The Hidden Scandals Inside The British Government - Dominic Cummings

1. 0:00 – 5:01

   Is Multiculturalism Working?

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      Good Morning Britain asked the question, is multiculturalism working? 5% said yes and 95% said no it isn't. What do you make of that?

   2. DCDominic Cummings0:15

      Um, I guess not surprising given like, you know, months and months of, um, crazy marches, terrorism over the years, um, harassment of MPs. I mean, um, lots of parts of the country go to, they seem kind of like clearly crazy, there's a lot of violence in sto- in, in various towns which is not picked up by the mainstream media. But if you live there, you know, you live with, you, you live with it and you see it all the time. So, um, I'm slightly surprised by the number, but like the, the overall kind of picture is not, not surprising.

   3. CWChris Williamson0:55

      Do you think there's a- an irony or a prescience of Brexit being driven by concerns about immigration to now 2024 with the UK facing massive immigration problems and it being such a huge talking point?

   4. DCDominic Cummings1:14

      Yeah, it's sort of, it's, it's a, it- it- i- it's a crazy situation, right? So you got in, in 2015, 2016 we had the referendum and during the referendum campaign I say, "Well, what's a core reason to, to..." L- l- let's go through a few f- few fundamentals of, uh, o- of why we should leave, right? Number one, free movement of people i- i- is out of control. It's t- it's the number one issue in Britain. Politicians' response to every problem is simply to say, "Well, it's an EU issue so there's absolutely nothing we can do about it." All across Europe you see the problem of free movement driving the growth of extremism. You have votes in places like Austria where you have like a third of the people voting for pretty much actual Nazi parties. I don't mean like fake Nazi parties, like accused by the mainstream media, but like actually basically Nazis. Um, and my- our argument was if you actually take back control of Democratic policy over immigration in Britain, then you'll see the, uh, immigration collapse as an issue. Farage will be retired, UKIP will be gone, and, um, extremists will, will be neutered here and the whole country can, could, can move on and talk about other things. It would be better if Europe did it o- overall, but Europe's not gonna do that. But we should do this ourselves. The whole mainstream media attitude was, "That's completely crazy." The FT and The Economist laughed at this. They, their prediction was if Brexit wins then immigration will become even more of an issue, Farage will be turbo charged, UKIP will be up at a third of the vote, blah, blah, blah. Right, so run the clock forward, um, to 2020, all the predictions that we made were completely correct. Concern about immigration is a straight line down, attitudes towards immigrants is like much more positive. Farage is retired, UKIP is gone, uh, uh, uh, and, uh, uh, basically the Vote Leave position is completely vindicated. And even the mad Remainers who hate me and hate Brexit have to admit, actually the immigration thing has turned out completely differently than what we expected. Right? Meanwhile in eu- in Europe, of course, exactly as Vote Leave predicted, the problem has grown and grown. If I'd said in 2016, "Well, in like eight years time they'll be like close to a Nazi party, neck and neck for leading the polls in Germany," everyone would've completely laughed at the FT and Economist. But that's actually the situation, right? So I think things worked out the way that Vote Leave predicted on the, on that stuff, but then in an amazing plot twist, I fall out with Boris over the summer of 2020, Vote Leave leaves number 10. And then in 2021, 2022, 2023, the Tories actually like give up all immigration control of legal immigration, have unprecedentedly high legal immigration. Then open, like basically like surrender to the fucking insane, stupid, retarded dinghies coming across the channel. So you suddenly have tens of thousands of these ludicrous boats coming over, and Farage is back, a new party's created, Tories lose half their votes. I mean, it's like a sort of, I mean, you can't explain it by any kind of rationality, right? The Tories just sort of completely shoot themselves in the, shoot themselves in the head. Um, but that's, but, but, but the good thing about it is like every- it's clear to everyone what's actually happened, right? Because of Brexit there's democratic accountability. No one can blame the EU anymore. The British government sabotaged border control and sabotaged having a sane immigration policy deliberately. That's what the Tories did, and everyone was clear about it. So it's sort of stupid and insane in one way, but at least now because of Brexit, everyone knows exactly who to blame. And quite rightly, they, they gave the, the Tories the kicking they deserved.

2. 5:01 – 10:23

   How the Tories Broke Immigration

   1. DCDominic Cummings5:01

   2. CWChris Williamson5:01

      Talk to me about how you say that the Tories sabotaged the immigration policy. I- I haven't lived in the UK for two and a half years. Looking at what people talk about, it's a huge issue for friends, a lot of whom live in London, a lot of whom would've been not talking about this sort of thing unless it was a big deal. Uh, and it's all over the news. So-

   3. DCDominic Cummings5:22

      Mm-hmm.

   4. CWChris Williamson5:22

      ... just dig into the dynamics and the mechanism of what's gone on.

   5. DCDominic Cummings5:26

      So like obviously it's super complicated in one way, but I think like you can simplify it, um, to, to, to, to a large extent. Essentially... So, we win the referendum on i- in 2016. Tories then implode for three years, drive the country into constitutional crisis, complete chaos. Boris asks the Vote Leave team to come to Number 10 and sort out the shit show. We go into Number 10, we solve the constitutional crisis, we beat Corbyn in the election. We're then in Number 10, right? And we do it with an immigration policy which is pretty clear and has very, very widespread support. Our, the Vote Leave immigration policy was...We should be much more pro and open to high-skilled immigration. If you're a scientist, if you're a doctor, if you're a physicist, if you're a start-up person building a company, we should make it way easier for you to come, easier for you to bring your family, uh, uh, and build things and create value. But we should make- but we should massively cut unskilled immigration and we should have a period in time over, like, the next decade or so where we go, "Right, more so- more high-skilled immigration, massively crush l- unskilled immigration," particularly from, like, war-torn countries with people fleeing with completely fucked up ideas about how to run the world. Um, and we spend that time actually building the infrastructure, schools, hospitals, GP surgeries, all that kind of stuff, that both parties basically neglected for 30 years. And then in 10 years' time, we can, uh, you know, revisit it and see whatever we want to do. Essentially what happened in 2021 is the Tories said, "Screw all that, we're just gonna basically open the floodgates." And so suddenly, a system that had been thought to be, you know, like when net immigration was, like, 200,000, 300,000 was already unprecedented, suddenly it shot up to a million. Right? (laughs) Like, nothing ever- nothing like it has ever been seen. And then in parallel, they basically concede that, um... Well, they started off, uh, uh, um... Uh, so at the same time as you have this huge unparalleled surge in legal immigration, you then have the, um... You have a situation where organized crime gangs, transnational crime gangs, realize that essentially the British legal system is paralyzed in dealing with, um, uh, people coming across the Channel in these boats. They claim asylum, uh, and there's basically no realistic chance of anyone being stopped or booted out. So the gangs start increasing the pressure on this from 2020. It's like, there's a little bit of it in 2020, but it's, like, tiny numbers. 2021, 2022, the numbers go up and up and up. Um, uh, uh, and, uh, essentially what happens there is Boris inve- So, the actual solution to this, I went through in 2020. I went through it with the Navy, in terms of operational methods of how you actually stop the boats physically, and I went through it legally to figure out the legal side of it. In a nutshell, you can't stop the legal side of it unless you actually, um, at least amend the Human Rights Act, or you're prepared to tell the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg that then- we're not gonna enforce various of their judgments on this subject. And that's fundamentally the only way you can get legal control over the illegal immi- immigration and the asylum system. What Boris does is, he doesn't wanna do this, so he creates this completely ludicrous policy of, "We're gonna shi- we're gonna fly all these people to Rwanda." Tory MPs being what they are go, "Oh, that sounds like a good idea," and everyone starts yabbering away about Rwanda. But the important thing to realize about the Rwanda policy is, like, it was always intended by Boris as a fake. It was intended as a fake thing instead of actually solving the problem. So the real solution is repeal parts of the human rights legislation and then deploy the Navy and just stop any boats arriving. That's the actual solution if you actually are optimizing for Stop the Boats. What Boris started was this whole kind of fake discussion about Rwanda policy, but of course then what happens is the courts just say, "Well, sending all these people to Rwanda is a breach of their human rights anyway." To cut a long story short, Boris Johnson and then Rishi Sunak sp- waste four years arguing about this completely retarded Rwanda plan which wouldn't solve the problem anyway instead of actually solving the problem. So you have on the one hand unparalleled parabolic legal immigration and then you have parabolic numbers on boats coming across the Channel (laughs) , um, and the country looking at this and just saying, "Uh, this is world war and absolute farce." And of course it's e- made even worse for the Tories because Sunak takes office and he says, "Read my lips, judge me on whether or not I stop the boats." Then of course the boats are completely out of control.

   6. CWChris Williamson10:22

      What's your post-mortem

3. 10:23 – 16:49

   Dissecting the General Election

   1. CWChris Williamson10:23

      on the recent general election? 80 seat majority to the biggest loss ever. How did this happen?

   2. DCDominic Cummings10:33

      The fundamental core of it is the Tory Party's been rotting for decades and between, uh... And the, the MP, it's not like... It's not because they were too Left wing or too Right wing, um, or because of Brexit or Remain. The core of it is, uh, and having been in Number 10 and watched these people, the core of it is that the Tory MPs completely gave up thinking about actual government and real power and how power is exercised, uh, uh, and voters. So the kind of the core of democratic theory is that parties want to win elections to be in power, therefore they look at voters, and therefore when they're in government they're actually incentivized to take government seriously. This theory completely breaks down when you look at the Tories over the l- uh, uh, over the last decade. Um, essentially what they optimize for is the 24/7 news, breaking news cycle and their careers over a very short time span inside Westminster, and they completely stopped caring about or thinking about or prioritizing actual government. So if you look at, like, every kind of significant aspect, we've talked about immigration but if you look at NHS waiting lists, um, uh, if you look at violent crime, if you look at productivity and average wages, you know, like, ev- if you look at the Ministry of Defence, like, you've had, you've had-... the biggest pandemic, worst pandemic in a century, and the Tories basically just gave up on the health service and let the whole thing fall apart. We've had the biggest land war in Europe since Hitler in 1945 and, and the Tories completely gave up on the MOD and let the armed forces just kind of rot and hollow out. So you look at like every single major aspect of the pub- uh, uh, uh, uh, of the state and state capabilities, the Tories either let the rot happen or they just, or they actually, like, did things to accelerate the rot. So they piss away, they pissed away something like 35, 40 billion just in this Parliament on the most ludicrous high-speed rail, um, scheme in world history. Um, completely corrupt, completely useless total and utter farce of a project, 40 billion down the toilet. Meanwhile, they go around, like, machine-gunning critical areas of state capabilities, starving special forces of, uh, uh, uh, of crucial cash, like trivial cash. Um, uh, you know, all, um, pandemic response, all sorts of things. So it's just this sort of... uh, and- and the public can see it, right? The public aren't stupid. The voters can see we're paying w- we're paying more and more taxes, the country's going into more and more debt, yet every major thing that we look at i- i- the serv- the quality of services are disintegrating. We're paying more and more and m- more money for less and less and less services. Um, so, you know, uh, uh, y- you keep doing that, um, the Tories, uh, deservedly have had the worst election result in, i- i- in their history.

   3. CWChris Williamson13:31

      How, relatively, do you see it as a Labour victory versus a Conservative loss? Was it just handed over? Would it have been, it could have been anybody? It could've been Count Binface on the other side?

   4. DCDominic Cummings13:43

      No. I think you gotta give credit to Starmer and his main kind of guy, gu- um, uh, I forgot just now, now. Um, but the guy who ran his, th- the guy who ran his campaign. I'll think of it in a sec. I'm really bad with names. Um, I think that, you know, like, there's, there's brilliant campaigners like Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan. Uh, and Starmer knew that he wasn't a character like that. And to give him credit, like a lot of politicians are sort of delusional and things like that and think that they're Obama when they're not. Starmer, uh, uh, Morgan Swinney is his name. Um, Starmer and Morgan Swinney, I think sort of realized that you- they've got a guy who's not very good at politics, not very good at communication, so they, so they played a kind of cautious, defensive game. They didn't try and overreach. They didn't try and pretend he was something that, that he wasn't. Um, and they put thems- yeah. Eh, their, their political effort over three years was very far from, you know, a sort of, like, fascinating, interesting story. But it was careful, defensive, and they put themselves in positions so that if the Tories blew themselves up, then they could profit from it. Whereas Corbyn and other people, uh, you know, on, uh, uh, on the left of the Labour Party over decades repeatedly, like, just don't get to first base like that. S- Starmer and Swinney got to first base and they put themselves in a position whether to- if, whether they could profit from the Tories blowing themselves up. And you think you've got give- you've got to give them some credit for that. On the other hand though, if you look at the numbers, right, Starmer only got basically the same number of votes as Corbyn did in 2019 when we crushed him. Uh, and, uh, um, and there's like massive tactical voting, but the massive tactical voting is driven by the fact that everybody perfectly reasonably despises the Tories and was determined to try and shove them out wherever. So if, if voting Lib Dem was the right way, they voted Lib Dem. If voted Reform wi- for Farage was the right way, they voted for Farage. So essentially it was like overwhelmingly, and you can see it in how people answer polling, uh, it's just overwhelmingly people trying to figure out, "How do I vote most effectively to remove, to remove the despised Tories?" 'Cause we've g- the country's got to move on.

   5. CWChris Williamson15:51

      What's your thoughts on Reform UK and Farage's re-entry into politics?

   6. DCDominic Cummings15:58

      Uh, it's sort of depressing basically, I think, because Farage is not, uh, Farage is basically like Tory MPs at, at heart. His goal is just to be on the Stupid Today program on the BBC, you know? He's not actually there to get anything done. Um, so he's there to kind of profit from people being upset with, with, with the system, but he doesn't have real answers for, for, for what to do. And he always surrounds himself with useless characters who can't build anything, so the party itself isn't really going anywhere. It tops out at, like, roughly 15%. There's 15% of the country, um, like pretty much like Farage and hate everybody else, and he can get that 15% this year. He got 15% in 2015. Um, but it can't r- but, but, but, but, but it's never gonna solve the actual problem.

4. 16:49 – 23:30

   Building a Strong Opposition to Labour

   1. CWChris Williamson16:49

      Well, there's a lot of people that see Reform as the only potential supplanter to the Conservative Party, that Tories are dead in the water, they're not going to go anywhere, there's no way that they can come back from this, their reputation's completely destroyed. And-

   2. DCDominic Cummings17:01

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson17:01

      ... here comes, here comes the prodigal son, someone who is a good communicator, who does, uh, articulate and orate very well. Uh, i- is that a non-starter in your opinion? Do you need to, like Lazarus, bring the Conservative Party back from the dead? How can you make any sort of a, uh, an opposition to Labour?

   4. DCDominic Cummings17:22

      So I think it, it, the, the, there's, there's a vicious circle in, in, in, in British politics, which I think you see a similar sort of issue, issue in America, right? Um, what's happened over, over decades is that elite talent that y- uh, a lot of elite talent used to go into politics and public service in one form or another. If you go back 100 years, if you even go back like 50 or 70 years, you see a lot of incredibly able people in Washington DC, in Whitehall, building things and doing things. What's happened is that that elite talent has massively shifted out of politics and public service...... uh, and they're in, you know, some combination of maths, money, venture capital, tech startups, scientific research, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They don't want to be part of the party clown show and the, and the political clown show. And this becomes very self-reinforcing. Um, so, you know, like if you, if you, if you're looking at the overall economy, the economy is an open system. All kinds of people can come in and out of it, startups happen, old companies die. There's this constant creative destruction, right? But in politics and government, the system doesn't work like that. So you've, you have increasingly these, like old parties which were all created 50, 100, 200 years ago, Tories 200, bl- 200 years ago, Labour 100 and odd years ago, Democrats, Republicans, you know, 150 years ago, whatever. Um, these things are all like kind of rotting internally, and the smart people of... most of the smart people have moved, uh, moved, moved out elsewhere. And it becomes therefore extremely hard to rejuvenate these things. So, um... and, and, and very similar thing to what's happened in, in the States, right? You can see both Democrats and Republicans suffering from, suffering from this problem. My own view about the Tories is that it's just very hard. I've watched them for 25 years. Um, uh, it's just a like one-way process of, of talent collapse and rot. It's very hard to see how it can be self-generating. And also, you have to consider this, right? They don't want to change, right? (laughs) Like the voters look at them, and they say, "We hate you because you're so shit." But the Tories don't think of themselves like that, right? They just want to keep going in the same way that they, that they, that they always do. Same as Whitehall, right? You have, you have Whitehall collides with once-a-century event in COVID, once a 50-year event in Ukraine. Does it say, "Oh my God, we've totally failed. We've got to change tack"? No, it's like, "We've got to go back to normal. Give us more power, give us more money, and let's carry on." And you should just... the answer is, you've all got to trust the old institutions, right? That's, that's the solution. That's their solution to it. "Give us more money, give us more power, uh, trust us."

   5. CWChris Williamson20:06

      Would... Does, does that not lay the groundwork for someone like a Farage to come in and say, "This is new." Uh, some of the people that were around him did seem to be a little bit younger, maybe a little bit more disruptive in some way. It's less ossified. It can do these things. Is, is that not a potential solution to this?

   6. DCDominic Cummings20:23

      Yeah, I think... so I think in principle it is, and in like, in some, in some respects, right, that's what Trump is. Trump, T- Trump partly is a, i- i- is a phenomenon generated by mil- tens and tens of millions of people just being completely disgusted and fed up with the old system. And a lot of people might think Trump's a bit of an asshole. They might not agree with him about everything. But they, but they know one... what they know one thing for sure about Trump, right? The old system really, really hates him. And because of that, well, he can't be all bad, and therefore, like maybe he's our guy. And that-

   7. CWChris Williamson20:55

      Well, I mean, we saw that with, uh... we saw that with J.D. Vance. There's this famous Tucker quote where he said something like, "I know of nobody in the halls of power that supports J.D. Vance, and that makes me trust him immensely."

   8. DCDominic Cummings21:06

      Exactly. And this is this like self-feeding dynamic, right? So the old establishment is saying more and more, "The real danger is populists and fascists and the people who don't trust the old institutions." But the more they, the, uh, uh, a- a- and their argument about what's happening is, "Well, it's the idiot voters who are fooled by disinformation." Yeah? Like Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation, right? And, um, and, and, um, Biden is senile. Disinformation run by, r- run by Putin. Biden is super sharp in private, right? That's what all the... that's what all the main... that's what The New York Times and CNN and MSNBC told, told everyone for the last two years. Um, so they, they keep doubling down on, um, "It's the voters who, who are stupid to be... not to trust us." And the answer is for them to trust us more. But that is pushing more and more and more people into opposing them. And as the Democrat Party's got more and more mad, it's pushed up... Elon voted twice for Obama. A whole bunch of people in Silicon Valley who voted for, uh, for Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Obama twice have now just come out and said, "Sod it." Like, "We're, we're, we're gonna vote for Trump." What, wh- what-

   9. CWChris Williamson22:17

      David Sacks doing a fundraiser, Chamath coming on his side, SF now starting to get moving.

   10. DCDominic Cummings22:22

       Chamath who was like... Exactly. Chamath, who was like super pro-Hillary and Biden, right? Is now like all... is all in, all, all in for, um, for, for Trump. The kind of... this kind of like self-generating madness of the Democrats and the old media is part of what's driving that, right? These guys didn't want to find themselves involved in politics. These are startup people who wanted to keep doing what everyone's done in Silicon Valley for, for 50 years, which is like, "We try and isolate ourselves from the madness in the East Coast. We don't want to touch it. We want to build our own stuff out here, and like leave us be." And finally, the madness of The New York Times and the Democrats has got, b- could become so intense. A lot of them have said... and I think Marc Andreessen said last, last week something like, um, uh, paraphrasing Trotsky, "You may not be interested in war, but war's interested in you." And, you know, I, I, a- and, I think that's the attitude which a lot of people in the Valley have, have adopted, right? We didn't want to be interested in, i- i- in all of this stuff. We wanted to keep clear of it, but we kind of put a gun to our head and forced us to.

   11. CWChris Williamson23:21

       It's a call to arms for the tech bros and their mechanical keyboards to, uh, get moving and, and start doing something. All right. So just to round out-

   12. DCDominic Cummings23:29

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson23:29

       ... just to round

5. 23:30 – 26:59

   Predicting the Next Few Years

   1. CWChris Williamson23:30

      out the discussion about the UK, uh, you know, w- what do you see? What can people expect the next few years in the UK? What do you... what should people, uh... what's your prediction? What do people expect?

   2. DCDominic Cummings23:44

      So I think that generally speaking, uh, um, uh, I... there are powerful long-term trends, and unless some force intervenes with them, you should just expect these things to, to, to continue, roughly speaking. So if the Tories are a farce, the Tories will remain a farce. I think it's very unlikely that you'll see some kind of rejuvenation.... after 1997 to 2001. They just ran around in circles for four years. Completely delusional, a complete waste of time, didn't get anywhere. Since then, the quality of the people has massively deteriorated, so why the hell would- w- w- w- would the story be different? I think, ironically, that, um, Labor will do a bit more of what me and the Vote Leave team wanted to do on some things. So I think they'll be, like, a bit better on things like planning law, for example. It'll become a bit easier to build stuff. Um, they'll be a bit less, sort of, like, casually, ignorantly vandal- vandalistic towards science and technology than the Tories were. Um, but at the heart of it, Keir Starmer, like Rishi Sunak, like Boris, is like an institutional man, right? They believe in Whitehall, they believe in the institutions. And, um, these institutions are pathological. The institutions destroyed the good things. So, what happened in 2020? We built the Vaccine Taskforce, world-leading. Whitehall thought, "Oh, this is terribly embarrassing," so it closed it down. We built, um, sewage monitoring for pathogens. Crucial not just for- for- for COVID, but for all future pandemics and for bioterrorism and everything else, right? World-leading thing, everyone says, "God, what Britain did is brilliant." What happened? Th- they shut it down. Um, you go through th- you go through, like, valuable thing after valuable thing now. The institutions, uh, actually attack it because it's embarrassing to the all- to- to- to all- Whitehall. So, I think Tories keep failing, Labor keep failing, Whitehall keep failing. There'll be some improvements of Labor over the Tories here and there, but I think the picture generally will be- will- w- w- will be pretty grim. Not as grim as in- as in- inside the EU, but, um, but I think it'll be- I think it'll be de- be depressing if the system's left to itself. Right, so then the question is, big question is, is it- will... Britain obviously is, in many, many ways, constantly downstream of what happens in- i- i- in the States. We have, like, the kind of communist trans madness grow, sparks off and grows in San Francisco and then heads west, heads east, and then hops over the Atlantic, um, and gets to here. And then similarly, you have, like, the backlash starts in California, heads east. And then the question is like, will that spread? Will that hop across the Atlantic? So, will there be something sort of equivalent to what you've seen with Elon and the, uh, ........................ people and other parts of America saying, "Okay. Washington is so dysfunctional, we've got to get involved"? If Britain's gonna change course, it needs a subset of elite talent to stop what they're doing now and just say, "Okay, we're actually gonna get involved with- with- with politics and government and- and force the broken old system to change."

   3. CWChris Williamson26:58

      How

6. 26:59 – 35:53

   How to Attract Young Talent to Politics

   1. CWChris Williamson26:59

      would you make politics or government more attractive to young talent, to the people that you want to bring into it?

   2. DCDominic Cummings27:07

      Um... Well, so, at the moment, you have these old Civil Service hierarchies, right, which are, um, they're run by the absolute worst elements of the HR department. Um, and they recruit almost entirely internally. And one of the way... A- a- a- a- what this does is it creates a kind of, like, anti-talent ratchet. So if you deal with the British Civil Service, what you see is you see a whole bunch of people between, like, 25 and 35 who are really, really able, a lot of energy, a lot of brains, um, a lot of kind of can-do spirit. What then happens is, these people la- almost all leave between, like, 35 and 45. And the reason is, they spend the first 10 years looking at it, they do a bunch of stuff, and then they look at their bosses and they look at the HR system and how everyone gets promoted, uh, and they basically recoil with horror and they leave. So almost every single one of the most able young people in the Civil Service that I've worked with over the last 20 years, almost every one has gone.

   3. CWChris Williamson28:23

      It feels like the reverse of the Peter Principle, in a way. You know how people get promoted in positions where they're good at their job until they suck at their job, which is why the world is filled with people who suck at their jobs.

   4. DCDominic Cummings28:35

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson28:35

      This is almost like an early warning system against the Peter Principle. You know, you're seeing all of these people, this slow march toward potential promotion, toward potentially a position of power or respect or- or remuneration or whatever, and these people are just, you know, ripping the ejectors- cord to get out before that happens.

   6. DCDominic Cummings28:55

      Yeah. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. And that's why you have this kind- the kind of, like, collapse over COVID, right? You suddenly, you look around the room and a whole bunch of the senior people actually responsible for crisis management in a pandemic are just, a lot of them are complete clowns. And- and the whole system falls apart.

   7. CWChris Williamson29:11

      What's the... What's the reason for this l- ossified, old guard, e- w- worst parts of HR department being in charge? Is it just that there's no market forces acting, so the sort of typical competitive dynamics that would happen in a world of business, entrepreneurialism, capitalism and stuff, they're just not acting? Is that kind of the primary force?

   8. DCDominic Cummings29:35

      Yeah, I think so. I think, um... I think a lot of people on the right make a mistake and they- and they think, like, th- the big difference is private V public, but I don't think that's really the key thing exactly. Um, because you see... I- th- the first thing is, all really big organizations, after a bit of time, end up having very similar dynamics, right? You look at Google now and you listen to people talk in the Valley about Google, right? What do they say? They're basically like, "Well, it's like a sort of dead government bureaucracy. It's incredibly hard for anything to get done. The founders are no longer involved. The page as often as yours, whatever." Um, so, eh, this happens in the private sector too. But of course, the huge difference is that, okay, Google ossifies but then Sam Altman is over at OpenAI reading the papers produced by Google (laughs) and says, "Holy shit. Like, if you see this paper on transformers from the Google team, like, we can go and do the following things," right? So he's got this very dynamic startup, very dynamic character, Sam, and they go and build something, eh, eh, i- in a short period of time.That's like the big difference, right? You haven't got that kind of startup ecosystem in government where people can- could go, "Right, okay. The Department of Health is a joke," or, "The Ministry of Defense is a joke. We could build something different." In government, that's not how it works, and therefore the only real creative force or disruptive force that can happen is political. The only people with the power to change it... The civil servants can't change themselves, and the civil service system because of its HR system only promotes internally, so it just gets worse and worse over time. The only force that can change that is a political force that says, "We demand, and we are going to insist and use our political authority to change how these things work." And historically, the only way you can really do that is you have to just keep closing a lot of stuff down, and you have to s- create new things that can bring in new talent from outside... fr- fr- fr- fr- from outside the system. But that's- that problem is

   9. CWChris Williamson31:26

      I imagine that's- that's very threatening to the people that are in there.

   10. DCDominic Cummings31:30

       Exactly. A, it's very threatening to the people who are in there, so they fight like hell to- to- to- t- t- to basically blackmail the politicians into, "Well, if you try and do this, there'll be war." But you also have the- the- the other cultural problem which we discussed earlier on which is, the MPs have just lost interest in it. The MPs have lost interest in, um, uh, i- in the business of actual government and they're actually happy not really running things, right? So British government now is basically a Potemkin show. The- the ministers walk up Downing Street, they smile at the cameras. The media pretends that the Cabinet discussions are actually where power is, and actually where the big decisi... And it's like big row in Cabinet about, you know, policy X. But the reality is Cabinet is a completely Potemkin exercise. Uh, X is not decided in Cabinet. X is decided somewhere else. But the MPs are okay with that, right? Everyone's kind of in on the game. The MPs are okay with that, the media's okay with that, and the officials are okay with that because the officials have the real power. They're the ones actually in charge of it, so they're perfectly happy for the clown show to focus on the ministers.

   11. CWChris Williamson32:37

       What- what do you mean when you say the officials and elsewhere? Who are the officials? Where is elsewhere? Who does run the British government?

   12. DCDominic Cummings32:45

       I mean... So a huge amount of, uh, uh, um, uh... So if you want to ask like where's real power now, but the Cabinet Secretary, right, an official in the... Originally the job was literally the secretary to the cabinet would sit there and write notes on what the cabinet ministers are saying, right, when the job was created in 1917. Now, that Cabinet secretary is much, much more powerful than any government minister apart from the prime minister. Right? So the Cabinet... And- and- and his deputies in all sorts of ways are like 10X more powerful than Cabinet ministers are. So Cabinet is nominally the place where power is, and nominally the place where critical decisions are taken. But in fact now vast amounts of the most important things are actually done in the Cabinet Office, and power is actually wielded by the Cabinet Secretary. If a bomb goes off in London tonight, the Cabinet Secretary will be called before the Home Secretary is called. A whole set of wiring of power goes... links to the Cabinet Secretary, not to the Foreign Secretary or to the Home Secretary. And the C- Cabinet Secretary decides what information is allowed to be seen. If someone's got to... iI MI5 have got a tap the phone of some, um, of the Secretary of State for Defense 'cause people are worried that that person might be like shagging some Russian agent or something, then it's not the Home Secretary that like, you know, gets to see all of these intricate operational details with the intelligence services. This is like compartmentalized and it's done in the Cabinet Office. And there'll be a few words with the, with the PM but the PM will be the only political person essentially who has any involvement with it. So power is... Like unseen power is shifted inside the system very largely to officials. Doesn't... I'm not saying it's all Potemkin, it's not purely Potemkin, and in the British system the Prime Minister does actually have a lot of power constitutionally if they choose to exercise it. But since Mrs. Thatcher PMs have basically given up on using vast amounts of their power and don't actually exercise it.

   13. CWChris Williamson34:50

       What is Potemkin? You've mentioned it a couple of times.

   14. DCDominic Cummings34:53

       It's a... So it's a famous Russian, uh, Russian guy like s- centuries ago. Essentially i- i- it's a... it's i- i- i- it means, um... So i- in this process what would happen is like the tsar would leave St. Petersburg and go and visit somewhere, um, to see what was going on. Um, but instead of actually sorting out the village they kind of paint a facade down each side of the village so the tsar would go through the middle and he'd look left and right and the tsar would go, "Oh right yeah everything in the village seems to be fine." In fact it's just like they paint the front, they paint the front. The picture is... the picture's completely fake, right? Behind the picture, the village is actually a complete- uh, a complete hellscape.

   15. CWChris Williamson35:29

       It's like when you hear about these tours of North- North Korea where the journalists have been taken round.

   16. DCDominic Cummings35:34

       Exactly.

   17. CWChris Williamson35:34

       Right, okay.

   18. DCDominic Cummings35:35

       Exactly. Uh, if you imagine like North- North Korea photo shoot is what I mean by um-

   19. CWChris Williamson35:40

       (laughs) Okay.

   20. DCDominic Cummings35:41

       ... by sort of P- Potemkin- Potemkin politics.

   21. CWChris Williamson35:44

       Cool, okay.

   22. DCDominic Cummings35:44

       Where the picture that you're shown on TV on the BBC is essentially um like completely or largely fake.

7. 35:53 – 44:50

   What Was Being in Government Like?

   1. DCDominic Cummings35:53

   2. CWChris Williamson35:53

      What was being in British government like for you? You step into those doors as someone that wants to make things happen that, you know, has desires and ambitions capitalistically for success, uh, in terms of technology. What was it actually like being in the midst of that machine?

   3. DCDominic Cummings36:16

      It was um... It was basically very depressing um-

   4. CWChris Williamson36:22

      (laughs)

   5. DCDominic Cummings36:24

      ... because (laughs) um... because you have on the one hand, yeah you have this incredibly centralized system that in all sorts of ways has too much power. ... but in all sorts of other ways, it's very, very hard to, i- i- i- it's very hard as a special advisor, which is what I was, to actually get things done because you don't have actual executive authority yourself, right? So, although if you, like, if you look at the media, the media reports about me are like, "All-powerful Dominic Cummings, second most powerful person in the country," blah, blah, blah. A lot of... You'll see endless things in the newspapers to that effect. But that's just not, it's not true, it's not how the thing works. I, I... Just not a single... The, the most junior official in the country, I could not give a direct order to and say, "You should go and do the following thing." Um, so your kind of influence is all very, very indirect and it only exists to the extent that people think you're actually speaking for the PM. Um, it's depr- it was fundamentally depressing because on, o- o- o- on the one hand you have, you have a sort of, uh, you have a depressing mix of things. On the one hand, you have ministers in a cabinet that's just not interested in the most important questions. They're completely obsessed with all the bullshit in the media every day. That is their only life and only, only interest. Um, and you have, as I said, you have a lot of very able young officials, but then all of their bosses, or most of their bosses are a nightmare. And you have just these broken bureaucracies that can't actually get anything done and which spend almost all of their time just trying to defend their own power and, and budgets, not actually doing what they're there to do, um, you know, to, to, to serve the public. Um, and that's... It's very depressing when you see that, when you see that up close every day.

   6. CWChris Williamson38:18

      Well, I suppose from the outside, everybody hopes even if the government appears upfront, you know, Biden, decrepit and unable to speak correctly, or Boris is this kind of blabbering, big, buffoon-y guy that's sort of m- rolling through press conferences, you hope that behind the scenes there's some competence somewhere. And I suppose the magician showing you how the sausage is made and you getting in there and going, "Oh, it's just as incompetent behind the scenes."

   7. DCDominic Cummings38:49

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson38:49

      I imagine that that must be quite-

   9. DCDominic Cummings38:51

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson38:51

       ... quite disenchanting and dispiriting. I think-

   11. DCDominic Cummings38:53

       So, you know, like... You, you know what happens in James Bond films, right? There's, like, often a scene in a James Bond film where Bond is, like, walking along and then suddenly someone opens the door and then suddenly there's, like, 100 ninjas doing their martial arts exercises.

   12. CWChris Williamson39:04

       Mm-hmm.

   13. DCDominic Cummings39:04

       And like, you know, and like, "Oh, right, th- that's where the ninjas are."

   14. CWChris Williamson39:07

       Mm-hmm.

   15. DCDominic Cummings39:08

       But when you go to government, you realize there isn't a door, uh, a- and there aren't, and there ain't any ninjas either.

   16. CWChris Williamson39:14

       (laughs)

   17. DCDominic Cummings39:15

       You're sort of sitting there and it's actually, it's actually literally just like Yes Minister, right? You've s- you've watched the old TV show from the '70s. Yes Minister, that's basically like a documentary of, like, actually how government, a- actually how government works. So, of course, I'm not being completely... And you always have to remember that, like, what I'm talking about is, like, 98% of the picture, right? There's, like, obviously always a few brilliant people. One of the privileges of doing my job was I spent a lot of time dealing with some of the people in the Armed Forces. I went and had meetings with s- with British Special Forces. There's extraordinary people there doing extraordinary things. So, obviously I'm not saying that, like, every part of the British system i- i- i- is rubbish, right? There are obviously pockets of extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. But the tragic... But that kind of heightens the tragedy, because you look at these people and they're kind of like the system is the enemy of them, right?

   18. CWChris Williamson40:06

       Mm-hmm.

   19. DCDominic Cummings40:06

       Wherever you go, like the MOD is the enemy of Special Forces, the Department of Health is the enemy of these brilliant doctors and nurses.

   20. CWChris Williamson40:13

       It's like the... It's like competence is kryptonite.

   21. DCDominic Cummings40:16

       Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

   22. CWChris Williamson40:17

       Yeah. Well, I think one of... one of the most surprising things that I learned from you is just how much of Britain is run via WhatsApp.

   23. DCDominic Cummings40:27

       Yeah. Yeah, and that's partly, of course... And that itself displays like a really weird thing, right? So when I arrived in, in Downing Street in the summer of 2019, like, no one... basically no one ever believes me when I say this. I put it in my COVID evidence under oath, but no one believed it even then. When I arrived in, in, in Downing Street in, in, in, in July 2019, there wasn't even a file sharing system, right? There's not even a... So, if you go back and look at all of Boris' statements on COVID, right? Like announcing lockdown, hu- hugely dramatic things that you don't want to see in 70 years, they were done literally on my private Gmail account. Because the only way you could get the Prime Minister, crucial advisors, the crucial scientific advisors, and the press office all able to edit the same document at the same time was to use someone's private Gmail account, right?

   24. CWChris Williamson41:11

       (laughs)

   25. DCDominic Cummings41:12

       So a one man start-up... In lots of ways, Chris, your start-up doing your podcast-

   26. CWChris Williamson41:18

       Yeah.

   27. DCDominic Cummings41:18

       ... has better tech and tools-

   28. CWChris Williamson41:20

       Mm-hmm.

   29. DCDominic Cummings41:20

       ... than are available to the British Prime Minister spending like a trillion quid a year on British taxes, right? That's, that's, that's the insanity of the, of the system.

   30. CWChris Williamson41:29

       What is the state of information flow efficiency in the British government? I have friends that are doctors, they tell me that the NHS still largely runs on Windows XP and that you've got to fax things around. And you think-
8. 44:50 – 53:19

   The Covid Inquiry Report

   1. CWChris Williamson44:50

      The UK COVID-19 Inquiry released its Module 1 report only, uh, a few days ago. Did you get a chance to read that? What do you think?

   2. DCDominic Cummings44:59

      No. I haven't read it, I'm afraid. I've been ... Uh, um, the- the inquiry has been incredibly depressing, and in lots of ways it's just like adding misinformation and, like, another layer of fake to the- to- to- to the- to- to the whole thing. I mean, you have the extraordinary sight of scientists just trooping one after the other saying under oath, "Well, on Friday the 13th of March, I believed the following thing and I didn't understand why Number 10 was ..." Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Saying this under oath. But sitting on YouTube is a- is a video of them on BBC News on Friday the 13th of March, that exact day, saying literally un- like, 180 degrees the exact opposite. Not once ever in the entire inquiry did the lawyers and the judge ever say, "Um, your statements to us today are under oath, Professor So-and-so, are 180 degrees opposite of what you actually said that day. So, we're not saying you're lying, we're not saying you've got to go to prison for perjury, but, like, we have to get to the bottom of, like, you were ... This has to be explained," right? Instead, everyone's just gone, "Oh, right. Okay," and just accepted it all. And there's, you know, there's example after example after example, unfortunately, where the inquiry- the inquiry basically wants to say the whole thing is the product of, like, moron Boris and moron Matt Hancock, and they wanna blame those two for everything. Now, of course, those two did make a lot of mistakes and like ... But no- no one's been more critical of- of those two than me. But if you actually want to do government better in future and if you actually want to get to the truth, you can't just have this process where you say ... Where, you know, where you try and dump all the blame on them and then pretend that the rest of the system actually, uh, worked fine.

   3. CWChris Williamson46:42

      Is that the inquiry being incompetent, or are they willfully allowing a narrative to permeate that is, um, appropriate for the outcome that they want?

   4. DCDominic Cummings46:58

      It's very hard to know these things, right? Unless you're in the room talking to them, it's very hard to know. But like, you know, it- it- it-

   5. CWChris Williamson47:03

      You'd been- you'd been in the room. It seemed like they- they pushed and poked and were able to sort of throw some sharp things at you.

   6. DCDominic Cummings47:10

      Yeah, they did with me but has been ... But- but- but they haven't with the officials, and they haven't with the ... And they- and they haven't with the scientists, right? They've let the- they've let- they've let a whole bunch of people, um, uh, give evidence without poking holes in it. And also, they just haven't called a whole load of people, right? So there's a whole bunch of people who were at- were in critical roles who have just never been asked to ... even to give a statement, nevermind to turn up and be- and be interrogated. Right? So, it's very hard to reconcile that with the set of people who are actually trying to get to the truth. Like, they're head of the Civil Contingencies Unit, the actual Cabinet Office entity in charge of crisis management for a pandemic, right? Obviously, you have to have that official in and you have to in ... Uh, you have to, um, question very carefully what they say. Never even appeared. Nevermind questioned badly, just- just hasn't appeared to- to- to- to answer the questions i- in the module, um, that I was in.

   7. CWChris Williamson48:09

      I found it so funny watching the, uh, highlights from your ... Uh, maybe one of your, um, multiple run-ins with the- the COVID inquiry where your WhatsApp messages or your text messages get brought up, and there's some, uh, spicy language in there. It's the kind of language that you send to people when you just need to get things done or when you're in a mate's WhatsApp chat or whatever it might be. Uh, it did read qu- (laughs) quite a lot like a Thick Of It sketch. It read like Armando Iannucci had actually put it together. Uh, but on the flip side, I ... Obviously, I don't know the- the ins and outs, but I can imagine if you're a- a northern guy working with a bunch of fucking incompetent people who d- seem to be incapable of actually getting anything done, that you're going to begin to dial up that rhetoric and just speak-... uh, unencumbered, sort of straight from brain to fingertips into, into WhatsApp chat, uh, to try and say, like, "Thi- this is what I'm feeling right now. I'm in wartime. Don't get in the fucking way. It's not time for airs or graces." And, um, yeah, I just, it, it really resonated, I think, with a lot of the... I- I used to run nightclubs in the Northeast of the UK, and if we're doing Halloween and there's 5,000 people trying to get into two nightclubs on the big market-

   8. DCDominic Cummings49:21

      (laughs)

   9. CWChris Williamson49:21

      ... in Newcastle, you know, I- that is the sort of... Th- those are precisely the messages that I'm sending to the boys. Like, "Where the fuck are the barriers? Who do I, who do I need to kick in the nuts to be able to get this to be sorted?" It's just, it's that kind of style.

   10. DCDominic Cummings49:34

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson49:35

       Now, in the, in the cold, harsh light of day five years later, or four years later, doesn't, it doesn't sound great when it's read out with some guy in a suit and tie on, pointing at you, who's sat looking sheepish in front of a microphone. Um, but yeah. I just, I thought it was, uh, (laughs) very reminiscent for me.

   12. DCDominic Cummings49:53

       So, I think as well, right, so if you, if you take the, the, like, you know, a few of those messages that got the most attention, I'd say two things about those messages, right? The, the media presented a lot of them as if I was swearing at officials. But in fact, I was... They were one-to-one messages between me and the Prime Minister. They weren't me shouting at some official, "You fucking idiot, do blah, blah, blah," right? It was me screaming at the PM saying, "This is what..." So that's the first thing. The second thing is, the whole, the whole kind of media focus on that itself was very revealing, right? Because it's like, "Oh, Cummings' language is appalling," to the Prime Minister. But no one paid attention to the actual content of what I was talking about. If you take the one that was, people were most appalled by, by, um, uh, me, me criticizing a particular official, right? The actual issue in play there was that the Cabinet Office was taking officials working on vaccines and testing, as we went into the second wave, off vaccines and testing, to deal with a Cabinet Office HR fuck-up from a year earlier, right? So you're like, you're facing thousands of people more dying in the wave, in wave two in September. You're desperately trying to get vaccines going and testing going to try and stop this happening. And the people actually in charge of doing this are coming along and taking the staff away and saying, "Oh, no. We've got this HR fuck-up with a bunch of lawyers, and we've got to work on that instead." Right? That's the actual scandal, not me, you know, using, uh, using swear words to describe someone to the Prime Minister. The actual scandal is the actual scandal, right? But again, neither the, the inquiry and the media want to, you know, want to focus on, want to focus on my bad language rather than how the system works.

   13. CWChris Williamson51:39

       I don't know. It's so... This sort of weird performative empathy, upstanding, prim and proper approach to decorum, and I don't know. It just seems so detached in many ways. Yeah, I mean, can, can you deliver these messages without the, uh, requisite (laughs) the requisite swearing that goes along with them? Yeah, y- y- you can. But, uh, you're right. It just seems to me to be another example of people focusing on all of the wrong things. Now, that's not to say that they've not focused on some of the right things at s- at other points, but fuck me. Like, is that really the most important thing? Think about the language that was used here. You know, do you... There was people dying. Does, does that really matter?

   14. DCDominic Cummings52:20

       Uh.

   15. CWChris Williamson52:20

       Does the language matter?

   16. DCDominic Cummings52:22

       Exactly. And of course, like, as I said, you know, like, when I'm actually in meetings, having meetings with people, of course I'm not, like, shouting and swearing at these people. They're, like, they're proper meetings and it's like, "Right, you do this, you do that, you do the other." But the ca- but the way which the, in which the inquiry and the media tried to present it is as if, like, "Oh, that's how meetings are conducted at Number 10." And again, like, it's all part of a fake story. So they want the story to be, "Oh, well, because Number 10 has these crazy meetings with Cummings shouting and swearing at people, like, that's why things went wrong." No. The messages were one-to-one messages to the PM. They're not meetings.

   17. CWChris Williamson52:56

       Mm-hmm.

   18. DCDominic Cummings52:56

       And you're not focusing on the actual issue.

   19. CWChris Williamson52:58

       Mm-hmm.

   20. DCDominic Cummings52:58

       So it's like a double fake. A way... Again, it's like, they want to create a fake story. They want people to focus on the fake story. They don't want to get to the heart of, why on earth is the entity responsible for crisis management and saving thousands of people's lives actually, like, ditching that to work on HR cock-ups...

   21. CWChris Williamson53:15

       Mm.

   22. DCDominic Cummings53:16

       ... from, for, for, that are completely irrelevant?

   23. CWChris Williamson53:18

       Yeah. Speaking

9. 53:19 – 1:00:16

   Why the News is Faker Than WWE

   1. CWChris Williamson53:19

      of fake, you've got this new breaking kayfabe series thing where you say that the news is faker than WWE. What do you mean by that?

   2. DCDominic Cummings53:26

      Yeah. So it's like, um, the... You'll, you'll know who I mean, but I'll just explain for, for, for some of your audience. So there's a, like a legendary, um, music producer in LA. There's a guy called Rick Rubin, right? You'll, you obviously you'll know. And it was Rick Rubin who actually said this. Rick Rubin s- was asked about, you know, like how he relaxes and about politics in the news and whatnot. And Rick Rubin said, um, "Well, like I'm a big WWE fan. But like the more... The older I get and the more of the, you know, political news I watch, the more my attitude is that, like, wrestling is real, and it's the news that's fake. And what you should do is, you should start watching political news on CNN or read The New York Times as if it's a WWE script, and then you'll actually understand what's going on much better." And I thought, like, that's, that's... (laughs) That really, re-... It take, it takes an art- an artist to kind of get to the heart of the, uh, um, of the, of the polit- political issue, right? And it sounds kind of crazy when you first say it. But then, look at just what happened with, with Biden, right? For two years, if you talk to a swing voter farmer on 30 grand living in Missouri, um, in a focus group, he would say, "Well, the president clearly is, like, senile. He's shuffling around, walking into walls. He's shaking hands with the air. I don't understand what these clowns in Washington are doing. Like, it's just ludicrous having a president like that. He's, it's like my grandfather when he got senile. He can't do the job, right?" That was what the uninformed people who watch no news thought.The story i- in the New York Times, believed by the best informed people in Washington, was the president's super sharp in, in private, like he smashes out, uh-

   3. CWChris Williamson55:12

      Sharp as a tack.

   4. DCDominic Cummings55:12

      ... you know, he's sharp as a tack. And then, uh, first debate happens and all of, a- and New York Times and Washington Post are full of, full of people going, "Oh my God, this is unbelievable. Like, I'm shocked, shocked." From staffers briefing from inside the White House, right? So you've actually got a situation in which staffers briefing from inside the White House and giving statements about the president's mental health, showing that they're actually less informed than someone who watches no news and just watches TikTok for like five minutes a day driving a tractor-

   5. CWChris Williamson55:40

      (laughs)

   6. DCDominic Cummings55:40

      ... in, i- in Michigan.

   7. CWChris Williamson55:44

      Yeah, that, uh...

   8. DCDominic Cummings55:44

      So that's, uh, it sort of shows that, like, R- Rick Rubin is right.

   9. CWChris Williamson55:47

      Rick Rubin is right. He should have been the, the guy that was advising everyone. Yeah, it's, um... I, I realized during that period that to me, making jokes about Biden's senility on a, an episode felt so obvious that it was hacky. It was so old news and so-

   10. DCDominic Cummings56:05

       Yeah, exactly.

   11. CWChris Williamson56:05

       ... that I wouldn't, I, I avoided doing it because it felt like a cheap shot, not a cheap fake, a cheap shot. And then-

   12. DCDominic Cummings56:12

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson56:12

       And then to realize that the fucking veils fall from people's eyes when he has that debate with Trump.

   14. DCDominic Cummings56:17

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson56:17

       And then to hear this totally dickless set of assertions by people in the media who now can s- do this sort of like faux criticism thing where they can seem like they're stepping up and pushing back against the Democrats and the party and the president that they've been running cover for, for the last two or three years, saying that it's cheap fake saying, that it's whatever. Well, I... It's obvious, there's no cost to you holding this opinion now. There's no cost at all because everyone's seen that the emperor is wearing a- no clothes. There's this-

   16. DCDominic Cummings56:51

       Exactly.

   17. CWChris Williamson56:51

       Ben, Ben Usher, Ben somebody wrote this great article about common knowledge. And the common knowledge is not just, it's not good enough simply for people to know a thing, they also have to believe that everybody else also knows that thing. And when you have this-

   18. DCDominic Cummings57:06

       Exactly.

   19. CWChris Williamson57:06

       ... huge, big fireworks display showing the problems that the president is facing at the moment, anybody that then comes out and says, "Oh, it's, it's unbelievable. We can't support Biden with the way that he's gone." Well, yeah, yeah, everybody knows this now. It's the same thing with-

   20. DCDominic Cummings57:21

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson57:21

       ... free speech. Free speech is only important for people that disagree with your view because of course you're going to want all of the people who agree with your view to have fucking free speech. Yeah, it was so... God, it, it really made me realize just how much there are kind of two worlds of people. There was one world of people who thought it was so obvious it was hacky to talk about, and another world of people-

   22. DCDominic Cummings57:40

       Yeah.

   23. CWChris Williamson57:40

       ... for whom this was a revelation.

   24. DCDominic Cummings57:42

       Yeah, exactly. And, uh, and, and, and even more weird in a way, but it's like the world which is most deluded about re- I, about actual core reality is the set of people who spend all of their time supposedly at the absolute center of power talking to the power people, right? So like, the closer you were to being an editor of The New York Times or The Washingto Post or CNN Bureau in DC, the more likely you were to say completely insane things about Biden's mental health.

   25. CWChris Williamson58:14

       I, I wonder whether that was running cover rather than being ignorant. Uh, obviously it's gonna be difficult to know, but I, I get the sense that anybody that had been around him knew, uh, as opposed to them being ignorant and, and telling what they thought was the truth in the press.

   26. DCDominic Cummings58:32

       So I think like at the very, very core, that's true, right? I mean, I remember having, I had breakfast with one of the top five probably most powerful officials in the country, in Britain, in January 2023. And he'd just come back from one of these NATO meetings. And he said to me... They're all sitting around with like... He was with, um, uh, uh, he was with the British Prime Minister, Macron, Scholz, Biden, blah, blah. And he said Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, was literally, like had a huge pad and would write every time like Sunak or someone would speak, it would be like massive letters. Sunak, Macron. Jake Sullivan would be writing on this huge pad, right? And putting in front of Biden. And everyone could see this, right? So that was said to me in January.

   27. CWChris Williamson59:19

       Oh, so he knew who he was, uh, responding to?

   28. DCDominic Cummings59:23

       Yeah, because he's like , he had to be reminded that, like what, who Macron. That it's Mac- he, the guy there is Macron.

   29. CWChris Williamson59:29

       Wow.

   30. DCDominic Cummings59:30

       Right? That's how bad it was. And I was told that by this guy who'd watched it happen in like I think end of January 2023. And that's a guy in Britain, right? That's not someone who's, you know, sitting working in the White House and involved all the time. So clearly a lot of people around the core of the deep state who were in these meetings with Biden knew the truth about it for a long, for, for, for a long time and kept it quiet. Um, but the whole kind of elite media whose job is supposedly to tell people the truth and to get to the bottom of that, right? The Washington Post is the people who broke Watergate, they're supposed to be the people to, to, to, to figure these things out. And it's not like this was hard to figure out, right? As you say, you could see it and it was so obvious you didn't even wanna talk about it.

10. 1:00:16 – 1:09:04

    The Current State of America

    1. CWChris Williamson1:00:16

       What do you make of the state of America right now? For all that the UK's maybe gone through some turmoil, pales into insignificance with the absolute furnace that is America.

    2. DCDominic Cummings1:00:27

       Um, America's always just like so much more extreme than Europe, right? In various ways. So it's got, on the one hand you've got like hugely, hugely interesting progress in things like AI and biotech. Um, incredible economic dynamism in all sorts of ways. But then, uh, as soon as you turn to the political scene, then it's a sort of like just amazing, um, uh, uh, uh, amazing car crash. I do think it's very positive though that a bunch of the valley people are getting involved. And I don't really mind if it's like, if they're gonna get involved in the Democratic or Republican side. To me it's less important than-... at an overall level, are we gonna start seeing a shift in what we talked about before, where like all the able people basically sort of often leave poli- politics to the government to become a clown show? Or are you gonna start seeing a historic reversal of that, and see more and more of the talented people say, "Okay, we are actually gonna have to step up the play here and, and, and try and change it and get involved with it"? So I think that's a, um, that's a hopeful sign for America. Washington and government can only improve i- i- if the most able people at building things get more involved in public service, for sure. Um, and I hope that that's a sign of, you know... I hope that this is gonna be one of those things where Britain is downstream of what happens in America, and that there's a similar kind of process here.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:01:58

       What do you make of the J.D. Vance VP pick?

    4. DCDominic Cummings1:02:02

       Don't know very much about Vance. Um, never met him. But I think, uh, I think one of the most interesting reactions I've seen is, is the kind of smart Obama people who actually, like, ran Obama's winning campaigns, their reaction to it was not the best pick for Trump from the point of view of winning the election, but it's a sign that Trump might be actually serious about driving things through in, in, in government. Because Vance is friends with a lot of entrepreneurs. Um, he actually believes a lot of this kind of like economic populist stuff. The Obama people were all very worried about whether or not in Trump's first term he would actually govern the way that he said, and they were very relieved when he arrived and made a terrible blunder and basically followed Paul Ryan and tried to like whack Obamacare and stuff like that. Which, um, wh- which was a political disaster for Trump. The Obama people now are very worried that the Vance appointment is a sign that he's learned his lesson, and when he arrives this time, um, he's actually going to govern in a, in a different way and actually focus on what a lot of working class voters want. Um, so like from America's point of view, I think that would be good if they, i- i- if Trump does do that, right? Um, the system does need rebalancing. Uh, um, and across the western world, we can't just carry on with this economic model where it's stagnant, it's stagnant wages for people on median earnings. Um, but like huge asset price bubbles that help the billionaires. Like, this, this whole thing can't carry on the way it is.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:03:35

       And give me your thoughts on Kamala going into November.

    6. DCDominic Cummings1:03:41

       So I think what's happening on her is like, it's the same... It's the- So... The way I describe like the way that the media works now is, is the phrase narrative whiplash, right? So you have this narrative which goes along and then like suddenly they just change on a dime. So like in COVID, you saw, uh, "Trump is racist to talk about closing the borders." "It's racist to close the borders." Suddenly, narrative whiplash, "Uh, we must shut the borders immediately." Right? And then, uh, "The war in Ukraine is completely nothing to do with NATO, nothing to do with NATO." "It's something to do with Ukraine joining NATO." Narrative whiplash, "Ukraine must join NATO." Right? So we see this process over again. We've just seen it with Biden. "Super sharp in private." "Biden is senile," is like literally Russian disinformation. Flip. "Biden's senile." Biden's gone. The next day is, "Kamala's great." Super energy. "We're all really excited." "She's going to be a brilliant candidate." And I guarantee you that before very long people are going to start writing, "Oh shit." Like, all the reports and focus groups are that she is not a good candidate. Remember, Kamala's 2019 campaign was a total shit show. She blew herself up very quickly. She couldn't keep, she couldn't build a staff and keep it. Um, she's very, very hard to work with. People don't like working with her. Um, I think politics, like winning politics at an elite, at an elite level, it's a lot about can you mobilize talent and get people with different views working together in a kind of harmonious way? Um, and if you can't build a team, then you can't get, you can't get much done. And I think she's really going to struggle as a candidate. Of course, Trump's not popular by, you know, by historical standards, so it's likely to stay close whatever happens. Um, and probably be decided by, um, you know, by not that many votes in maybe three or four states. Same as last time, same as in 2016.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:05:39

       The narrative whiplash thing is so interesting, and I've certainly seen it too. It's odd that in a world where everything that everybody says is essentially blockchain for the rest of time that no one actually decides to bring up the shit that you previously said. It feels like-

    8. DCDominic Cummings1:05:53

       Yeah.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:05:54

       Uh, it's this odd blend of, you know, sort of puritanical language policing if it comes to your WhatsApp messages directly with the PM or Andrew Huberman's sex life. But then if it's articles and headlines that have been written that are then immediately reversed, or positions that people have taken publicly which they then publicly, perhaps under oath, decide to do a U-turn on, that that bit gets to be allowed. And I, I really haven't worked out what this is. I don't know whether there's a particularly sort of protected class. I don't know whether it's certain people are allowed to do this and certain aren't, whether it's if you, if you align with particular points of views that you're more allowed to have this like odd non-retroactive skepticism and scrutiny of the shit that you used to say compared with the shit that you say now. But it's-

    10. DCDominic Cummings1:06:46

        Yeah.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:06:46

        It is true. I, I, you know, I thought about mass lighting as opposed to gaslighting. It's across the entire board. It's like, "No, no, no, no one ever saw this."

    12. DCDominic Cummings1:06:55

        Yeah.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:06:55

        "Nobody ever saw this." You've got, uh, you, you did a little in that article I was talking about before that kayfabe thing. You said, uh, "Herd immunity without vaccines is the science and the policy." Herd immunity without vaccines was never the policy. The central question-

    14. DCDominic Cummings1:07:09

        Exactly.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:07:09

        ... in the referendum is about whether we're in the single market and Customs Union. The referendum was never about whether we're in the single market and Customs Union. The war is weakening Russia, so we must continue. The war is strengthening Russia, so we must continue.

    16. DCDominic Cummings1:07:23

        Exactly. Right, and you just see this process over and over again. But as you say-It's kind of an invisible process to any- e- everybody involved with it, and they don't, they don't point out to each other. Like, it's like, we'll be just like terribly bad form. So the flip happens, but then everyone just talks like that's what we've always said. And no one goes, "Uh, hang on a second, but like, the war was supposed to be weakening Russia. How the fuck are we now... What do you mean, like, we've gotta carry on because it's strengthening?" But like, that means like our whole plan has gone totally wrong, right? (laughs)

    17. CWChris Williamson1:07:54

        Well, I mean, it-

    18. DCDominic Cummings1:07:54

        'Cause if we go through-

    19. CWChris Williamson1:07:56

        It's the easiest solution, or it's a, it's a much easier version than 1984 where they have to retroactively go back and actually change what happened.

    20. DCDominic Cummings1:08:03

        Yeah, now they don't bother. (laughs)

    21. CWChris Williamson1:08:05

        Yeah. For some reason-

    22. DCDominic Cummings1:08:06

        They just leave it there in the public domain and no one even, no one picks it up and-

    23. CWChris Williamson1:08:09

        I'm-

    24. DCDominic Cummings1:08:09

        ... points it out.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:08:09

        So I really wonder whether this is contributed to by the pace of just news, the, the sheer velocity that we're being s- you know, pepper sprayed in the face with everything that's going on, this pressure washer of information that's coming out. Like-

    26. DCDominic Cummings1:08:23

        Yeah.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:08:24

        ... Trump getting shot feels like it's over.

    28. DCDominic Cummings1:08:27

        Yeah.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:08:27

        The president got shot in the head, or the-

    30. DCDominic Cummings1:08:31

        Yeah.
11. 1:09:04 – 1:23:25

    What if Trump Had Been Killed?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:09:04

       dude. Have you d- did you run in your mind the model of what would have happened if Trump's head had been an inch to the right?

    2. DCDominic Cummings1:09:14

       I mean, I, this will all be so... Like, if, if you look at the whole thing now, right? Like, the event is, is just about explainable by like total systemi- systemic incompetence. If you just look at it and go, okay, well, like, we know from COVID, we can see in Ukraine that Western institutions, like one after the other, are just shot and they just like do pathological crazy shit. Well, okay, like you can sort of imagine how the Secret Service would have like decayed to this point where they could allow this sort of thing. You don't have to posit a conspiracy. But if you imagine that like Trump's head had exploded live on TV and then you'd ask people to believe the, the current official story, right? Millions of people are not, not buying any of that shit. Um, I mean if you look at it on the flip side, but I-

    3. CWChris Williamson1:09:59

       Why do you think that's the case?

    4. DCDominic Cummings1:10:03

       I think... Well, if you look on the flip side now, I was looking at a poll the other day and it said something like a third of Democrat voters believe that like the thing was basically staged to, um, to help Trump. Now you imagine if Trump's head hadn't exploded, I think like at least a third of Republicans, maybe even more than a third of Republicans and more than a third of the country would have said, "What, uh, like we're supposed to believe that this is just all some like to- t- like just s- s- incompetent idiocy? That the Secret Service looked at this for 20 minutes, didn't, di- didn't shoot at him, and then just let him shoot the president in the head?" Like, no, I'm not fucking buying it. So I think it would have been, I think it would have been, um, uh, people would not have bought the idea that this is just systemic pathological inco- incompetence. I think they would have, um, a, a very, very large faction of the country, w- quite possibly over half the country would have said, "Clearly this is, um, the, this is, this is some kind of conspiracy." And they've tried to lock him up with the law fair, they've lost these cases, the Supreme Court's thrown everything out. Okay, well, now they've shot him so that they, so that, so that they've, they've gotten rid of him that way. Um, so I think it would have been really, really bad, uh, and, and quite possibly sparked a lot of violence. Right? You know, you, we could think back to 1968 when you have the assassination of Martin Luther King, the, the terrible assassination of Bobby Kennedy, what, like eight weeks later or whatever it was. Um, uh, uh, you know, that was like serious profound shock for America, sparked a lot of riots, a lot of violence. I think, you know, you'd have to... I- i- in a parallel world, I think you'd have to, uh, you'd be pretty lucky to escape that having, th- that happening.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:11:47

       Isn't it fascinating that the consequence of the action is indicative of how the action came about? That Trump getting clipped in the ear changes the story that lots of people believe about how it had actually happened? Because there's no chance-

    6. DCDominic Cummings1:12:07

       Mm-hmm.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:12:07

       ... that the Dems would say, "Oh, this is..." Or whatever it is, the third of, of Democrat voters that would say, uh, "Oh, this was to improve his chances to become president." Like, obviously not. And-

    8. DCDominic Cummings1:12:17

       Yeah. (laughs)

    9. CWChris Williamson1:12:17

       (laughs) You know? Like, he's fucking dead.

    10. DCDominic Cummings1:12:19

        Exactly. Yeah.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:12:21

        Um, uh, but yeah, it's just, uh, an odd, an odd quirk about, um, sort of human psychology I suppose that we, we look at what the outcome was and then retroactively make an explanation from there as opposed to trying to sort of walk through it step by step by step. And, uh-

    12. DCDominic Cummings1:12:35

        Yeah.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:12:35

        ... o- obviously the, the Secret Service lady's now gone. Uh, I mean, uh, did you watch any of that hearing? Word, did she-

    14. DCDominic Cummings1:12:43

        Didn't unfortunately, no.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:12:44

        No way.

    16. DCDominic Cummings1:12:44

        I meant to, but sounds like another shit show.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:12:46

        Oh, she got... It was, (laughs) it was like really, really, really aggressive, just the most vehement... You can't think of, you know, this woman, e- incompetent as she may be and driven by DEI and blah, blah, blah, she doesn't care about Trump and all the rest of it. Every... You can throw every accusation that you want at her, but this woman was eviscerated on TV for f- fore- forever. And they basically lined up every different, uh, uh, person that was gonna have the... And every single one of them had a tightly defined five-minute segment where they just punched her in the face over and over and over and over again.

    18. DCDominic Cummings1:13:25

        I saw even, um, the only thing I saw was on, on Twitter, I think, where I saw like AOC ask a pretty like very, very, very (laughs) good question that like just obviously doesn't have any kind of respectable answer, right?

    19. CWChris Williamson1:13:35

        No.Yep. It was a- it was rough. But yeah, I mean, just thinking about what would've happened if Trump's head had exploded. I- I- I still, it blows my mind that we're over this already, the fact that it was so close to happening. Like, i- as close as it's possible to be without it happening-

    20. DCDominic Cummings1:13:55

        No.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:13:55

        ... literally. And it's just a story now. It's a meme, there's T-shirts about it. He kicked the hop tour girl off the top of the memeiverse for a couple of weeks and-

    22. DCDominic Cummings1:14:07

        (laughs)

    23. CWChris Williamson1:14:08

        ... (laughs) now, now, we're talking about Kamala Harris and, "Oh, is this... This is the real insurrection because they've su- subverted the democratic process of getting a candidate in," and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, hey, what about the guy who got shot in the head only a little while-

    24. DCDominic Cummings1:14:26

        Yep. Yep.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:14:27

        ... ages ago?

    26. DCDominic Cummings1:14:27

        And wait till... As I said, the n- the next thing that's gonna happen is, you know, you can see on the- i- in Ukraine now, um, what's happening with these cr- with- with- with- with the e- incredible growth and sophistication of these drone attacks, right? Like, that's coming to domestic terrorism across the Western world, right?

    27. CWChris Williamson1:14:42

        Mm-hmm.

    28. DCDominic Cummings1:14:42

        You don't- you don't develop all this technology and then it just stays in fucking Ukraine. So, at some point, we're gonna see that crazy shit happening over here, and then you can start asking questions. Like, the whole format of how Trump had that event, right, is just not doable. Like, it... Assume that the Secret Service actually had a sniper perimeter, which they should've done, and they handled the whole thing competently, right? You do all that the way that you actually should do it and did do it competently in like 1991, it doesn't matter anymore because you just... Someone's just gonna fly a fucking FPV drone in-

    29. CWChris Williamson1:15:15

        Mm-hmm.

    30. DCDominic Cummings1:15:15

        ... and- and- and zap him with that, right? So, the whole way in which we think about these events, how politicians interact with the public, I think is gonna change sharpish. I mean, hopefully, like, the- the tragedy is normally historically these things only happen after a complete disaster. And- and- and- and sadly, probably-

Episode duration: 1:58:30