Boris was, toilet party's rotten.

1:51:11We haven't won into 2019 election because the toilet party is some healthy thing or it's a love thing, right? We won because it's a massive constitutional crisis because the MPs and Westminster have tried to overturn the biggest democratic vote in our history because Corbyn is rubbish and because many of our leave team have come into number 10 and grabbed the broken thing and sorted out and we're much better at politics and campaigning than the rest of the Clowns and Westminster off. But that's not a long -term solution to stuff. We essentially have to close the all -toury part down and turn it into something new.

1:51:49one of the things we should do, for example, to do that is we should close the whole rancid structure of the HQ in London. We should reopen their quarters for the party up in Manchester or Birmingham or somewhere and say that's the new headquarters. And the people who are hired to run the Conservative Party are actually living up there like 200 miles away from London. And that's the sort of thing I, if you're actually going to rejuvenate the country, if you're actually going to reach you for their politics, it has to become much more connected to the actual voters. It has to stop being the self -referential game where everyone's looking in within like, you know, like 500 square meters of Westminster.

1:52:29And we have to go back out and look at, we have to be engaged with what the important things are in the world. And we have to focus on the voters not ourselves. But the more dysfunctional politics gets, the harder it is, the more mad. So when I say that, like normal people outside London think, well, yeah, that's just obvious. But that sounds more and more insane to people inside the system. And that's where that's where the problem, that's where a big part of the problem comes. It's why London was so shocked by the referendum, right? Because they're all sitting here talking to each other in central London.

1:53:02And they never realized what was happening outside the M25. What are you doing now? What are you working on? What are your plans for yourself for future? So I spend most of my time, I spend most of my time just basically reading history books and studying and writing on blogs. I've got a sub -stack, some of your subscribers might be interested in and ditched on projects that come up. People come to me with problems and say, well you have a look at this and help you out and if it's interesting, might spend two, three months looking at something for them. But I've never been driven by money, and I never do any political thing for money.

1:53:48I only do it because I actually agree with it. So that's quite limiting from the commercial point of view. I don't fly around the world like running elections here, there and everywhere. I could make a lot of money doing that, but I just don't like that. I don't like the idea of it. What I'm thinking about now is, you know, the British situation is depressing as we've been discussing. What I'm thinking about is setting up something new, setting up a new political campaigning thing to try and grip it and try and force change and to try and bring in people from outside politics and try and do the whole thing differently.

1:54:25So, I'm talking to people now quietly about it. I'm talking to some donors about funding I'm trying to figure out how to structure it. I've talked to some potential staff and things like that. And what would you try to think? Is it going to be a party, a think tank? Like what is this? It's definitely not a think tank. And to begin with, it definitely won't be a party. I think it's not the right time to launch an actual party now. But I think what you could do is build a very unusual political organization that does a bunch of valuable things. I've built support. I think pretty quickly you can get you get and get some media that has more supporters than I've been to recently put together that that tries to represent what the actual voters think who basically hate all the parties and they're all rubbish and then who knows down the line right if you can build this thing in the right way and you can get on the one hand support from voters and on the other hand get a lot of elite talent involved with it Then who knows who knows down the line what what might be possible but Westman's left to itself called with Geophonate itself in history says that usually what happens is these kind of broken systems Just like you'd go into the hitter massive crisis of some kind And then they break it and then there's a disaster So the question is like can we build something that can force change?

1:55:48short of some terrible disaster. But if you're going to do that, it needs to be something the rejuvenating force has to come from outside the system. It can't come from inside Westminster. It has to be great people in the country sick of the old system saying, right, we're sick of it and we're going to build something you. Fuck me, that's disruptive. Well, it's hard, right? Like if we can do it, if hard to do these things. I go back out of fourth on it. It's clearly very hard, but on the other hand, doing Brexit seemed really hard in summer 2015. No one really thought it was possible, but it ends up happening.

1:56:30So the core thing is, if you just look back over that period, why did we win 2016? Because people are really sick of the current system, but they've wanted massive change. Why did the vote leave team win the 2019 election? Because people really sick of the old system and they really want massive change. One of the two wishes suffered the biggest ever defeat ever in 200 years because people have seen sick of the old system and really want massive change. If Boris is stuck with our deal in 2019, the rate didn't 2019 and spent four years doing what we said we would do in 2019 and 2020, the situation would be completely different.

1:57:04Instead, him and Carrie decide get rid of vote leave, just fuck around and do nothing for four years, they get kicked out. The public now vote them out and vote storming and their desperate for change. But they're not going to get massive change again, right? So we keep having this system where the voters keep vote saying we want massive change, we are completely sick of the old thing. And the old thing says, yeah, we're not giving it to you. How much do you lay the failure of the last four years at the feet of Boris personally? I mean, you've got to blame him a lot, right? You know, we had the In summer 2020, there's an historic moment.

1:57:40We had Navy seat majority. We had a one century crisis with COVID. We had the collapse of all the core institutions of power in number 10 in the cabinet office. And you had the civil service, see the civil service, knew the system and collapsed and essentially surrendered to us and said, well, okay, the economy needs rebuilding, the health system needs rebuilding, the civil service needs rebuilding. You guys want to see the majority, clearly now like you're gonna do it. So let's work out, we'll work out the terms for that. And for about eight weeks or so, Boris went along with that. It was, okay, we're actually going to do it.

1:58:13We're going to smash it and we're going to build up a whole bunch of things. And then it got like tragically, he turned his back on that historical opportunity. Essentially it was because, weirdly, because he saw Starmer. So he started doing PMQs with Starmer and dealing with Starmer in Parliament. And he decided Starmer was so rubbish of politics that I actually don't change a lot of things will be immediately, I won't be to me as the in 2024. And secondly, of course, this girlfriend said, well, Boris isn't going to be really in charge of all the details, so why should it be dormant charge of it?

1:58:45I want me and my friends to be in charge of it. So you had this combination of Boris thinking, I don't really have to change much. So his Boris's attitude was, if things are really difficult and I've got to build a whole bunch of things, then I need to vote leave people here because they're the only people that can do it. and I can't do this with the usual Tory Cloud show. But once you realize or decide it, I don't actually have to build very much like a just coast because storm is so bad at politics. Then he was like, I don't really need to have the belief people around because I don't really need to do anything.

1:59:14And everyone hates them anyway, so why don't they get rid of them? And then his girlfriend is saying, everyone hates them, get rid of them and put my friends in charge. So you have this huge historic moment, opportunity to change the trajectory of the country, a latency majority of people desperate for the after and then you know he walks up to the paddlery spot and gives out the stadium.

1:59:38Wow. Dominic Cummings, ladies and gentlemen, I really appreciate your insights. There's very few people that are able to be as sort of candid and explain what's actually happening inside of government even if it would be significantly more comforting to feel like the people in charge and you what they were doing. I really genuinely really appreciate the insights. Where should people go for your sub -stack and other stuff? Just Dominic Cumming, you start sub -stack .com. If you click on that, you'll see. Thanks for having me on Chris. I really enjoyed our chat. Hopefully come back on on chat. Maybe about the US election or something in the future.

2:00:17Oh, I'd love that. I appreciate you Take care. Thanks very much.