"Today I have the pleasure of speaking with  Dominic Cummings. He was the chief advisor   to Boris Johnson when he was Prime Minister and  before that, he masterminded the Brexit campaign. Let's start ..."

"it's extremely hard to appreciate that you  have these handful of people trying to come   up with the answers to extremely hard problems.  The weight of the news flooding in on you just   makes it int..."

"resolved to hire some consultants for millions  of pounds to spend a year doing a study on it. So one very small little thing in a way,   but probably certainly anybody who's  been at a kind of high f..."

"Most obviously, for example, some terrorist  incident happens in central London. Prime   Minister can't ignore that. It's going to  involve the Prime Minister's time. Politics,   the news, the governm..."

"government. We've just won an election, partly  by running against the previous decade of the   Conservative Party. Can't pull that off again.  We're actually going to have to do a whole bunch   of th..."

"up in a system where they just don't know any  better than dealing with the media all day. Now,   if you actually understand communication,  you know that communication is not the   same as answering ..."

"How much does it have to do with the fact  that in the British political system,   the people who are running these  departments have to be an MP,   so they have to be an elected official?  Is that wh..."

"I'll tell you a story about it that kind of  summarizes it. At the peak of COVID craziness   in March 2020, on the day itself that the PM  tested positive for CoVID, a bunch of people come   into Numb..."

"What if the Prime Minister said, I am giving  a blank check. If I appoint you as minister,   whatever you say, I'm going to sign it. So you can  rule as if I agree on everything you said. Could   they..."

"issues later.” But it also showed that even in  a crisis where literally thousands of people   are dying day after day after day, that large  parts of the bureaucracy will still simply say   “No. We a..."

"What incentive is there for people to speak  out about how these things work? No one expects   anything to change. Even after something as big  as COVID, when you see what the reaction is,   everyone ..."

"was essentially back to normal. You will be  promoted for being the most insane process,   and you will be demoted and blacklisted if you  say this process is insane and try to do better. There's two ..."

"So those sorts of things  come in. The treasury says,   “The spending rules and how the people  in the vaccine task force make decisions,   that was an emergency thing. Now the normal  rules apply aga..."

"At some point we should talk about what it  would actually take to change the equilibrium.   It might be first useful to talk about how did  this come to be? So presumably, at some point,   this is no..."

"self-selection, largely because they go in  idealistic, they're there for a few years,   but then they look at what the process is to  be promoted, and they look at their bosses,   and the best of the..."

"he was highly aggressive in saying, “This  whole fucking disaster system has got to   change. It nearly killed me. It's killed tens  of thousands of other people. We've got to   blow the whole thing u..."

"and you've got Brexit done and you've got the  Vote leave team in Number 10 who've said before   they arrived here they're going to change civil  service. Okay, well, now, obviously this is all   goin..."

"Starmer is so obviously rubbish on the other side,  we don't actually have to change very much either. On your blog, when you've written about all these  other reformers throughout history, they were ..."

"The overwhelming majority of people in politics  fundamentally prioritize social relations within   the insider network. That is just what totally  dominates their life day in, day out, year in,   yea..."

"If you look at Brexit, the foreign secretary  was almost completely irrelevant to all of the   Brexit negotiations. The Prime Minister's  private secretary, a very able character,   much more able tha..."

"So it's an oddity in the system and it's purely  around the PM. The way the system works is in all   the different departments, the gerontocracy  is in charge and you have this appalling HR   system t..."

"Well, there's a few. IThere's a guy called  Jono Evans who did Brexit negotiations. There   is a brilliant young woman called Hannah who  coordinated deep state stuff with Mi5 and things   like that. ..."

"Now, in 2020, we started a whole bunch of  things to actually make it a core part and   shake up the way that the system worked.  We changed how the power relations between   Number 10 and the treasur..."

"Speaking of the treasury, you helped promote  Sunak to Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was,   from what I understand,  relatively unknown before that. What did you notice about him  that made you deci..."

"of financial information from Number 10, which  is obviously completely insane. How can you have   a Prime Minister making judgments about all  sorts of things if his own treasury is hiding   data? In..."

"I'm more curious about the broader lessons  about personality that this reveals than him   necessarily. In the American context for example,  FDR clearly had control of the government, and as   far as..."

"This is the same government that has  nukes, that deals with biosecurity,   counterterrorism, and all kinds of other  things that I'm sure I'm not even aware of. If the general government is this dysf..."

"Similarly, on the nuclear side, I spent a lot  of time in 2020 in bunkers without phones,   talking to officials about the state of the  nuclear enterprise, weapons safety infrastructure.   And the tr..."

"trying to reassure me that I shouldn't really  worry about this. At the end of the meeting,   I asked, “So James, what do you think about  this?” Of course, these people have no idea   who he was. And..."

"And then imagine that it turned out that these  things are controlled by and owned by Chinese   intelligence. That gives you a kind of nightmare  picture. That is the reality. I can't go into the   sp..."

"on large parts of that system at all now. When I  dug into these things inside the Cabinet Office,   I was essentially the only political person  in a long time who'd actually even been   discussing i..."

"censoring in large parts of the system and much  less aggression than most people would assume. How about defense? In Ukraine, we're seeing  very asymmetric returns on different kinds of   new weapons..."

"Well, in war games, if they're  dealing with any kind of serious   peer opponent the British aircraft carriers  immediately flee to the edge of the war game   so that they don't get sunk immediately. ..."

"What happens when we have to face  the music and when does that happen? I don't know. Maybe there's a conflict and  many personnel on the aircraft carrier drown.   Or maybe not even with defense speci..."

"Conflict matters a lot. Technology  matters. And they matter in ways   that are very contingent and hard  to predict and very nonlinear. And ideas matter most of all. But almost none  of that really c..."

"more the competent people retreat to their fish  ponds. They look up, they build walled gardens,   and they cultivate their fish ponds, they try and  build their own companies where they can do things..."

"across the political world, academia,  in the media, you can see on Twitter,   they're all very happy to give their personal  takes on Elon Musk as manager and his startup   abilities. And they take e..."

"Take me out of the equation. Let's  think about the general thing. Winning an election, in a lot of ways, is  the easy part because in a lot of ways,   the madness of the old system actually makes it ..."

"them, repeatedly, every day, do things that make  no sense. If your assumption is that they're   optimizing for winning the election, why would  Rishi Sunak say: judge me on whether or not I stop   th..."

"Probably FDR, you'd say. Not even LBJ? I don't know enough about LBJ to say. I mean, my  impression is that for all his amazing skills,   he didn't manage to grip the Pentagon  and the intelligence se..."

"that actually decides that its fundamental goal  is to solve a set of problems. Its fundamental   goal is not maneuvering the social hierarchy  of existing political and media elites. Like   that's th..."

"it the undersecretaries? How big does that  minimum group need to be to take charge? Everything depends on particular  historical circumstances. I mean,   you could do it with a relatively small  numb..."

"If you go back to your Singapore example, so  far it's been successful in preserving that   culture. It's like: here's what our real  goals are and the different elements of   the government system ha..."

"constant rejuvenation. And that's a mix of  basically sunsetting, closing and rebuilding. Let's get more specific. Let's talk about the  Ministry of Defense. Would you just lay off a   huge chunk of i..."

"Well, the examples you gave of people like Groves  and everything, this is a very particular time   in history, wartime and also depression. So  there's not many private sector alternatives. How would..."

"Exactly. What is the trick to getting these  people to ditch the existing system? Well, it's extremely hard in the first past the  post system. When I did some research in America   recently, I asked ..."

"On Brexit. If it's possible to build a  new political machine that's relatively   cheap to do and is much more effective than the  current political parties at winning elections,   what is it that you..."

"With Brexit. Afterwards on your blog,  you're writing about why you did   Brexit and how the government is dysfunctional  in these ways and it's similar to the things   we're talking about. We've got ..."

"Is that the way you think about it? To some extent, that's always what politics  is. Because as I said before, you could only   ever talk about a relatively small fraction of  all the things that you ..."

"While we're talking about talent,  [you obviously put out that famous   post](https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-were-hiring-data-scientists-project-managers-policy-experts-ass..."

"can get things done fast vibe.  So it's just highly dependent. Is a war over Taiwan with China worth it  for the US and the UK and the West together? Obviously not. It's a completely insane  idea. It'..."

"willfully antagonizing China over a place  filled with Chinese. It's fucking stupid. But it has worked in the past where  the Soviets had the huge Red army in   Europe and with nuclear deterrence, we ..."

"Yeah, and not responsible. You spent time in Russia when  you were a younger man. You   were trying to start an airline there, right? Yeah. What did you learn about Russia, and do you  think the regim..."

"That lesson with incentives, for example,   is isomorphic to other institutions you've  seen, or was that specific to Russia? Everything is crazier and more insane in  Russia, but I think it definitel..."

"How come? They'd be crushed by the system. You could imagine  in China, some Machiavellian character coming   through. You could say the CCP has done that to  some extent. A Machiavellian character co..."

"Yeah, or hard for a good  statesman to take over as well. You are somebody who has actually lived  through and participated at a high level   in a hinge point in history, with masterminding  Brexit an..."

"of it is really recorded anywhere. I mean, there  might be some sketchy WhatsApp conversations here   and there. The odd person keeps a diary, which  can be useful for sure, but it was pretty rare,   ..."

"You were giving a talk or participating in a panel  at the Orwell Festival of Political Writing about   Bismarck, and you had a quote there that I thought  was so interesting and I want you to explain..."

"Okay, big picture. What is the cause  of Britain no longer being the global   superpower it once was? Is it decolonization?  Post war socialism? Is it the war itself? The productivity stuff started ha..."

"His answer is, “Well, of course, like a whole  generation of great leaders was destroyed.” I'm curious why the opposite thing isn't more  common, where you have all these generals who   have seen Worl..."

"The science and technology staff  is important for us to develop,   but not just for economic reasons. But it's also  very, very far from a magic bullet. There's a   whole bunch of stuff that we have ..."

"whereby we come up with some equivalent  of take back control, but for planning,   and then we persuade everyone and the public  will shift and start cheering house building.   I don't think that's re..."

"“Look at what's happened. Now, do you want to go  back? Do you want the people who don't like this   to take over?” You see what I mean? I think the  idea of coming up with some kind of agenda on it  ..."

"that especially having gone through COVID and  the horrors around that. The way to deal with   that is to have different kinds of people with  different kinds of skills. But you also need   some peopl..."

"It totally depends on temperament and  personality. Two of the most interesting   intellectual people, 20th century are [John von   Neumann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann)  and [Kurt ..."

"I think elite universities now definitely  don't train this sort of thing. The way   that I think about it is this. It's easy  to imagine creating new courses for 17   to 23 year olds where they do a ..."

"How does PPE (Politics, Philosophy,  Economics) fuck up the people who   go through it? Because basically, almost  every Prime Minister has gone through it,   and even US presidents? Clinton was a  Rh..."

"Yeah, the debug loop is broken. It's  like you're debugging a program,   but you can only do it a month after  you write the program or something. Yeah, exactly. Imagine if you could only debug   the ..."

"have them all. Practically by definition.  Not worrying what the media says and not   worrying about everyone hating you, I  think, is a very powerful advantage. All the way through the referendum  an..."

"Okay, final question. What does pessimism of the  intellect and optimism of the will mean to you? If you look at history, then you have to expect  that what happens to everyone else is likely   to hap..."

"Dominic, this is a huge pleasure. I honestly  learned so much. You really can't get this   anywhere else. Having somebody who is as  thoughtful as you inside the government,   so that you can have bot..."