#45 - Dominic Cummings - Stagnation, Corruption & Rebooting The System

31:26It kind of gave an added impetus to the 2019 election message of, right, everything needs rebuilding and we've got to get going. The disaster with Starmer was, it made him think, we don't actually have to change very much. Politically, we can't lose to this joker. so rather than then have all of the fights with the system annoy all these different people have to purge people from whitehall rebuild the civil service tell the treasury we're not having this stupid budgeting process we do are going to take science and technology seriously unlike the last 50 years dot dot dot i could just go around and you know open open railway stations enjoy myself ride around my motorbike checkers and chill and have fun so you had two those two forces basically had Boris thinking I don't need to change very much in order to win politically and then his girlfriend saying I want rid of these guys and I want my my friends in those two things coming together it's extremely hard problem it's kind of a classic example of how competition leads to better outcomes for well in this case the public which is the user of basically what you end up competing for and providing them better products.

32:41Yeah, exactly. He just felt like he had no competition. If politicians think they have no competition, unless they're very unusual people, I think it almost definitely can lead to these kind of pathological problems. And then, of course, he basically just self-sabotaged constantly from that moment on for two years until he got spat out. Which is also how, because on the question of, yeah, who is actually in charge of the UK, you would probably not say that it's either the Tories or Labour that much. It's the civil service. It's like 99.99%. Specifically the Cabinet Office, right? Particularly the Cabinet Office and particularly the Cabinet Secretary.

33:21So the Cabinet Secretary is 10 or 100 times more powerful than any minister apart from the Prime Minister. If bombs go off, the Prime Minister is not the first person who's told. The Cabinet Secretary is the first person that's told. if someone's got to authorize or deal with a problem like some senior secretary of state is having an affair or sleeping with Russian girls that you shouldn't be sleeping with, how do we authorize people to keep them under surveillance and handle the whole nightmare? Problems like that go to the cabinet secretary first and then they speak and then they decide what we're going to tell the PM.

33:57So lots of very fundamental aspects now of how power, the deep wiring of power in the system operate no longer wire through to the Secretary of State in the Home Office or the Secretary of State in the Foreign Office. They wire through to the Cabinet Secretary who controls a lot of these things. And how is the Cabinet Secretary selected and succeeded? Well the system exists the system sort of via osmosis demonstrates its priorities and it puts up to the Prime Minister usually two or three candidates of which all two or three are kind of acceptable to the system and no one else gets put on the list.

34:41But that person controls, one of the critical things that that person now does is, so that role, Captain Secretary, was created in 1916 but it became much more powerful over the last 20 years because it basically merged with the head of the civil service job so once you merge those two things you have you have so that person has incredible powers of patronage right that any normal minister cannot hire or fire a single official not one if you're the minister of health you're the chancellor the checker don't not the cabinet secretary sits on top of the whole hr pyramid for all of these thousands of people and as everyone knows who reads any kind of history, if you're in charge of the people and their promotion and their firing, then you're actually, you really have power in a way that the ministers don't.

35:30And that goes to the heart, really, of what's changed in Britain over the last 200 years. You go back 200 years, the time of Pitt and fighting Napoleon, you have ministers who are actually responsible to Parliament in a real sense and are actually in charge of the government departments in a real sense. And then if Pitt says they're rubbish and they're need changing, Pitt changes them and things change. Fast forward to now, the ministerial responsibility to Parliament is fake and they're not actually meaningfully in charge of almost anything at all. And they obviously can't hire or fire literally a single person.

36:00So that's how the system has evolved over 200 years. And is the cabinet secretary, the individual that gets proposed as a cabinet secretary, what election or anything has you wanted? It's a member of parliament still, right? No, no, no. They're not members of parliament. They're all people who've gone through the the bureaucratic system oh they're pure civil servants and almost all of the people that do that are kind of or what's termed lifers i.e people who've only really worked in that or nowadays they do some kind of like fake outside stuff where they kind of send them off to goldman sacks for three years or something and then bring them back and they say oh they find a real world experience but they're basically people who've worked in the in the system entirely and the current guy Chris Wormald right Wormald he was one of the I was looking into him he was one who kind of screwed up a lot of the pandemic he was the official who was actually responsible for pandemic preparation and for planning he's the official who told the prime minister and me in January 2020 don't worry we're the best prepared country in the world we've got everything nailed he's the person he also is the person who so on Thursday the 12th of March 2020 when the cabinet secretary not for the first time started saying to the prime minister that you've got to go on TV and tell everyone that this is like the chickenpox parties from the old days and the sooner everyone gets COVID the better this was sort of obviously a disaster at the time but those of us watching this were thinking saying, well, A, whatever you think the right thing on COVID is, definitely the worst thing is that everyone gets it at the same time, because that's the fastest way to the health service being completely overwhelmed.

37:38Right. And bear in mind, because that thing is, a lot of people sort of see this through hindsight bias. So like, well, it wasn't as bad as everyone, you know, the fatality rate wasn't as high as people thought. But bear in mind, at the time, it was estimates of somewhere between one and three percent. People were wondering whether the fatality rate was that. And we also didn't know yet that it was predominantly for older people. Yeah, we just didn't have any information. So given the state of uncertainty, going for like the highest variance play is insane decision making. And the NHS has the least kind of spare capacity of any kind of modern rich country.

38:13And in the end, we were only, of course, one doubling away from the whole thing. I mean, in various parts of the country, it did kind of crumble over. But one doubling nationally would have led to tens of thousands more people dying and effectively no else. Because I ran the numbers back then, actually specifically at the time, around the hospital bed capacity and the ICU capacity. And that's what you're referring to with the doublings. those would have been overstretched exactly in particular i mean some parts of the country was anyway but but but so it was obviously the most stupid thing whatever you thought of the right policy but also we were obviously asking like where the hell is this idea come from well two years later as part of the inquiry and disclosure of all set of documents it turns out that the guy who the cabinet secretary got this from was actually the person in charge of pandemic planning chris wermold himself now the most powerful official in the country so he was the one and there's a glorious message where he texts the cabinet secretary saying i've been trying to get the idiots in in number 10 i me and co to understand the chickenpox party's plan but i can't i can't get them to i can't get those people to to accept it and that's all now out in the public domain and that is who kia starmer knowing this appointed to be the number one most powerful official in Britain.

39:31So why would he have an allegiance to this guy? Because it's not like even, you know... It's not allegiance. It's just NPC behavior. Starmer asks for a process for a new cabinet secretary, and the system throws up three people, three life officials. And Wormald is the choice that the system most wants, because it's the most reassuring that we know if you put Wormald in, absolutely nothing important will change. Correct. Correct, correct from the system's point of view. That is a very good play for them, and wormhole does indeed mean that absolutely nothing important will change. So you talk about the system like it almost has its own consciousness.

40:09Yes, it does have its own consciousness. Can you expand on that a little? An official said to me once, Dominic, the way we see you is you're like a virus and we're an immune system, and our job is to expel you as fast as possible with the least possible damage to the system. wow that's how they think so it is almost like this it it's it it's a consciousness that runs off the hive mind of the individual bodies within it yeah they all kind of get it right why so if you think we're going back to the previous conversation because of the crisis of spring 2020 we ended up actually bringing in a whole bunch of very unusual people very able people in any kind of healthy functioning thing this would have been seen as a very positive development And it was seen as such by some of the young, very good officials in Number 10, particularly in the private office around the PM, which does actually have some good people in it.

41:04But of course, it was super disastrous and threatening to the old guard who thought correctly, OK, well, with Brexit and a big majority and now the COVID collapse, obviously Cummings and the Volive maniacs are going to push through actual change. and now we see the first signs of this because there are all these people coming in from outside the system. You have people coming in from the business world. You have people coming in from expilitary. Total nightmare from that point of view because they thought correctly, well, we're all going to get perched and the system's going to be changed. So I love these ideas of putting a persona to, putting a face and a name to this almost like egregoric consciousness.

41:52You know, the system has its own consciousness, its own identity. You've read Meditations on Moloch, which is like essentially putting a name and a face, this demon-like character to the process of like competition gone wrong. You know, these multipolar traps or these race to the bottom dynamics where people try and coordinate, but they can't because the game theory prevents them. They're optimizing for short-term incentives, and it creates these race-to-the-bottom spirals. That's Moloch. And what you're describing is it's something a little different, but it also deserves a name. And I remember we were talking about this once.

42:30We came up with a name for the demon of bureaucracy. But if Moloch is scary, the demon of bureaucracy is incredibly boring, very plain, and his name is Norm. does that fit like aesthetically this thing called norm because I feel like it's sometimes useful to have like bring these concepts to life with a face so we can like it's a common enemy we can fight against it's kind of the identifiable victim but the identifiable perpetrator makes it easier to I think it's not so much norm I think it's a female head of HR spicy it's a certain kind of female head of HR is certainly part of it mixed with a certain kind of male middle management psychology.

43:17It's like it's a double, it's a combination of those two. So it's gentleness. It's a combination of those two. So it's the female head of HR and the kind of banality of evil type of behavior from the past as well. So, I mean, so it's kind of the energy of, what's the name from Harry Potter? Oh, God, what's the name? Umbridge? Yeah, Professor Umbridge. Umbridge, yeah. Yeah. I have more Charlie Potters, I don't know. Oh, really? Oh, you should. There's a lot of parallels. It's also a book. I haven't read it. I'll have to with my son. No, you really must. It is truly excellent. And it touches on a lot of these concepts.

43:51You can see Rowling's absolute loathing for bureaucracy and centralised government and tyranny and so on. And there's this particular character, Professor Umbridge, who is kind of like the banana. Who epitomises the whole horror. Absolutely. and she if you ask me is scarier than the the classic enemy of the series which is uh you know lord voldemort but because voldemort is like you know he has no he's looked like a snake he goes around killing people he's you know he's a giant narcissist that everyone knows is the bad guy whereas umbridge she's sweet and she walks around and she wears like pink fluffy kittens your face now actually is like the female h-roll that's it oh yeah yeah no i can't i can channel this shit I think.

44:31Yeah, exactly. You know, I dressed up as Moloch in one of my videos, but yeah, I think I said, okay, Norma, maybe. It's good to have a slight gender to this. And yeah, it is. It is this like, that's the... Yeah, the wide-eyed look. And she smiles and nods. It's all going to be okay. And she wields the power of the law as if that was an ironclad rule of nature. Yeah. But it's for your safety. Yeah. We created the sewage monitoring, but we've decided it's really best if we close it down now because that mission's over we'll save all that money won't we we will save it and then that's it there will never be another virus there will never be another virus so we closed down all the infrastructure we build yeah so wait so all that so that's my next question actually while we're on the topic of covid because you know the world has been through this i i you know when it initially came out and then we saw it it wasn't going to probably you know it wasn't actually as fatal as we thought it was like okay good this is going to be a dry run for humanity for when the real bad pandemic comes along when some kind of probably synthetic or at least gain of functioned uh pathogen although probably covid was that too but uh you know where it actually is a 10 fatality rate we'll have done this dry run and we'll be more empowered and know what to do but i actually feel that now if anything we're almost less empowered because everyone's become a bit radicalized because the government overdid a bunch of stuff it didn't you know it kept on restrictions far longer than it actually needed to um would you agree or do you think we are in a better state now i think in almost every way worse and i think most of the people who were there in spring 2020 would agree with me that if something similar happened now almost definitely will be handled even worse than it was so if it happened next year if we had an engineered pandemic next year what do you think would happen of 10 % fatality rate, let's say.

46:24I think it would just be complete carnage. I think the government would just completely implode. And also, I think another crucial part of it is that the lies that they told, I think, have massively... I think this is underrated. They've destroyed trust on every... basically with every demographic. So if you go back to the vaccines, quid pro quo for doing the vaccines fast, was, and I had discussions with the chief scientific advisor, Patrick Vance, about this in spring 2020. The quid pro quo was total transparency on the data from the companies. None of the usual, well, this is commercially confidential, therefore we're not da-da-da.

47:07We're going to help the companies in all sorts of ways. We're going to help them with regulation. We're going to help them in terms of manufacturing and distribution, blah, blah, blah. They're going to make money out of it. There has to be total honesty and publication of all the data now what actually happened everyone nodded along to that 2021 basically that was all ditched and they obviously now hid a load of data so i haven't followed all of the stuff about vaccines don't know what the ins and outs are i find the whole thing so depressing but for sure we know that a whole load of important data was kept hidden and governments all over the western world including in britain and america lied through their teeth about it and they played sociology experiments basically yeah and and it's been it's an absolutely classic government failure you see it in issue after issue after issue where out of panic they lie and tell themselves it's a platonic lie to stop chaos and to stop disinformation and stop people getting the wrong end of the stick and on this they've said well we really need people to believe in vaccines therefore but the actual outcome of their behavior i think has been disastrous and it's destroyed confidence generally in vaccines.

48:21It's not even just like, oh, they lied about the COVID thing and it's kind of poisoned everyone's ideas about what really happened in COVID. Far beyond that, all sorts of people now think basically everything that they say about vaccines is a lie. Even the ones we've had for 60, you know, have eradicated polo, blah, blah, polio, et cetera. And even more widely, sorry, but even more widely, they probably just lie about everything to do with public health. Yeah. Because let's face it, They seem to lie about everything. So, duh. So I think that's another reason why now, if there was anything like that, one of the, I think, very underrated things internally in Whitehall is, you know, in spring 2020, there was actually quite a lot of, remarkably, in a sense, given, you know, overall political situation, there was actually remarkably a lot of trust from people that the government would tell them the truth and was at least trying to tell the truth.

49:18Like, obviously, we were going to fuck certain things up, but the government was trying to tell the truth. That's all been completely destroyed by how the regime operated in 2021, 2022. So if they had another crisis now and they said, we've got this information, it means very disparate political groups for different kind of underlying psychologies in various ways would say, yeah, they're obviously lying. We're not doing that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, on the vaccines, I suppose like a potential positive side effect is that it is it seems to be the case that in the US, there's maybe an over subscription of vaccines.

49:54So like some of it getting re investigated on the basis of lower vaccine trust might have some positive effects. I know some people will be extremely against vaccines. But actually, one positive thing, though, that happened, how the UK handled it is and apparently because was it Valens had seen the movie Contagion, he said. and also in part because the UK was enabled due to Brexit to order vaccines ahead of the EU who was stuck in like bureaucratic figuring out whether the price is right during a pandemic and trying to save like 3 billion euros or something by negotiating for three months longer.

50:32The UK ended up getting the vaccine much, much sooner. Unfortunately, and I think it was unlucky because there was no prior knowledge of it. It ended up not being a very good vaccine, the AstraZeneca one that they ended up getting in large numbers. But that didn't have to be the case. Depends how you feel about mRNA. A lot of people are now – I mean, you – No, no. I had issues and there are many issues with it. But I think the point is like before the fact of which vaccine, you had no kind of knowledge of which one will be how good, that stronger knowledge. And it was definitely a good idea to at least have the optionality.

51:06Yeah. So our basic attitude was we were given the EU's plan in, I think, March 2020. It was obviously exactly what you would expect from the EU, right? It was basically like hire McKinsey type people and Bain Consulting to share PowerPoints for months in advance. No one build anything. No one do anything. And I said, part of the whole point about Brexit was to do things differently. This is obviously a shit bureaucratic process. We can obviously do better than that. Therefore, we should try. Patrick Vallance also wanted to try and other people inside the system wanted to try. And our basic thought was essentially, you know, channel some of the great projects of the 20th century and do this stuff concurrently.

51:53So stop building manufacturing, distribution, logistics. Talk to Amazon about like last model logistical supply chains and blah, blah, blah. But do all of this in parallel now because time is money. And therefore, you know, like with the great ICBM programs of the 50s and Apollo in the 60s and whatnot, this kind of systems management approach where you build everything concurrently is the actual way to do these things properly. Side note, might want to talk about later, the way that McNamara and the WizKids and the Pentagon in the 60s basically made that great system that America had fundamentally illegal.

52:30and the Pentagon's never been able to go to operate the same way since. But our approach in 2020 was actually apply the great lessons of 20th century project management and do all that at the same time. It was obviously the right thing to do. And the EU, ironically, in terms of the British debate, the EU even admitted it and the Germans and the French all admitted it and said this is super embarrassing because Britain just left in January and our process has been, as the Germans have said, quote, a complete shitshow, unquote. like we in Brussels have to face that and very very unusually even the European Commission publicly publicly stated all of that of course is completely memory holding in in London where everyone just says I know they're like basically never happened so that but then they squandered all of that advantage by then lying about it it's way for it so I wonder specifically on that point though do you think that again say engineer pandemic 10 % fatality 2027 would they have a saner procurement process especially given as as you did already in 2020 especially given that the eu agreed to it there'd be there'd be huge pressures on the system to do the crazy thing right because if you look at what actually happened various things that we did on a kind of emergency basis in 2020 then got judicially reviewed and went to the courts including even completely crazy shit like i said to valancey and i think february 2020 or possibly march um given all the data is rubbish given the various parts of the system completely fallen over we were doing a whole load of polling for the election just like two months ago or whatever should i get those guys booted back up and just do a shitload of polling to ask people on their travel, on their illness, on their blah, blah, blah.

54:20Fallon said, God, that would be great. Please do. I called up the people. We just did it all in like three hours or something. Of course, various officials said, this is completely unlawful. You've got to have a whole procurement process, da, da, da, ignored all that, did it. After we did it, then there was a legal case brought, went through the courts. Two years later, what I did was declared unlawful. And then another year later, the Court of Appeal overruled that and said, no, actually what he did was lawful considering but you can see that all of that what there were multiple court cases like that that crazy guy jolly on who's like the one of the great trans rights campaigners he tried to bring up a whole judicial review to stop vaccines and testing happening at all and tied the government in knots over various things what was his because these people these people a think anything that we do is criminal by definition therefore should be stop you are the bad guys therefore therefore they're evil therefore they should be stopped secondly they thought um correctly well they're basically just ditching all of these normal rules including a whole bunch of eu rules um rules are good we want to defend the system right like that's the whole point that's what the brexit battle was about are you for the system or are you against the system they're for the system so all these legal cases were brought but but the bottom line of it is in lots of ways the lesson in whitehall taken out of that is the people who basically tried to go faster and do it differently, of all being criticized, attacked, declared as semi-criminals in the courts.

55:51The people who said, we should just go by the book, that was the right approach, is the lesson that most of Whitehall has learned. Now, if that means thousands more people die, well, so be it. But the revealed preference of Westminster fundamentally is they are retrospectively would have been happier by just playing by the book and thousands more people dying. and that message has very much got through to officials so what official in 20 you know 2026 or 2028 is going to go yeah you know what we should do we should just ignore all of this crazy stuff and just do the right thing everyone's going to say courageous person talking about like we've seen how that works we've seen the complete joke inquiry of course so odd weird courageous people will try and do the right thing.

56:36But the system, the Moloch, HR woman, norm system, all of the different demons, they will basically be aligned behind, do the stupid thing. I wanted to go over specific other aspects that could have happened. So I agree the quarantining will be harder to convince people of because we just stayed way too long with it. And that definitely erosion of trust and just like not again. Something much more drastic needs to happen before people believe it. I imagine you'd see it similarly. And what about other aspects? So one thing that I was unhappy with is because I was working on helping fundraising and funding some of these projects that improve pandemic risk reduction was that it seemed to me that the world due to mRNA vaccines, the technology kind of falling into the lab at scale at the time, started over-relying on specifically that as the cudgel against everything.

57:38And my perspective, at least, was that the Biden admin, as well as the UK and European countries, were just kind of explaining any problem by insufficient vaccine use rather than also looking at other solutions that could have been more sensible. Like the bad version was the sanitization of services, but actually like air transmission was pretty straightforward like you could hang out outside in rooms you can improve the airflow those things seem pretty straightforward or now like far uvc light is being considered yeah there are also still antivirals it is a virus that could be developed but we were doing just vaccines nearly totally um how much how much discussion of while you were there was there of these alternative other means to kind of navigate things people need to understand just how incredibly kind of risk-averse and novelty-averse these bureaucracy, Western bureaucracies have become.

58:39So it turned out subsequently that a whole bunch of people had figured out, knew really in the first quarter of 2020, that there were ways to do testing much more effectively than the PCR testing, much faster, much cheaper, and you could do a massive scale, You get tens of millions of these things. That information was basically suppressed inside the government system until July, when a bunch of young scientists came to a scientist that I brought into number 10, a young guy called James Phillips, and said, we've been talking to the Department of Health for months about this, and they won't listen, but we can just do this rapid testing stuff.

59:17The science works. Here's how you deploy it. So we have these meetings at number 10. We realize that what they're saying is true. So Patrick Vallance, chief scientific advisor, says, yeah, that sounds completely reasonable to me. I don't really understand why this has been squashed. So we then end up having another whole panic from kind of August through quarter three 2020 to get this fast testing stuff done, all of which could and should have happened months and months and months earlier. And again, it's like, well, what exactly is it just seems so incomprehensible in retrospect. people find it very hard to get their heads around it but these things happen repeatedly on everything every time someone came up with a new idea the uv light was another example example i remember people like eyes rolling around in their head in 2020 when i asked in meetings well what about you know i'm getting emails from people who were right about covid in january much more right than all of you guys were in the room and they're saying to me that there are some interesting new ideas people haven't really thought of like fire uvc lights and da da da They have the same thing, like eyes rolling around.

1:00:24The people who come to the top of these organizations get there by being against doing anything new. That's literally basically their job description. Fundamentally uncurious. It's just their whole career. It's like thinking of your own lives, right? And now saying to you, right, you've now got to go and be a middle manager email job, like nine to five every day, right? you guys couldn't emotionally couldn't do it it would be stupid to ask you to do a job like that right because you'd fuck it up you wouldn't read the emails you'd like go AWOL you'd rather be drunk than do that so it just doesn't work as a model and therefore with a lot of these people it's a wrong model to think like how do you persuade them or how do you do it if you've trained people for 20-30 years with incentives and culture and what they see being promoted and praised and celebrated and who gets fired and pushed out and then expecting a crisis they're going to completely flip and behave in a different way it's just never going to happen like that so i think the pushback against this like wider point of the government you know we need to have more dynamic and adaptable and creative people in government is that isn't the role of government to provide stability to provide predictability isn't it and therefore isn't it the role more of or you know of the private sector uh and even philanthropy sometimes to fill the gaps the of the things that government is too unwieldy to deal with so yes yes and no right but each side is very important it's true that in lots of things like you have say a government payment system that pays out people's pensions or pays out veterans health care or something right that system should work it should be very reliable you don't want You want all kinds of huge experiments going on all the time.

1:02:17You just want like steady away, make the bloody payments work. But another part of government is fundamentally dealing with crises. It's dealing with pandemics, it's dealing with financial meltdown, it's dealing with social disorder, and it's dealing with war and crazy mafia gangsters. And therefore, a different part of government has to be able to think in that appropriate way and execute on very hard problems in a dynamic fashion. And that's part of the problem, right? You can't have bureaucracies which are optimized for both things. At the moment, we have another problem is that if you have the kind of bureaucracies which you've got now, they can't even do the safe, stable, boring things, right?

1:03:05Even those things now crumble and fall over, again, as we saw in COVID. like also just the most simple um it systems can't work they can't share basic documents between like people find this almost impossible to believe but the prime minister's official statement on lockdown right i think the most watched prime ministerial statement for i don't know how many decades maybe going back to world war ii was drafted on my personal gmail account as the inquiry had to ask me about why did this happen. Had to happen because number 10 had no file sharing system. What? Number 10 had no file sharing system.

1:03:49So if you imagine a one-man band startup who just had like a one person wakes up one morning and says going to create a company to do blah and they create a gmail account you immediately have a better it system than the british prime minister had in 2019 and the beginning of 2020 but surely they had email themselves they had email but that's but you couldn't live edit a document with multiple people oh i see they didn't have like the equivalent of a google doc no google doc what did not exist they're going to use like microsoft word send it backwards and forwards for comments and so on. Literally everyone is on an email chain with like 150 emails in a chain with Microsoft Word 2014 attachments.

1:04:33That was the British state. Color printing is a challenge in number 10. Oh no. You have to like recalibrate. I mean to be fair color printing is a challenge everywhere. You have to recalibrate your assumptions on lots of these things. So if the system can't even have a Google Doc system for the PM, then how well do you think it's going to do a lot of these other things? And to be clear, I mean, hearing, you know, we know some people who you're working in Doge, etc. And there's a story of I think it's if someone wants to retire from the government, it takes the piece of paper to log it has to go down this elevator into lift.

1:05:23into a cave deep underground. And it's like... An old mineshaft. Yeah, it's like an old mineshaft. And then it's just like rows and rows of these old, like, essentially, like, library, like, storage things. And the bottleneck for the amount of information that can travel through there is the speed of the elevator. Which is a very old... Because there's only some amount. Anyhow, but yeah, and that was digitized. Yeah, and that's just an example. So it seems like it's a general worldwide phenomenon. Yeah, I think that is an important thing, right? So obviously there are specific things about Britain, but I think this is a very important thing.

1:05:59Most of the pathologies that Britain demonstrated and that I've been talking about are basically replicated across the Western world, including in America. And right down to, OK, us in America had a better idea of what to do on various technologies in 2020, and we executed better than the rest of Europe did. But similarly, America also closed those down in 2021, 2022. Right. So there's something very deep and profound happening across the Western world in the institutions. And I think what the core of it is, is this. All Western states have evolved to this model of the permanent bureaucracy fundamentally.

1:06:42That is the common factor. So we've got different political histories, different political institutions, different constitutions, da-da-da-da. But the common factor in all of these regimes is you have essentially unfireable officials in charge of the vast majority of things, with the political people kind of scattered around at the top in mostly fake jobs that don't actually reach down in power into the system. And that's why I think at the core of it, you see extremely similar things happen, whether it's like Sweden or Spain or Britain or America or Canada. Presumably, this is also the case in other big countries, like China, Russia.

1:07:21I can't imagine they are that much more like I would be surprised if they didn't have the same type of issues. Like, is this not like just a global phenomenon of humanity when systems become a certain amount of complexity when it comes to governance? Yeah, I think that's right. I think basically you have, like post-1945, regimes everywhere have built kind of similar permanent bureaucracies. They have like the siloed Ministry of Health, Minister of Education, Ministry of Body Blah. And those things have grown up everywhere with a lot of the same HR pathologies, right? And as you guys know, there's a big tendency to think about a lot of these problems as private v.

1:08:06public. But it's not in many ways a good way of thinking about it. lots of very big companies like Google end up developing the same kind of pathologies that you see in Washington. Scale and time seem to have very similar effects, whether it's in the private sector or the public sector. But the fundamental difference is, okay, Google, Larry Page and co can check out and go on their yacht for a few years and drop the ball. But the difference is Sam Altman and people go, right, we'll take their papers and we'll build a startup and we'll raise money and will execute and will change and the creative destruction of the private system ends up altering but in government you're just stuck with the same thing you're still stuck something like that if you had just very very easy movement of people across nations or something like this then maybe you would see something like the voting of people not liking a government happening in those cases but basically what you're saying is um i think like said another way is that the bureaucracy the stable bureaucracy within each country is kind of a monopoly on power that it has rather than that the political parties are in true competition with each other yeah right like whatever comes in yeah the this monopolistic uh bureaucracy just runs everything which uh again then you would expect the same kind of problems that occur with monopolies and the in capitalism also to occur where, well, you don't get as good products anymore.

1:09:36Prices go up. You can set those things, right? And here there's just no incentive to improve the offering to the populace, I suppose. I think another way of thinking about it is in terms of the political institutions that if you go back for a few hundred years in Europe, right, You just see the same pattern every few decades, essentially. And the pattern is regime change. Every kind of 50 years or so, there's a spasm. And then fundamentally what happens is the ideas and institutions of the ruling group are pulled out of whack over time with reality. The ideas and institutions can't cope. Reality pulls away from them.

1:10:25Crises build. Something happens. and then it flips and then there's a change. And if you go back, like France has had, I don't know how many regimes, like seven or eight or something since, say, 1815. Russia, multiple revolutions, Germany, multiple regime changes. Britain and America are different in that they've had those crises, but they've just managed not to snap. So they've kind of changed radically at the same time, but without changing the kind of core constitutional system. The Constitution has stayed, but you've had FDR. Yes. The Constitution is still there now, but you've got Trump. Britain, similarly, right?

1:11:06You have very, very profound changes, but you haven't actually had a revolution. You still have the, like... Had the buildings taken over, all the files ransacked into the streets like the Stasi in 1989 or something. but that fundamental process of

1:11:24any of this funny generational thing right that it seems somehow tied to generations so you have generations like you know generations be a generation beats napoleon it walks through the bloody battlefields it watches it and it says we've got to rebuild and we've got to try and avoid this happening that happens for a couple of generations and then those people retire and die and then new people come through and the world's different and then boom and then the same kind of... Because they've forgotten. They've forgotten. The horrors of war or whatever. It's like the classic meme of strong men build good times, good times create weak men, etc.

1:11:57And it's an old meme, right? Machiavelli talked about similar things back then as well when he analyzed all of the political history of the past and just to him it was more about peace breeds idleness and idleness... Corruption. Yeah, breeds corruption and corruption breeds war and out of that you get kind of like a facing reality again and then you build better times. He actually was quite pessimistic about one's ability to not continue the cycle because he just saw the cycle everywhere just repeating itself. I suppose, are you trying to push it so that we build something fast out of it or do you think we can just...

1:12:37Can we escape the wheel of suffering? I don't think we can, no. I don't think we can. But I think that, I don't think there's some universal escape, no. I do think, though, that individual countries and individual peoples can avoid potentially their fate. I don't think that there is any, well, sorry, obvious caveat, right? With a combination of biological engineering and AI coming, then you raise the question of human nature itself being altered and fundamental to the ideas of people like Machiavelli or Thucydides is really what you're dealing with the fundamental constraints of human nature and that's why you see these the same patterns recurring over and over and over right but the constant human nature is kind of the bedrock of that of those ideas so therefore I would say if you imagine human nature itself might be changed in coming decades then you everything needs would have to be lots of these old ideas might might how inevitably have to be rethought in various ways but if you take that aside you say assume stable human nature why would you think that there's going to be some escape from everything we can see in record in recorded history that doesn't mean though that you just have that you give up that different countries and different people at different times, choices matter.

1:14:08And I think a flip side of it is, if you think of war and peace, there's two kind of core stories in war and peace, right? Leaving aside the people. Philosophically, there's a story of huge forces collide. No individual really has much power over them, even Napoleon. These things are on the march. They crunch, they collide. the humans are picked up, thrown across continents, smashed to pieces, and you don't really have any control. But there's also a story of, particularly at these weird moments of crisis, then actual one individual decision can be critical. And the difference between, does the army run away, or does the army stand and fight?

1:14:49Does the country fall apart, or does the country survive? Both stories are kind of there in war and peace. And I think we have to all remember the second thing as well. So yes, we are at the moment going through one of these periods. These huge forces are on the march. Our regimes are obviously crumbling in a hundred ways. We can see it all around us. This has gone from being an extremely fringe view even three or four years ago to now focus groups are reporting back from 200 miles away from London to people in Westminster saying, oh yeah, it's now an open topic of conversation that people are talking about the breakdown of law and order in their area and their fears about civil war in general in the country.

1:15:29That is a huge shift. Suddenly, Westminster itself is having to face this kind of systemic possibility of systemic collapse. So we're living through one of these historical moments, but we also have to remember the second part of the story, which is exactly at these moments, individuals do matter, individual decisions can be the critical turning point. so are there any current nations or systems where you think they have managed is are there any countries that you think have managed to escape the wheel like a country like singapore it feels both stable it feels rich it feels um largely free yes they have some pretty heavy-handed rules around certain things that we might bulk at in the West, but that feels to me like a country that has escaped the wheel.

1:16:24Or am I just being pie in the sky about that? I think to a large extent you're right. I mean, everyone I know who kind of lives there or spend a lot of time there talking to the government and whatnot, everyone is very impressed by what they managed to build. clearly the way in which Lee Kuan Yew himself

1:16:53made people the core and talent acquisition central to what he personally was trying to do. If you have someone of that extraordinary level of ability and personal strength who's in power for decades and says, this is going to be a kind of core principle running through the whole thing, then that has a lot of momentum, right? And clearly is a huge part of the reason why Singapore is the way it is now. But there's huge kind of like forces of atrophy against that, right? How long can it survive after the extraordinary founder dies? Unclear. But for sure, if you're thinking now in Europe, OK, how do we basically improve a lot of these things that are broken?

1:17:46On area after area, if you just said, OK, let's look at what Singapore's doing and sort of copy it, then you'd be way ahead of the game. Right, it'd be better than what we're currently doing. Nothing's forever. And Lee Kuan Yew dying, like how long did it last? But OK, but for sure what they've got now is much better than what we've got. An interesting idea, because I mean, one thing that does seem, okay, this isn't necessarily overhauling the entire system, but it might be a thing that could kickstart the system into a more adaptable and sort of transparent direction is, it was a guest I literally just had on before this, Jamie Joyce, if you know her.

1:18:25A little bit, yeah. Yeah, founder of like the Society Library. And I call her misinformation. She's like the queen of it, but in a good way. and she had quite a spicy take which was that she thinks politicians themselves are just completely outdated technology that you know they came about in a time when people would write a note with a quill and get on horseback and take it somewhere and and their job was to sort of speak to their constituents and remember what they all said and then take it to wherever their local government is and and like you know because there was nothing else better than that but in modern times where you have so many more constituents and so many more policies and complex topics to talk about.

1:19:05She's like, it's absurd to expect any human to hold all of this information and the differing views and the percentages who believe in different things and try and then represent them. And she's like, that part of a politician's job should be replaced by databases, essentially. Whether it's viewpoint databases again um and and it's a way to also correct for biases um is there any inkling of like is there anyone do you think that has the the sort of the gumption or the ability uh to go in and start trying to digitize these types of processes yes i think there are i mean i wouldn't curse them by me naming them and making them targets for everyone in the deep state and beyond.

1:19:53Right, that's the problem. Yes, there are definitely, I think the view that the old thing is clearly broken and a completely radical different approach is needed is clearly shifted from being a very fringe view 15, 10, five years ago to being something which everyone is now, all over the place people are discussing. There is obvious scope for enormous changes in how politicians do pretty much every aspect of their lives, as you say, whether it's trying to figure out what their constituents think, trying to keep on top of the massive information flow in general on policy and everything else. Obviously, the way that they currently handle all these things could be done 100 times better than it is.

1:20:44But I think that in a way, though, just points to the kind of back to the deeper problem, right, which is that will only happen if the people there actually want to do that, if they're actually optimising for, I really care what voters think, I really want to understand policy, I really care about government and making it better. None of those three things have been the case for the median conservative MP for the last 20 years. They don't, contrary to the whole official story of how politics works, they spend very little time actually trying to figure out what people think and don't care about it.

1:21:21They don't spend their time studying opinion polls all the time, even. Most people, particularly in the business world, their model of politicians is, okay, well, they're kind of useless at management, and they're not very good leaders, most of them. But at least they're kind of experts in what the voters think, and that's what they're optimizing for. That's also wrong. They're not even doing that. So I think it's definitely true that there is huge scope for improvement, but that itself just points back to what is it that's gone wrong in the kind of culture and incentive system of the existing political things such that the people aren't trying to do it.

1:21:57You see what I mean? So another way to describe how we describe Moloch is that it's kind of the force that makes one sacrifice a bunch of other values in the pursuit of one narrow goal. Yeah. The origin with child sacrifice is the epitome of that, the strongest version of it. So is that also the case with current politicians? Do they have... It sounds like they're sacrificing some values here. What is their narrow goal? Is there one narrow goal or is there a multiple? There are two related. There are two very related narrow goals. Everything is sacrificed to two things. One, their next interview.

1:22:40Two, their promotion inside the system in a relatively short time frame. So they're not optimising for winning the election in four years. And I think a lot of political analysis goes wrong because they assume lots of things seem really weird, right, if you're thinking about that. If you're thinking that that's what Liz Truss or someone is thinking about, then you go, well, why are they doing this? why they do it because that doesn't seem to be what the polls suggest that's not what they're optimizing for they're thinking what am i going to say in my interview tomorrow on the bbc and they're thinking what do i say such that i get promoted and my work my way up the system over coming months a year is like an impossibly far timeline like three months is almost like nothing almost no conversation in westminster ever is about something in three months and how transparent is that within Westminster so do people discuss like internally actually with each other mainly the interview or is it still oh I'm doing the interview for the higher greater goal of the thing in three years 10 years for the UK whatever it is it's become very kind of polarized so I'd say MP culture they've lost so MP culture is they just talk about the interviews and the media and the 24-hour news but they don't even really kind of grasp that that's how they spend all their time.

1:23:56And if someone points out to them, guys, all you seem to do is talk about blah, blah, you don't talk about blah, blah. They just sort of like look around like who's the mad person that was let into the room. But amongst the deep state officials, obviously it's different. They talk in obviously much more condescending and sneering terms about the politicians. Like, well, obviously they won't care about that. Obviously they won't care about that because all they care about is their stupid interview tomorrow. But we have to actually focus on what the hell is the MOD going to do in three years time.

1:24:21And that's another part of this kind of culture that's grown up, I think, which is important that And there's the Russian phrase, you'll know, everyone's right and everyone's unhappy, right, as they say in Moscow. And it's the politicians say correctly, well, Whitehall's gone downhill and the quality of officials is worse and da-da-da-da-da. True. The officials say, well, the politicians' quality has collapsed even faster and they're just not interested in any of these things. So the nature of government itself is completely shifted because now if you watch like a cabinet meeting or a bunch of senior MPs and ministers, they just talk purely about like the next few days media and nothing else.

1:25:02So the officials correctly in a sense say, well, if that's what the political figures actually care about, someone has to actually do the important things in the country. And that's us as the permanent officials. Right. So they're actually in some ways morally justified to do things. Correct. And that's where it's a complicated thing. They are, to a large extent, morally justified by the complete failure of political leadership. And it's extra crazy because the media stories are not necessarily what is – it's not perfectly correlating with what is actually important going on in the world, right?

1:25:37It's completely not. Anticorrelated. I would say anticorrelated. I would also – there is the French philosopher. You can think of French philosophers. Many have various thoughts on them. But Jean Baudrillard wrote Simulacra and Simulation, and there he argues that, well, he claims that since the 1970s, we've lived in kind of like a hyper real state where we're just in this level four simulation where basically the stories and things that we care about are created to fit you. The phrase he uses is that you're not watching the TV anymore, but the TV watches you and feeds you the things that you will engage with.

1:26:17And then what you have engaged with informs further things that are shown on the TV, which this was prior to social media. He's dead, but I imagine seeing current social media, this is the like, it's that perfected, right? So I wonder just in that, it makes it even more insane because it's certainly true that much of the media stories are about what is attention-grabbing rather than about what is actually relevant. So focusing on the media is even crazier nowadays. So how is that discussed or internalized? It's even crazier. I would say it's almost even crazier in another way in that a lot of ideas like that kind of assume that, yeah but the guys in charge are kind of sitting in a room trying to figure out what the stories are which they're pushing out and it's kind of a lot of what we see is therefore manipulated and it's the people in charge the shadowy figures at the top of the pyramid are kind of figuring this stuff out and then running these stories and then the public are kind of manipulated by it but that's not a good way of thinking about it the people at the top are manipulated by it themselves and they're almost never actually trying to shape the story they are also just watching tv and responding to the tv story you see what i mean it's not a story of a few shadowy figures shoving down narratives from the top it hits the tv the voters respond the shadowy figures watch try and manipulate blah blah of course there are elements to that here and there but that's only a very small part of it it's mostly just kind of like unplanned chaos or the algorithms themselves.

1:27:54I was talking to Tristan Harris about this and he was just like, these days, journalists will get their news from either X or Instagram or whatever social media platform, probably Blue Sky these days, that they're on, which is ultimately what news stories get lifted there are what ones interact well with the engagement algorithm and spiking people's cortisol and dopamine and so on. And so it's really the algorithms that are actually choosing. They are choosing what stories get elevated to the editors at the BBC or whatever and like triggers their personal emotional bias in which they're like, we have to focus more on this.

1:28:34And it's just like confirmation bias all the way down, essentially. And then you have a whole bunch of these characters operating in public on Twitter and Blue Sky and whatnot, optimizing their own personal lives for social approval from networks around them, which are themselves just being kind of buffeted by these other forces. So it's a completely insane way. So it's a big part of the reason why the news now seems and politics seems so mental is it is just driven by this almost completely unconscious process. It's driven by Moloch. Yeah. So if you were given$20 billion to go and build a social media platform from scratch or a media platform from scratch, what incentives, what core incentives would you start from or fundamental axioms?

1:29:28Goodness. I don't think I've got a good idea about how to set up a social media platform.

1:29:36I think I think though an interesting project and I've suggested this to a few rich people but the answer is also interesting I suggest to a few people why don't you try to set up a media thing that is purely optimized for just telling the truth and verifiable facts because in a world where things like New York Times and whatnot have all become story creators and no one can actually trust anymore what's in any of these old institutions because we know they just make everything up in order to fit the story

1:30:16having and i'm sure you guys are the same right we're all on whatsapp groups and we're constantly bombarded with various things and constantly you see like very very smart people sometimes with huge numbers of resources like everyone else just going like is this story true it sounds kind of crazy but like i can't i've done some google searches and i can't quite think figure out like if the core facts are real or not real so it does seem to me that something that something that was simply trying to establish facts would be useful but whenever i talk to people with money about it they laugh and say there'd be basically no market for it because no because basically no one is interested in it anymore which i personally don't think is true but i think it is an interesting reflection of like where we've got to i don't think that's i don't think that's true i mean maybe a large percentage of the population has given up trying to sense make um or you know they just don't they can't conceptualize that the world is is so deep and similar similar level four that they don't care about trying to find a truth because truth doesn't exist as a concept but i think i mean the fact that we're talking about it suggests there is some kind of market for it i think more the question is it's just like now we're in the age of generative ai where it's so trivially easy to create propaganda what like maybe there are like technological steps that we can do to even just establish that like this camera when it was recorded here on this day was actually yeah verifiably there is a project You've conceived of one in 2017, but fortunately there is actually one, TruePick, it's called, where they just establish provenance and where it was recorded, how was it altered afterwards and have an original file of it.

1:32:05Well, no, specifically they have a crypto chip. We need a crypto chip and a camera because what is the blockchain? It's an indeligible lock. Censorship resistant. Censorship resistant and it will track. You can't go back and edit it afterwards. something like that would would be at least a technological solution where you can at least know that this video was recorded on that date yeah and then at the same time you also want to i think what uh yeah teach people to identify what is a simulation like it's kind of crazy that you have when you go on facebook occasionally then you see these posts that are obviously ai-generated stuff with a ton of responses as if it's not ai-generated stuff where i think some of those responses are also AIs just responding so that's why you don't know what it even is but then many people see the conversation and they'll probably believe it it's um I think we definitely need to build our understanding of what makes a simulation and what is more something like truth I think or what is more first principle possible before you see the simulation that would at least attack the problem of what's even real anymore and then there's the other problem that Machiavelli would be talking about is like needing to understand who holds the power also allows you to much better try to make sense of the world right which is why in part you're discussing the deep state as it manifests itself in both in both areas as the power vector.

1:33:31I think the other thing which will happen I suspect is that there'll be a weird kind of throwback where in-person events become more important again. Yes. So you've gone through a world where in-person events were everything, almost everything. Growth of mass media, 1950-ish kind of peak. Stalin can erase someone from a photo, create consensus reality for hundreds of millions of people. BBC decides X is a fact. It is three big networks in the States. Kind of peaks around that time. I Love Lucy in the 1950s, I think like the most watched TV show in the history of TV in like 55 or 57 or something.

1:34:11then obviously post 1990 all of this world kind of starts disintegrating because of the internet and i think we're going to go back to a lot more in-person events as part of what will happen both in the entertainment world and but also in the also in the political world so crypto will become more important but also all the most old school of old school things will become more so i was really struck the other day recently reading about the napoleonic wars you see these people who go through these things have no real all these peasants picked up washed across europe washed back interviewed after 1815 have no idea what the hell was going on right they just picked up in some village in france end up in moscow end up back here what the fuck was that all about no one those.

1:35:03Wow. Fast forward to 1950, as you were saying, you then have these very super centralised technologies, incredible control of a tiny number of people setting out. This is the story. But now we're kind of back to a world which in lots of ways is more like 1815, before any of that existed, right? There's no real consensus reality, super confusing. Did that thing even happen or not we're much more like french peasants of 1815 just fundamentally clueless as to what these big events are or even if they're even real yeah it seems like just as a first order of business i would just love for transparency to be increased kind of everywhere and then you can because like the clearly the population feels that something is wrong yeah right and then and you've been saying that actually for a while in the past as well that in part what LEAF came together because people just, they're actually smarter about this stuff than you want to give them credit to.

1:36:05It was an expression of these feelings. That's what Brexit was in lots of ways. I've watched this, I've been talking to people about this sort of stuff now since 1999. You can see a lot of these things in 2003, 2004, but the last people to see it are the people at the top of power. The last people to see a lot of these things are the people in Westminster. But if you just talk to normal people A lot of these things were obvious many, many years ago, but I completely agree on the transparency fund. And there's obvious, very easy ways in which a regime that wanted to could improve on that, right?

1:36:40Again, though, the core problem is inside Whitehall now, all pressures are for the opposite. All pressures are to cover up. I mean, we just had the most horrific in lots of ways example of that with the whole grooming gang, rape gang, horror show of decades. But that is a very vivid demonstration of how the system is, it's not trying to have transparency so that we learn about what's going wrong. It's desperately trying to suppress information about what's gone wrong to defend itself fundamentally, defend its own bureaucratic power, defend its budgets and to keep the public locked out of how it operates.

1:37:23Yeah, so the group in gangs is just like, I kind of heard about it and so on, but never really took it that seriously because it was like in my head, it was like, oh, it's a Tommy Robinson thing. And I've been told that Tommy Robinson is bad. um and then actually in part because elon and sort of the the x-sphere started talking about it more um went down the rabbit hole and it was like oh this is possibly the worst thing that's happened in britain in probably 50 plus years um how the fuck do you think like something like that could have gone so covered up for so long. Like I understand that the system, you know, it is in its, the system is to try and keep people happy and quiet so it can carry on doing its thing.

1:38:12But this seems like something that should be at odds at the system, at the odds, at odds to the system's survival. Because it's so abhorrent. So I think there's a couple of things I think come together. One is leave aside the, everything to do with ethnic angles and this particular case to begin with. There's a general bureaucratic thing, which is that

1:38:40the way in which the child protection bureaucracy in general in the country has evolved over the last few decades is towards extreme secrecy and extreme cover-ups overall. So when I was working Department of Education, I used to have to deal with these cases because it was tipped into the Department of Education. And there were things called serious case reviews. A serious case review would be done by social services and whatnot after some particularly horrific case with some child killed or whatever. And I would take these documents home and I'd read the redacted version and the unredacted version.

1:39:16And you could see that over and over again, whole paragraphs or pages were completely blanked out of the report. And when you looked at the unredacted version, you could see the bits redacted were purely because it was about the police screwed this up, social workers were told, were warned that this would happen next week and told to send someone round and said they would, but then they never did. And then the child was killed the following week, blah, blah, blah. And when you would talk to the officials and say, why is this being redacted? They'd say it's to protect the identity of the victim and the victim's families.

1:39:52But it doesn't mention anything to do with that. They never mention their names are not there. It's literally nothing to do with them. It's just about why the police and social services screwed up. That's your view, Dominic. Our view is that it's necessary to protect the identity of the children. Wow. So you have the general phenomenon of extreme cover-ups in general on the whole subject. If you go back, there was a case called the Baby P case, absolutely horrific case in, I don't know, 2007, 2008. And after that, we said in the Department of Education, the system should shift from being by default closed to by default open.

1:40:31So the reports on these processes basically are public. In order that you could learn and it should shift towards an industry, like an industry which is seen generally as a gold standard for safety, which is the airline industry, right? Airline industry developed checklists, airline industry developed an extremely effective methodology for dealing with catastrophic failure. Interesting part of the reasons why versus medicine where fundamentally the incentives of the pilots are aligned. So why do checklists evolve? Because the pilots don't want to die. So they went along with checklists. Why do checklists not evolve in surgery?

1:41:09Because the patient dies while the doctor goes home and has a large scotch. as per that book checklist manifesto which is very interesting on these things anyway we said social work industry basically is much more like surgery i.e lots of people die avoidably it should shift to being like the airline industry incredible hate and resistance for this concept throughout the system and once we've gone from the department of education effectively as always with these things, a brief period of trying to change things is basically overwhelmed by the consensus of the bureaucratic interests and the whole thing tipped back towards continued cover-ups.

1:41:51So that's a long way around of saying you have to realize that's the baseline that they're dealing with anyway, right? Then you layer on top of that, holy shit, in some of these places, like one in 50 of the Pakistani men in that town are actually involved with this. this is a political total shitshow given that we've been telling everyone diversity is our strength and immigration is a great success story and Britain is a wonderful integration success that everyone should copy you ally that political nightmare with the bureaucratic model of well we always cover this shit up so we'll just we know how to do this so it's kind of a completely to be expected outcome of the way that these bureaucracies have evolved over 50 years.

1:42:46So, I mean, do you think that because this is just so heinous and now that they are actually doing some kind of inquiry, although I imagine you're probably going to be skeptical about whether the inquiry will actually be done well, could this be the catalyst for change? because it is about as bad as it gets. And it intersects with the general concern that more and more increasing fractions of the country are having about uncontrolled immigration or at least a very non-discretionary immigration policy, to put it politely. Could this be the catalyst? or are you? So the black pill is what a lot of officials have said to me.

1:43:34Obviously, what happened is just another cover up. Whitehall knows how to do this. Look at what the judge said about the blood scandal recently. That report finally came out after many years and many years. The judge basically said, well, it's obvious that Whitehall has just destroyed a whole load of documents and lied and covered it up. Actually quite successful. So we haven't been able to get the answers to a lot of questions. No coverage of that really. The whole thing is blown away as usual by new crazy news. So a lot of people in Whitehall are extremely cynical and think that what all will happen is that they destroy a vast number of documents and they basically all get away with it.

1:44:16I'm inclined to that view depending on what happens with the political regime. So if Starmer stays or something like Starmer stays, then that probably is what will happen. They probably will be able to cover up a lot of the details. If the political regime changes, though, it says, no, no, we actually want to get to the truth of this. We don't want, you know, if you have a number 10 force that doesn't want to cover it up to keep the bureaucracy happy, but actually wants to reveal the truth, then the whole thing could work out in a different way. But even on the case where they managed to cover up a whole lot of it, it still in many ways kind of hold a lot of the system below the waterline, I think, now.

1:45:03Because millions of people now realise, A, not only did this happen, but B, clearly there's been a cross-party and cross-system attempt to keep the whole thing secret. And that extends to, of course, police, social work, local councils, national government, politicians and civil servants and much of the media. Right. Remember, most of the media ran away from covering this story. If you look at the most high status pundits in Westminster, the vast majority of them in January 2020, sorry, 2025, this year, when Elon started putting out those tweets, the vast majority of high status Westminster creatures said.

1:45:46Oh, yeah, Keir Starmer is right. The real story here is Elon spreading misinformation. Right. And how do we control the use of Twitter to spread these far right Tommy Robinson stories? That was only five months ago, the acceptable dinner party take in Westminster. I wonder if they actually know, like, because I imagine a lot of people have now shifted now that it is within the Overton window. Do they not remember that they behave this way? It's polarised. So some of them have kind of edged away from it, but I think you'd be shocked to know how many of them over on Blue Sky have just completely doubled down.

1:46:26Just now the whole thing is just racism. It's like basically a trivial problem. And the whole thing is only being brought up now because racists want to make it a big deal. And the, quote, really important story here, unquote, is what's the motivation of the racists and how is social media and the tech oligarchs exploiting this for their own fascist ends? That is the actual real story, not the grooming gangs themselves. Hence, of course, massive, massive support now. Another very big thing, I think, in favor of censorship. if you'd said even 10, 5, 10 years ago democratic presidential candidates will openly say a week before the election that the First Amendment was a historic mistake that needs to be fixed after the election everyone would have said, including me you're out of your mind like however mad they are even if they thought that they wouldn't fucking say it, right?

1:47:21Hillary Clinton, John Kerry both publicly say exactly that week, 10 days before the election just openly First Amendment, quote, historic mistake so I think another really really important thing that's going on and Obama just in the last week similarly started to talk about this is the elites fragment the set one set of them are digging in on defense of the old system at all costs and the people who are pulling in that direction simultaneously saying logically from their point of view we're obviously going to have to reintroduce like 18th century style censorship where we, the people in charge, the aristocracy of the system are actually in charge of information and everyone else has filtered content.

1:48:08That is clearly what's happening both in America and all across Europe. And if you take like kind of the normie Westminster pundit, most of them are on board for censorship. The UK doesn't have the same type of thing like the First Amendment, right? There are some laws that restrict communications and upon which grounds there have been frequent and more and more arrests also happening. It's like the Section 127 of the Communications Act and the... Which actually initially, when I looked into it, I saw, oh, what they actually at the time wanted to prohibit was when it was a public good that was used.

1:48:52It was on taxpayer money funded communication services. And on those, the state said, well, this is like funded from everybody. Therefore, you can't do certain things like indecent statements or something that could be interpreted as offensive, which is a better argument than to say on a private service like Twitter or something like this. You're also not allowed to do that because why is the state even getting involved to the same degree on those? in any case currently more and more people are getting uh arrested and then also prosecuted in the uk on it well it's kind of crazy to me that i know it's slightly different but it's still like in the current law it still says um if if that for indecency you could also simply be charged and it's it's coming from the country that it was for a different case but uh drove alan turing to suicide for being gay for indecency indecent behavior who then killed himself later of course and four years later afterwards and who also for similar reasons um oscar wilde uh was also prosecuted and it's like a country has a history of going after its in some ways its heroes genius as people and is now still kind of like trying to allow the application of some blobs assumption of what decent behavior is to restrict the flow of information it seems seems very sad and especially bearing in mind that like the uk feels terrible for alan turing right like the he got a posthumous pardon and is on the 50 pound note etc but still in law i'm just saddened by it What are your takes on the sort of creeping desire of, it seems like the establishment, to backdoor in censorship through blasphemy laws, or at least under the guise of Islamophobia?

1:50:54Yeah. Because that one seems especially creepy to me. Is that, again, the same elites pushing for this? Yeah, I mean, it's partly because they've convinced, so I think partly important to realize that a lot of these people mentally are in San Francisco night 2020, right? They are operating like those arguments all one and those arguments are truth and everyone now has to realign around those. hence partly why Starmer looks so completely confused about the current situation because Starmer operates on that like he was programmed in 2020 essentially this is the new good thing and that's your software back when he came out the oven yeah um that's one part of it another part of it is um there's a kind of high the these characters have a kind of hierarchy of values and the top of their hierarchy of values probably is don't be accused of racism.

1:51:58That's the number one thing. So most obviously everything to do with women and women's rights gets thrown under the bus by the system. It's just very clearly not a priority like being accused of racism is. So that's also part of the driver. It's also partly the fear that we've talked about before, that they are increasingly frightened that correctly, that they are creating the backlash. So their boogeyman for many years has been, oh, there's these terrible white racist nationalist type characters, and that's why we've got to do the following things. It was basically almost completely garbage, right?

1:52:39These characters are completely fringed, no political impact of any kind. They exist, but it's a tiny thing. It's like Scientology. It exists. There are some crazy people in various crazy cults, but that's not what MI5 and MI6 and the police and whatnot should be spending their time on and focused on, right? What they're worried about is that what they've done by a combination of the collapse of, by the grooming gang story, the Boris wave, completely uncontrolled immigration, the insanity of the boat spectacle coming across every day on these stupid boats. All of these things coming together is they're terrified that they are in the process of creating what they most fear, which was a kind of fake thing, white nationalism, but they're actually kind of superstitioning it into reality by their own behavior.

1:53:33So they're kind of frightened by the consequences of how they themselves have operated the system for a couple of decades. And all of these kind of pushes on free speech are part of that. Rather than actually deal with the boats, rather than tell the truth about the gangs, well, let's start having blasphemy laws and let's crack down on complaints of high profile white people tweeting. I mean, just a week or two ago, you had the absolutely crazy spectacle of people actually being caught, convicted of burning a guy's house down and killing him inside it and getting a shorter jail time than the famous, what's her name?

1:54:17Lucy Connolly. Lucy Connolly. With her tweet. Yeah, no, I just saw that. She got 31 months for her, admittedly, very, it's not a nice tweet, you know, saying like, set fire, you know, after the Southport stabbings. And she obviously believed it was an illegal immigrant who'd come over on the boats, set fire at the hotels, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Not a nice tweet, but like 31 months. Come on. It was only up for three and a half hours, by the way. It was like, like, I don't think that was the thing that caused the riots. There's no evidence. At least you need lock tight evidence that her tweet caused that, I think, to lock them up for that period of time.

1:54:52But meanwhile, there was like three kids went and literally burnt a guy alive in his house and they got the same length sentence. Slightly lower, I think. Yeah, it's absurd. You can see the oddness when the riots kicked off last year, that you could actually see all over Twitter and Blue Sky, a whole set of Westminster people and academics openly saying, all my life I've been against, you know, I've always been in favor of lower sentences. We imprison too many people. I've campaigned on these things all my life and feel very strongly about it. However, today I feel no penalty is strict enough.

1:55:30Why is that? The reason is purely aesthetic right it's the it's the because the people are kind of white sunburned skin with union jack flags and they're the people that westminster thinks i hate you you're the people who did brexit you're you are the people that have forced westminster to reorient how we think about all these questions to our rage and disgust so as soon as an opportunity comes along to say throw them all in jail. Of course, 30, 40 years of campaigning against prison suddenly went up in smoke in an afternoon. It seems like one of the highest untouchable values that has been, certainly in my age growing up in the UK, was this idea of multiculturalism is this perfect good.

1:56:24It is the thing that we must aspire to. Everyone will support. Everyone will support. And I started thinking about it more recently and it's like, well, what is actually multiculturalism? What do you mean by that? Because like, are we actually talking about sort of, again, aesthetic differences, like people of different races and a nice melting pot? That's a nice time. I'm staying on Notting Hill. It's lovely. Walk down. It's people from all sorts of places, you know, and different religions. And it works. It's like, that's going well. But then you have, at the same time, that's like an aesthetic form of multiculturalism, whereas actual multiculturalism is like you're talking people from completely different cultures, value sets, religions, etc.

1:57:07Some of which are fundamentally incompatible. For example, some of the teachings of Islam are at loggerheads with the teachings of the West.

1:57:19and so I guess it's it's is it just like a miss is it like a misusing of the term multiculturalism because like the you the US in a way was once multicultural right like or it was a bunch of different Europeans from different countries coming over but they gave up their different cultural identities to say we are American we unify under this flag and is that where the UK is going wrong? Because people don't have enough of a shared identity of what it means to be British? With a sufficient pride? So multiculturalism obviously has worked in one sense repeatedly through history, but in the form of empire.

1:58:01So you can see empire after empire successfully surviving for centuries, whilst having multiple ethnic groups, multiple languages, multiple religions. But of course the difference is you also have an actual ruling family in charge, and you have a regime overall which says, here are the core principles of how this operates, and you all better stick with this, or else you're for the high job. Now we don't have empires. We have decaying liberal democracies governed by the bureaucratic class which we've discussed, which have gone to university over the last 30 years with just like fog in their heads, with no actual idea about what the hell a country is.

1:58:55A country is even good. A lot of them come out of university thinking, well, maybe like borders are intrinsically evil and blah, blah, blah. So, of course, if you have a set of useless characters like that in charge of a country and the spectacle of the boats and just, oh, well, we all believe in multiculturalism, don't we? Well, then that's where you have total chaos. Going back to the previous conversation about Lee Kuan Yew, he, of course, handled this whole thing very differently, right? He said from the beginning, English is the common language. Yes, you can be Muslim. Yes, you can be whatever.

1:59:28but here are the common rules and I will enforce these principles with a rod of iron and if any of you ethnic groups religious groups think that you can start questioning fundamentally how this place works I'll come down on you like a ton of bricks again very strong moral leadership as well as kind of political and bureaucratic control all of those things now obviously have completely imploded in many Western countries. And I think also that there's a fundamental question of kind of proportions and numbers, right? If you have a country and then you say, actually, you know, some small percentage of the people, like 1 % or something, come from wherever.

2:00:20And those people come in and if they want to pray to the Hindu god or Islam or whatever every week, who cares? It doesn't really affect things. We've got a very clear, stable culture and set of rules about how it operates. It's basically unthreatening. All of that psychology collapses when you start having places that are now 90 % Indian, Pakistan, whatever, and the white people have left and there is effective segregation in the schools. So you go to Rotherham, one of the other places that's one of the epicenters for the whole nightmare grooming gang thing, uncovered basically by the British media, but you have very obvious no-go zones, completely ethnic, where if we go to the wrong place, you get your head kicked in.

2:01:13And you have the school segregating with a whole set of people, a whole set of white people going, oh right okay well we're out of that area now that's gone once those things go past a critical mass then you haven't got multiculturalism as described in 1975 or 1995 right it's like in separate countries you've got yeah you've got basically um you've got sectarian politics and you've imported sectarian politics with all of that implies and that's why you now have British elections where the dominant local issue is, well, I'm standing for Gaza. What the fuck has Gaza got? Your job is literally in charge of bins and current local services.

2:01:57Your opinion on Gaza, if anyone had said that 50 years ago, then you'd have called for the psychiatric people, right? You made a category error. Your job is nothing you do with Gaza. But of course, it makes complete sense once you have areas of the country that have those kind of ethnic numbers and you've imported sectarian political conflicts. So what are some core axioms or principles that either they can be old existing ones or brand new ones that for anyone who's listening, who wants to, who feels energized, and I hope someone is feeling sufficiently energized to go out and do this, either start a new party or try and rescue or create a new regime?

2:02:44what would be some of the like what are your three top axioms that it should be built upon so i think you have to you have to distinguish kind of two different levels of it there's the level of kind of policy and what are the sort of things that you're trying to build there and then there's the like how the kind of political movement and how you deal with the state right So there's, I would say, for example, one of the core things that should be central to a new political regime is actually making, as we started doing 2019, 2020, making science and technology completely central to the job of being prime minister and making it like a top, like a fundamental top three priority.

2:03:30So it has to be built into the entire operation of how the prime minister's office works. And that has to be reflected throughout how the prime minister deals with poor power and poor budgets. So for me, that would be one obvious thing. And I also think that that's basically what's going to happen in the next. What's already happening, as you can see, what's going to keep happening is states are going to bifurcate between the ones that actually want to and can and try really hard to take science and technology seriously and those that can't, and the second group of people are just going to be basically buying China or Chinese or American, and their actual control over their own fate is going to rapidly dissolve.

2:04:16So there's that kind of level of policy thing. Then there's the question of

2:04:25how you actually get to grips with power. There, I think the single most important thing is we have to face that, the shift from the 1850s onwards to permanent large-scale, permanent bureaucracy has been a catastrophe. It's no surprise that the growth of that whole system is completely contemporaneous with Britain going from number one power in the world to a country that can't even deploy the navy to stop stupid dinghies coming across the channel. So we have to ditch that and we have to revert to the principle that Britain used to have, which is the people in charge politically, responsibility is real, not fake.

2:05:06Their power is real, not fake. So that when you put someone in charge of things, they are actually responsible for it and they actually have the power to do it. the whole current system of ministers going to parliament pretending we have cabinet government when the cabinet meetings themselves are completely fake and the real power is taken in the cabinet office by a set of officials that whose names never appear in the paper that whole thing has to completely end so you have to have a system that comes in and says right we are actually now in charge you guys are all fired the cabinet office is abolished the prime minister is now actually in charge of number 10, not a whole set of PPE officials in 50 meters away in the cabinet office.

2:05:46That is called to... And you're not going to get any of the policy changes unless you actually have a political regime where the government controls the government. So that's the second thing. In terms of building it, I think the most important thing is obviously people, And again, the lesson of Lee Kuan Yew is central. He articulated the lesson that you see repeatedly in history, which is if you really want to do this, you have to make great people the center of things. Yes, systems are critical. Yes, you have to build institutions. but if you don't value great people then the institutions that you build will not be great themselves and the reason why the institutions of Singapore work so well is not just because he designed good institutions it's also because as he says repeatedly he himself as leader of the country made talent acquisition a core part of his job day in day out for decade after decade Now, again, anyone who's worked in the startup world, anyone who's built something successfully at scale themselves in the world knows that that is fundamentally true.

2:06:57Everybody at the top of one of these organizations has to make talent acquisition core to their job. Everyone knows that. But in politics, we've shifted to this world where the leaders don't do that and actually have made a virtue of not having anything to do with that. And that whole system is dealt with by the officials somewhere else. So again, connected to all of this is The leader and the new political regime have to have at the heart of it. How you explain this to the public is tricky, but the actual truth has to be we are replacing one set of rotten failed elites with a new set of elites.

2:07:32We are the business of elite replacement. That means we're in the business of talent acquisition. We are competing for Elon and Patrick Collison and everyone else for the best people in the world to come and work for us. So that's my sort of overall approach to it, I think. And while we have malfunctioning Western governments, I wonder what your approach on, like, is there any regulation that can even be good? In particular, a lot has been discussed from Silicon Valley's side around, like, the dangers of regulatory capture. And obviously that happens. But I think, and Bill Gurley gave this talk.

2:08:07I don't know if you've seen it, 2 ,851 Miles, where he talks about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, which is a great talk. We're thousands of miles away from D.C. Exactly. And that's one of the reasons why the Valley is as wonderful as it is. So it's a great talk and I agree with many things, but I think it makes the error of then assuming that therefore all regulation is bad, which of course is also not the case. Like some regulation is actually hurtful to the incumbent, in particular when it's about taxation or disclosure of information. and I wonder it may be the case that biotechnologies bioengineering will require regulation like for example forbidding gain-of-function research right that's that's one of those it may be the case that around AI more transparency by the labs about like what's on the system card what are you how are you biasing even like the outputs right like that's It's an obvious one that many would agree with.

2:09:03And then similar, maybe a bit more testing, et cetera. Do you see regulation as, I have two questions here. One is kind of like a failed thing to try to do while the government is in this very poor situation. And two, what was your internal experience while in the government about how often it was capture that was being attempted versus actually something sensible? So I am sympathetic with the view that a regime which responds to COVID the way it did, and a regime which even after COVID couldn't close down gain-of-function research, and a regime which allowed these crazy, still largely unexplained Chinese biolabs operating inside continental America without proper investigation, If you let a regime like that try and come up with new regulations on something like AI, which is like a hundred times more, a thousand times more complicated, it's almost definitely going to go wrong.

2:10:09Both in the sense of just the things, the regulations themselves will be stupid, but also in the sense that all the normal problems of regulation are almost bound to come, i.e. powerful players will gain the DC system for their own ends. Therefore, the bias should be, as in general in the Anglo-American system, towards competition and openness rather than rushing to regulatory solutions. I think it's a general bias. I think bio stuff is probably the most obvious case where it ought to be like if we can muster any sanity remaining in our civilization, then trying to regulate various things on bio and trying to take seriously what people like George Church and Kevin Esfeld and whatnot are warning us about democratization of biological engineering seems to me like just the most central thing.

2:11:05I also think it's something that, for obvious reasons, has the greatest chance of being able to make progress internationally. Because Putin and the KGB and Xi and Chinese army and Intel and everyone also don't want a lot of these nightmares spinning out of their control. And there is obviously a kind of community of interest. One of the worst things that I think that's happened geopolitically in the last few years is we've found ourselves, because of the insane Ukraine war, in a situation where there is less contact between NATO and Russia now than there was with Stalin, who killed many, many, many, many millions of people.

2:11:53right Stalin was Stalin yet we still developed contacts with that regime because we knew that we had to because we were moving into a nuclear age the fact that people all over the system say that we've have less contact now than we ever have done is obviously just beyond beyond stupid and and irrational but if there's one thing that could potentially turn that around and arguably the issue to try and turn around on, I think would be bioregulation and international agreements on some of this stuff. I'm somewhat surprised you're not pointing also at AI there as an option. Yeah, so I think, well, I increasingly think these things are going to merge, right?

2:12:37And like how you, so my best idea... In terms of as a democratizing force, you mean, like of power and risk. Yeah, merge in the sense of the risks of bio are increasingly going to merge with AI, both because the bad actors will be using AI to enhance their evil intentions. And we, in terms of trying to defend against it, are increasingly going to be using AI in order to try and spot what they're doing and then defeat it. So the two things are going to become increasingly entangled in terms of like operationally and legally and politically, I think. Though the regulation that would be agreed on is actually, again, I would point at transparency for both to just much more strongly occur.

2:13:29I wanted to note on the capture side, like it's I think that it's it's it's also happens to be convenient to believe that all regulation is bad. if one was to be placed in Silicon Valley. Though I am also in agreement that, yeah, I wouldn't want the current political apparatus to come up with anything. It's rather like nearly that most things wouldn't be done. But it is interesting to note that a lot of the kind of opposition to regulation also came right after Sam Altman spoke in Congress in like 2023 and asked for the Congress to regulate. And he was overtly very in favor of. but I think he just outplayed most people as he usually does because behind the scenes then he was open may I have opposed any regulation that has since come onto their desks and they've lobbied against it so he's again now he got also the powers that are against him to work in his favor because he was actually against it but I think that whole episode in a way right I mean we all know some of the key players in this drama over the last couple of decades and how this has all been playing out.

2:14:44Part of what's happened is that one set of players think that Sam and others as a set of players have tried to basically capture the regulatory system and use it for their own ends in terms of strengthening their own companies and dishing their competitors, the oldest play in the book in technology and regulatory circles. But wouldn't the better play be to not capture the regulatory system, but instead, kind of as you say, to go into the deep state apparatus and entrench yourself and your work within that? I think there's lots of people in the Valley doing that. That's my point. I think that's happening.

2:15:33right? I mean, it's already happened, it's happening, and it will deepen. And to some extent, that's inevitable. I mean, the most obvious way it's inevitable is that as these companies and the technology collides more and more with power, they are already every month coming more into contact with intelligence services. It is obviously the case that if you're OpenAI or if you're Demis and Google, you can have all kinds of great fancy cyber security stuff, and they'll obviously have the best that you can buy. But there are a whole set of things that punch intelligence services can do to you, which you can't defend against yourself without state help.

2:16:13So what's going to happen, I'm sure, is some kind of deal whereby the three labs in the first place, but others as well, basically do a deal whereby, okay, the deep state helps us with counter intel and with vetting of various kinds, so that I know if you're SAM or you're is you don't want your head of security to be done in by the Chinese intelligence by, say, blackmailing their sister. And then you go around all the security, right? The kind of things which intelligence services can do, but their competitors commercially can't. I think what will happen is they end up doing deals whereby the labs get protection from the agencies.

2:16:52And then in return, they give the agencies versions of the models, insight into what the models are doing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That could develop in quite a healthy, sensible way. Could also, of course, develop in a super bad way. Well, unfortunately, we are out of time. I do want to end on the thing that we always end on, which is rapid fire predictions. I'm sure you've done this many times in your life. Basically, whatever the first number that pops into your head, I'm going to throw a formal prediction at you. A number? Like a date? Yes. No, like a percentage. Okay. It'll be a probability.

2:17:25Okay. Either a confidence level or a probability that a thing will happen. First number that pops into your head. Okay. Probability there'll be a new Prime Minister before 2029. Before 29? 40%. That Farage will win the next general election. 50%. That Starmer will win it. 50%. That the UK builds a new nuclear power plant that's operational by 2035. 10%. That we rejoin the EU by 2040. 5%. That AI causes unemployment over 25 % in the UK by 2040.

2:18:0720%. That the BBC loses its licence fee funding model by 2030. 2030? Yeah. Low 5%. That the UK abolishes the House of Lords by 2040.

2:18:2310%. That some portion of the UK is under Sharia law by 2035. Already is. That any European nation will be under Sharia law by 2040. I mean, locally or like a whole state. A whole state.

2:18:4410%. That COVID was a lab leak. 95%. Epstein killed himself. Never followed that. case so probably kill himself like 70 percent that aliens above human level are already in existence in the galaxy in the galaxy yeah

2:19:1180 and that they've already visited us one percent less than one percent uh percent likelihood of agi by 2027? I mean, hard to define, but did Dennis, Sam, and Dario say that it's happened by 2027? The kind of classic definition of Shane like that it will be able to do most economically relevant tasks at or better than human capability. 50%. By 2035?

2:19:4995 % Okay, so that kind of answers then Instead of the PDoom I like asking the other side of it What's your PNormal? i.e. that the world will roughly continue growing at the same pace and that a certain year will just be that in the year 2035 we will have experienced about just a bit more change from 25 to 35 than from 2015 to 25 What's your probability that PNormal 2035 will exist? I didn't understand that very well, but... Then we'll skip it. Spiritually, my answer is I think lots more chaos is coming. Like the building chaos is not going to suddenly stop now. It's going to seem radically more tempestuous from now for the next 10 years than even the last 10 years it's felt like.

2:20:38Well, let's hope we can find ways to stem that chaos or at least build something beautiful and win-win out of the ashes. Dom, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much for inviting me. It's been great. Thank you. Let's do it again sometime.