The Hidden Scandals Inside The British Government - Dominic Cummings

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 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 Stu 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 you see it all the time so um I'm slightly surprised by the number but like the overall kind of picture is not not surprising do you think there's a an irony or a pressence of bre it being driven by concerns about immigration to now 2024 with the UK facing massive immigration problems and it being such a huge talking point yeah it's s it's it's a crazy situation right so in in 2015 2016 we have the referendum and during the referendum campaign I say well what's a core reason to to let's go through a few few fundamentals of of why we should leave right number one free movement of people is is out of control it's 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 immigration collapse as an issue farro will be retired ukup will be gone and um extremism will be muted here and the whole country can could can move on and talk about other things it would be better if Europe did it overall but Europe's not going to do that but we should do this ourselves the whole mainstream media attitude was that's completely crazy the FD and economists laughed at this they their prediction was if brexit wins then immigration will become even more of an issue far will be turbocharged 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 farro is retired ukip is gone uh and uh uh basically the vot 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 in Europe of course exactly as V Le predicted the problem has grown and grown if I said in 2016 well in like 8 years time there'll be like close to a Nazi part neck and neck for leading the polls in Germany everyone would have completely laughed at the ft and economists but that's actually the situation right so I think things worked out the way that vot leaf predicted On th on that stuff but then in an amazing plot twist I fall out with Boris obviously end of 2020 the vot leave team 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 [ __ ] insane stupid [ __ ] dingies coming across the channel so you suddenly have tens of thousands of these ludicrous boats coming over and farro is back a new part's created Tories lose half their vote I mean it's like a sort of I you can't explain it by any kind of rationality right the to just sort of completely shoot themselves in 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 to is the kicking they talk to me about how you say that the Tor sabotaged the immigration policy 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 have been not talking about this sort of thing unless it was a big deal and it's all over the news so just dig into the Dynamics and the mechanism of what's going on so like obviously super complicated in one way but I think you can simplify it um to to to to a large extent essentially so we win the referendum on in 2016 Tores then imploded 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 [ __ ] show we go to number 10 we solve the Constitutional crisis we beat Corbin in the election we're then at number 10 right and we do it with an immigration policy which is pretty clear and has very very widespread support our the vote leav 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 startup person building a company we should make it way easier for you to Cal easier for you to bring your family 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 more high-skilled immigration massively Crush unskilled immigration particularly from like War torn countries with people fleeing with completely [ __ ] 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 you know revisit it and see whatever wants to do essentially what happened in 2021 is the Tor said screw all that we're just going to basically open the floodgates and so suddenly a system that had been thought to be you know like when that immigration was like two 300,000 was already unprecedented suddenly it shot up to a million right like nothing ever nothing like it has ever been seen and then in parallel they basically concede that um well well they start off uh uh um so at the same time as you have this huge unparalleled surg 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 for 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 and uh essentially what happens there is Boris in 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 and you're prepared to tell the European Court of human rights in Strasburg that then we're not going to enforce various of their judgments on this subject and that's fundamentally the only way you can get legal control over the illegal immigration and the Asylum system what Boris does is he doesn't want to do this so he creates this completely ludicrous policy of we're going to sh we're going to fly all these people to Rwanda T 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 optimizing for stop the boats well start 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 as a breach of their human rights anyway to cut long story short Boris Johnson and then Richie sunak waste four years arguing about this completely [ __ ] 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 um and the country looking at this and just saying oh this is what what an absolute fce and of course it's made even worse for the jores because sunak takes office and he says read my lips Judge Me On whether or not I sto the boats then of course the boats are completely out of control what's your postmortem on the recent general election 80 seat majority to the biggest loss ever how did this happen the fundamental core of it is that the to party has been rotting for decades and between uh and the MP it's not like it's not because they were too leftwing or too right-wing um or because of brexit orain the core of it is having been a 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 over the last decade um essentially what they optimized for is the 247 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' 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 aage wages you know like every if you look at the ministry of Defense you've had you we'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 you'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 Arm Forces just kind of rot and hollow out so you look like every single major aspect of the public of the State and State capabilities the Tes 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 3540 billion just in this Parliament on the most ludicrous highspeed rail um scheme in world history um completely corrupt completely useless total and not F 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 of crucial cash like trivial cash um you know all um pandemic response all sorts of things so it's just a sort of and and the public can see it right the public aren't stupid the voters can see we're paying we're paying more and more taxes the country is going in more and more debt yet every major thing that we look at the Ser the quality of services is disintegrating we're pay more and more and more money for less and less and less Services um so you know you keep doing that um the toies deservedly have had the worst election result in in in their history how relatively do you see it as a labor Victory versus a conservative loss was it just handed over would it have been it could have been anybody it could have been count bface on the other side no I think you got to give credit to starma and his main kind of guy gu um uh I forgot this name now um but the guy who run his the guy who run his campaign I'll think of in a second I'm really bad with names um I think that you know there's there's brilliant campaigners like Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan uh and starma knew that he wasn't a character like that and to give him credit like a lot of politicians are sort of delusional on things like that and think that they're Obama when they're not starmer Morgan Sweeney is his name um starmer and Morgan Sweeney I think sort of realized that 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 them 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 position so that if the Tories blew themselves up then they could profit from it whereas Corin and other people you know on on the left of the lead party over decades repeated like just don't get to first base like that starma and Sweeny got to first base and they put themselves in a position where if where they could profit from the Tories blowing themselves up and you think you got you got to give them some credit for that on the other hand though if you look at the numbers right stalmer only got basically the same number of votes as Corbin did in 2019 when we crushed him uh and um and there's like massive tactical voting the massive tactical voting is driven by the fact that everybody perfectly reasonably despises the Tories and was determined to try and shove them whatever so if if voting lidm was the right way they voted lidm if voting reform for farage was the right way they voted for farage so essentially it was like overwhelmingly and you can see it 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 because we the curr's got to move on what's your thoughts on reform UK and farage's re-entry into politics uh uh it's sort of depressing basically I think because farage is not farage is basically like Tori MP 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 out at like roughly 15% there 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 but but but but but it's never going to solve the actual problem 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 there their reputation's completely destroyed and Here Comes Here Comes The Prodigal Son someone who is a good communicator who does uh articulate and orate very well uh 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 an opposition to labor so I think there 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 you a lot of Elite Talent used to go into politics and public service in one form or another if you go back 100 years you even go back for like 50 or 70 years you see a lot of incredibly abled people in Washington DC in whiteall 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 etc etc etc 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 if 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 cons creative destruction right but in politics and government the system doesn't work like that so you've you have increasingly these like all parties which are all created 50 100 200 years ago Tories 200 200 years ago labor 100 odd years ago Democrats Republicans you know 150 years ago whatever um these things are all like kind of rotting internally and the small people have most the small people have moved out moved out elsewhere and they become 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 like the voters look at them and they say we hate you because you're so [ __ ] but the Tories don't think of themselves like that right they just want to keep going in the same way that they they that they always do same as whiteall right you have you have whiteall collides with Once 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 tag no it's like we've got to go back to normal give us more power give us more money and let us 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 and trust us 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 aifi it can do these things is is that not a potential solution to this yeah I think so I think in principle it is and like in some in some respects right that's what Trump is Trump Trump partly is a is a phenomenon generated by m tens and tens of millions of people just being completely disgusted and fed up of the old system and a lot of people might think Trump's a bit of an [ __ ] 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 well I mean we saw that with uh we saw that with JD Vance there's this famous Tucker quote where he said something like I know of nobody in the halls of power that supports JD Vance and that makes me trust him immensely 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 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 scile disinformation run by 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 part is called more and more mad it's pushed up Elon voted twice for Obama a whole bunch of people in Silicon Valley who voted for for Bill Clinton Hillary Clinton and Obama twice have now just come out and said s it like we're gonna vote for Trump David saaks doing a fundraiser chath coming on his side SF now starting to get moving exactly chathu was like super pro Hillary and Biden right is now like like all is all in all all in for um 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 with politics these are startup people who wanted to keep doing what every wants 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 leave us be and finally The Madness of the New York Times the rats has become so intense a lot of them have said I think Mark andreon said last last week something like um paraphrasing trosky you may not be interested in war but war is interested in you and you know I think that's the attitude which a lot of people in the valley of have adopted right we didn't want to be interested in all of this stuff we wanted to keep clear of it but you kind of put a gun to our head and forced us to 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 round out just to round out the discussion about the UK uh you know 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 so I think that generally speaking uh um like 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 the Tories are a FAS the Tories will remain a f I think it's very unlikely that you see some kind of Rejuvenation after 1997 2001 they just ran around in circles for four years completely delusional complete waste of time didn't get anywhere since then the quality of the people has massively deteriorated so why the hell would would the story be different I think ironically that um label 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 examp 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 technology than the Tories were um but at the heart of it K starma like wishi Zak like Boris is like an Institutional man right they believe in White Hall they believe in the institutions and um these institutions are pathological the institutions destroy the good things so what happened in 2020 we built the vaccine task force World leading white all saw this is terribly embarrassing so closed it down we built um sewage monitoring for pathogens crucial not just for for for Co but for all future pandemics and for biot terrorism and everything else right World leading thing everyone says God what Britain did This brilliant what happened they've shut it down um you go through you go through like valuable thing after valuable thing now the institutions actually attack it because it's embarrassing to the old to to to Old whiteall so I think tourist keep failing labor keep failing whiteall keep failing there'll be some improvements of Labor over the Tories here and there but I think the picture generally will be will will 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 be depressing if the system is 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 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 will that hop across the IC so will there be something sort of equivalent to what you've seen with Elon and the valley people and other parts of America saying okay Washington is so dysfunctional we've got to get involved if Britain's going to change course it needs a subset of Elite Talent to stop what they're doing now and to say okay we're actually going to get involved with with with politics and government and and force the broken old system to change how would you make politics or government more attractive to Young talent to the people that you want to bring into it 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 what this does is it creates a kind of like anti- Talent ratchet so if you deal with a British Civil Service what you see is you see a whole bunch of people between like 25 and 35 who are really really able a lot of energy a lot of brains um a lot of kind of C do Spirit what 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 it feels like the reverse of the Peter Principle in a way you know how people get promoted in positions where they're good at their job until they suck at their job which is why the world is filled with people who suck at their jobs this is almost like an early warning system against the Peter Principle you 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 ecor cord to get out before that happens yeah that's exactly it that's exactly it and why you have this kind the kind of like collapse over Co right you suddenly you look around the room and a whole bunch of the senior people actually responsible for crisis Management in a pandemic and just a lot of them are complete clowns and and the whole system falls apart what's the reason for this aifi Old Guard worst parts of HR department being in charge is it just that there's no Market forces acting so the sort of typical competitive dynamics that would happen in a world of business entrepreneurialism capitalism and stuff they're just not acting it is that kind of the primary force 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 the big difference is private V public but I don't think that's really the key thing exactly um because you see like the the first thing is all really big organizations after a bit of time end up having very similar Dynamics right you look at Google Now and you listen to people talking 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 L page is often as y whatever um so this happens in the private sector too but of course the huge difference is that okay Google ossifies but then Sam Alman is over open AI reading the papers produced by Google and says holy [ __ ] like if you see this paper on Transformers from the Google team like we can go do the following things right so he's got this very dnamic startup very dynamic character Sam and they go and build something in 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 it's not how it works and therefore the only real creative force or disruptive force that can happen is political the only people with the power to change it the civil servants can't change themselves and the civil serice system because of it 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 create new things that can bring in new Talent from outside from outside the system I imagine that's that's very threatening to the people that are in there exactly a it's very threatening to the people who are in there so they fight like hell to to to to to basically blackmail the politicians into well if you try and do this it'll be War but you also have 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 in the business of actual government and they're actually happy not really running things right so British government now is basically a pemp 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 de and it's like big Row in cabinet about you know policy X but the reality is cabinet is a completely pkin exercise X is not decided in cabinet X is decided somewhere else but the MPS are okay with that right everyone's kind of in on the game the P are okay with that the media is 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 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 so a huge amount of uh uh um 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 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 cabinet secretary decides what information is allowed to be seen if someone's got to if My5 have got to tap the phone of some um of the Secretary of State for defense because 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 pkin it's not purely pin and in the British system the Prime Minister does actually have a lot of power constitutionally if they choose to exercise it but since Mr Stater PMS have basically given up on using vast amounts of their power and don't actually exercise it what is patkin you've mentioned it a couple of times it's the so it's a famous Russian Uh Russian guy like centuries ago essentially it's a it's it means um so in this process what would happen is like gar would leave some 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 facad down each side of the village so the saw would go through the middle and he'd look left and right and the saw would go oh right yeah everything in the village seems to be fine in fact it's just like they paid the front they paid the front the picture is the picture is completely fake right behind the picture the village is actually complete hear about these tours of North North Korea where the journalists have been taken right okay exactly if you imagine like North North Korea photo shoot is what I mean by um by sort of pkin pkin politics cool where the picture that you're shown on TV on the BBC is essentially um like completely or largely fake 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 in terms of Technology what was it actually like being in the midst of that [Music] machine it was um it was basically very depressing um because um [Music] because you have on the one hand you 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 like very hard to it's very hard as a special adviser which is what I was to actually get things done because you don't have actual executive Authority yourself right so although if like if you look at the media the media reports about me are like all powerful dominant coming second most powerful person in the country blah blah blah a lot of you'll see things in the newspapers to that effect but that's just not it's not true it's not how the thing works like there's not a single 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 dep it was fundamentally depressing because is on the one hand you have you have a sort of 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 [ __ ] 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 would 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 well I suppose from the outside everybody hopes even if the government appears up front you know Biden decrepit and unable to speak correctly or Boris is this kind of blabbering big buffoon guy that's sort of rolling through press conferences you hope that behind the scenes there's some competence somewhere and I suppose the magician showing you how the sausages made and you getting in there and going oh it's just as incompetent behind the scenes I imagine that that must be quite quite disenchanting and dispiriting I think so you know like you know what happens in JS Bor films right there's like often a scene in JS born film where is like walking along and then suddenly someone opens the door and then suddenly there's like 100 ninjas doing their martial arts exercises and like you know like ah right that's where the ninjas are but when you go to government you realize there isn't a door uh and there and there ain't any ninjas either you're sort of sitting there and it's actually it's actually literally just like Yes Minister right you you've watched the old TV show from the70s yes minad that's basically like a documentary of like actually how government actually how government works so of course I'm not being completely you always have to remember that like what I'm talking about is like 98% of the picture right there's like obviously always a few billion 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 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 is rubbish right there are obviously pockets of extraordinary people doing extraordinary things but the traged 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 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 competences Kryptonite yeah yeah 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 yeah yeah yeah and that's partly of course and that itself displays like a really weird thing right so when I arrived in in Dow Street summer 2019 like no basically no one ever believes me when I say this I put it in my co evidence under oath but no one believed it even then when I arrived in in in in down street in in in in in July 2019 there wasn't even a file sharing system right there's not even so if you go back and look at all of boris's statements on Co right like announcing lockdown hu these hugely dramatic things that you don't want to seen 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 in the Press office all able to edit the same document at the same time was to use someone's private Gmail account right so a onean startup in lots of ways Chris your startup doing your podcast has better Tech and tools than are available to the British prime minister spending like a trillion quid a year in British taxes right that's that's that's the insanity of the of the system what is the state of information flow efficiency in the British government I have friends that are doctors they tell me that the NHS still largely runs on Windows XP and that you've got to fax things around and you think yeah yeah yeah but you know that's only people's healths and and them staying alive what about government surely government can't be so inefficient no no it's it's it it it it's it's very much the same it's like the computers there look like they're out you know look like they sort of like 20 2005 Windows you know Windows Office is what it all looks like it's like um or anything like that it's basically uh it's basically pretty shambolic now there have been one of the few good things about covid so obviously I wrote about a lot of this before going into number 10 2019 everyone poo pooed it we don't care about data we don't care about technology blah blah one of the good things about covid is that some of these issues did go more mainstream um in Spring 2020 uh you know so when the first wave of Co hit right and you approaching the first nightmare Peak thousands of people starting to die a day the actual information system for the British prime minister was I would go into a little office I would wield this white board along the corridor at number 10 i' put it in the cabinet room and the British prime minister would sit down and the head of the NHS would read out from scraps of paper on a bit of paper that he' written down from fax machines the last faxes oper you're kidding me I am not kidding you right this is I said this under oath so you know like perjury if I if it's not true Simon Steven said the NHS is reading things out from scraps of paper that he's got from faxes and I am scribbling on a whiteboard these numbers that he's reading out and then getting my iPhone out of my pocket and going times two times two times two and then scribbling out the numbers Bel and then saying prime minister that means that like the number of people in hospital in 3 weeks is going to be and everyone looking around going what the [ __ ] is he like that can't be true what's about like just just like double it for four times and that's what that's where we're going to be you know in in two or three weeks that was the information system now we brought in a bunch of people who to work on this um and within like eight weeks so normally if you say like how do you fix the system that for NHS right it would take 5 10 years cost 15 billion quid and then be a total [ __ ] show uh do you that would be the normal story we actually built a new system completely for the NHS in about is weeks and actually had like a state-of-the-art system so we went from faxes scraps of paper me scribbling stupidly on a whiteboard like an idiot to state-ofthe-art Cloud AWS dashboard with live information on all the beds all the ventilators how many beds were free and we we managed to do that in like six eight weeks so one of the few good things about Co was that some of these things went more mainstream and officials actually saw for themselves the power of Technology the power of actually having modern tools how it helps decision makers how it helps better management also the danger of inefficiency I suppose because the the consequences are actually dire for once exactly exactly they're confronted with the consequences of [ __ ] it like we have we're basically blind while thousands of people dying and we don't understand where when how or what to do about it the UK covid-19 inquiry released its module one report only a few days ago did you get a chance to read that what do you think no I haven't read it I'm afraid I've been uh uh 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 site of scientists of tro in one after the other saying under oath well on Friday the 13th of March I believe the following thing and I didn't understand why number 10 was blah blah blah blah 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 say literally like 180 degree the exact opposite not once ever in the entire inquiry did the lawyers and the judge have to say um your statements to us today 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 you got to go to prison for perjury but like we have to get to the bottom of like you this has to be explained right instead everyone's just gone oh right okay I 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 [ __ ] Boris and [ __ ] m m hanok and they want to blame those two for everything now of course those two did make a lot of mistakes and but no no one's being more critical of those two than me but if you actually want to do government better in future and if you actually want to get to the truth you can't just have this process where you say you know where you try and dump all the blame on them and then pretend that the rest of the system actually work fine 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 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 you've been in the room it seemed like they they pushed and poked and were able to sort of throw some sharp things at you yeah they did with me but but but but they haven't with the officials and they haven't with the and and they haven't with the scientists right they've let they've let they've let a whole bunch of people um uh give evidence without poking holness and also they just haven't called a whole load of people right so there's a whole bunch of people who were were in critical roles who have just never been asked even to give a statement never mind to turn up and be and be interrogated right so it's very hard to reconcile that with a set of people who are actually trying to get to the truth like the head of the Civil contingencies unit the actual cabinet office entity in charge of Crisis management for a pandemic right obviously you have to have that official Aid and you have to you have to um question very carefully what they say never even appeared never mind questioned badly just just hasn't appeared to to to answer the questions in in the module um that I was in I found it so funny watching the uh highlights from your maybe one of your um multiple run-ins with the the co inquiry where your WhatsApp messages or your text messages get brought up and there's some spicy language in there it's the kind of language that you send to people when you just need to get things done or when you're in a mat WhatsApp chat or whatever it might be uh it did read qu quite a lot like a thick of it sketch it read like Amando yucci 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 [ __ ] incompetent people who seem to be incapable of actually getting anything done that you're going to begin to dial up that rhetoric and just speak uh unencumbered sort of straight from brain to fingertips into into WhatsApp chat uh to try and say like this is what I'm feeling right now I'm in Wartime don't get in the [ __ ] way it's not time for HS or Graces and um yeah I just it it really resonated I think with a lot of the I used to run nightclubs in the northeast of the UK and if we're doing Halloween and there's 5,000 people trying to get into two nightclubs on the big Market in Newcastle you know that is the sort those are precisely the messages that I'm sending to the boys like where the [ __ ] 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 now in the in the cold harsh light of day five years later or four years later doesn't doesn't sound great when it's read out with some guy 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 a very reminiscent for me 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 there were onetoone messages between me and the prime minister they weren't me shouting at some official you [ __ ] idiot dude 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's 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 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 of vaccines and testing to deal with a cabinet office HR [ __ ] 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 stuff away and saying oh no we've got this HR [ __ ] 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 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 the requisite swearing that goes along with them yeah you you can but you're right it just seems to me to be another example of people focusing on all of the wrong things now that's not to say that they've not focused on some of the right things at other points but [ __ ] me like is that really the most important thing think about the language that was used here go there was people dying does that really matter does the language matter exactly and of course like as I said you know like when when I'm actually in meetings having meetings with people of course I'm not like shouting and swearing at these people like they're proper meetings and it's like right you do this you do that you do the other but the C but the way which the in which the inquiry and the media tried to present it is as if like oh that's how meeting is a conducted of number 10 and again like it's all part of a fake story so they want the story to me oh well because number 10 has these crazy meetings with coming shouting and swearing of people like that's why things went wrong no the messages were one toone messages to the PM they're not meetings mhm and you're not focusing on the actual issue mhm so it's like a double fake 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 from for that are completely irrelevant yeah speaking 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 yeah so it's like um the you 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 is a guy called Rick Rubin right you'll who obviously you'll know and it was Rick Rubin who actually said this Rick Rubin was asked about you know like how he relaxes and about politics and 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 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 we 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 actually really really it take it takes an an artist to kind of get to the heart of the uh um of the of the Pol is 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 scile he's shuffling around walking into walls he's shaking hands with the air I don't understand what these clowns are Wasing are doing like it's just ludicrous having a president like that he it's like my grandfather when he got seen all he can't do job right that was what the uninformed people who watched no news thought the story in New York Times believed by the best informed people in Washington was the president super sharp in in private like he smashes out you know sharp as attack and first debate happens and all of and the 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 Stafford briefing from inside the White House right so you've actually got a situation in which staff is briefing from inside the White House are giving statements about the president's mental health showing that they're actually less informed than someone who watches no news and just watches Tik Tok for like five minutes a day driving a tractor in in Michigan yeah that so that's all shows that like Rick Rubin is Right 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 senility on an episode felt so obvious that it was hacky it was so old news and so yeah exactly 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 and then to realize that the [ __ ] veils fall from people's eyes when he has that debate with Trump and then to hear this totally [ __ ] set of assertions by people in the media who now can do this sort of like faux criticism thing where they can seem like they're stepping up and pushing back against the Democrats and the party and the president that they've been running cover for for the last two or three years saying that it's cheap fake saying that it's whatever 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 no clothes it was this Ben Ben Usher Ben somebody wrote this great article about common knowledge and the common knowledge is not just it's not good enough simply for people to know a thing they also have to believe that everybody else also knows that thing and when you have this huge big fireworks display showing the problems that the president is facing at the moment anybody that then comes out and says oh it's it's unbelievable we can't support Biden with the way that he's everybody knows this now it's the same thing with free speech free speech is only important for people that disagree with your view because of course you're going to want all of the people who agree with your view to have [ __ ] 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 for whom this was a revelation yeah exactly and and and and even more weird in a way but it's like the world which is most deluded about re 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 Washington Post or CNN Bureau in DC the more likely you were to say completely insane things about Biden's mental health I wonder whether that was running cover rather than being ignorant uh obviously it's going to 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 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 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 uh macron Schultz Biden blah blah and he said Jake Sullivan's 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 maon Jake sulliv 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 oh he knew who he was uh responding to yeah because he's like a he was had to be reminded that like what who who maot it's m the guy there is maot right that's how bad it was and I was told that by this guy who' watched to 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 bot that right The Washington Post is 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 want to talk about it what do you make of the state of America right now for all that the UK's maybe gone through some turmoil pales into insignificance with the absolute furnace that is America 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 biot Tech um incredible economic dynamism in all sorts of ways but then as soon as you turn to the political scene then it's a sort of like just amazing amazing car crash I do think it's very positive though that a bunch of the valley people are getting involved and I don't really mind if it's like if they're going to get involved in the Democrat or Republican side to me is less important than at an overall level are we going to start seeing a shift in what we talked about before where like all the able people basically s off and leave Pol politics and government to become a clown show or are you going to start seeing a historic reversal of that and see more and more of the talented people say okay we are actually going to have to step up to the plate here and 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 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 going to be one of those things where Britain is Downstream of what happens in America and that a similar kind of process here what do you make of the JD Vance VP pick don't know very much about fance um never met him but I think I think it one of the most interesting reactions I've seen is this 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 fance 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 and made a terrible blunder and basically followed Paul Ryan and tried to like whack Obamacare and stuff like that which um which was a political disaster for Trump the bound 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 in a different way and actually focus on what a lot of workingclass Voters want um so like from America's point of view I think that would be good if they 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 that help the billionaires like this this whole thing can't carry on the way it is and give me your thoughts on Kamala going into November so I think what's happening on her is like it's the same it's so the way I describe like the way that the media works now is 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 Co 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 it's completely nothing to do with NATO nothing to do with NATO it's nothing to do with Ukraine join NATO n if we're plash Ukraine must join NATO right so we see this PO over again we've just seen it with Biden super sharp in private Biden's scile is like literally Russian disinformation flip Biden SE now Biden's gone the next is Cala is great super energy we're all really excited she's going to be a bring candidate and I guarantee you that before very long people are going to start writing oh [ __ ] like all the reports of focus groups are that she is not a good candidate remember Cabala's 2019 campaign was a total [ __ ] show she blew herself up very quickly she couldn't keep she couldn't build a staff and keep it uh she's very very hard to work with people don't like working with her um and politics like winning politics at an 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 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 four states say was last time say was in 2016 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 blockchained for the rest of time that no one actually decides to bring up the [ __ ] that you previously said it feels like it's this odd blend of you know sort of puritanical language policing if it comes to your WhatsApp messages directly with the PM or Andrew huberman's sex life but then if it's articles and headlines that have been written that are then immediately reversed or positions that people have taken publicly which they then publicly perhaps under o decide to do a u-turn on that that bit gets to be allowed I 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 [ __ ] that you used to say compared with the [ __ ] that you say now but it is true I you know I 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 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 her immunity without vaccines was never the policy the central question 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 exactly well you just see this process over and over again but as you say it's kind of an invisible process to any everybody involved with it and they don't they don't point out to each other right it's like would be just like terribly bad form so the flip happens but then everyone just talks like that's what we've always said and no one goes hang on a second but like the war was supposed to be weakening Russia how the [ __ ] are we now what do you mean like we've got to carry on because it's strengthening like that means like our whole plan has gone totally wrong right it's the easiest solution it's it's a much easier version than 1984 where they have to retroactively go back and actually change what happened yeah now they don't bother yeah for some reason just leave it there in the public domain and no one even no one picks it up and points it out so I really wonder whether this is contributed to by the pace of just news the the sheer velocity that we're being you know pepper sprayed in the face with everything that's going on this pressure washer of information that's coming out like yeah Trump getting shot feels like it's over the president got shot in the head or the presidential candidate got shot in the head and now we're talking about uh it's Biden oh my God CA Harris camea Harris is doing it there and everybody who's talking about the Trump thing now it's wild it's wild yeah meanwhile all these details come out about the about the Trump thing right like turns out the Secret Service agents were actually watching the guy for like 15 20 minutes through the Scopes before he fired when he had a g and didn't and left him left Trump on stage like unfuckingbelievable crazy [ __ ] but as you say it's just like oh like that's like that's now page 18 oh dude have you did you run in your mind the model of what would have happened if Trump's head had been an inch to the right I mean there's prob be so like if if you look at the whole thing that right like the event is is just about explainable by like total system systemic Inc competence if you just look at it go okay well like we know from Co we can see in Ukraine that Western institutions like one after the other are just shot and they just like do pathological crazy [ __ ] well okay like you can sort of imagine how the Secret Service would have like decayed to this point where they can allow this sort of thing you don't have to posit a conspiracy but if you imagine that like Trump's head had exploded live on TV and then you ask people to believe the current official story right milons of people are not not buying any of that [ __ ] um I why do you think that's the case I think well if you look on the flip side now I was looking at 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 had exploded I think like at least a third of Republicans maybe more than a third of Republicans and more than a third of the country would have said what like we're supposed to believe that this is just all some like to to like just just incompetent idiocy that the Secret Service looked at this for 20 minutes didn't didn't shoot at him and then just let him shoot the Pres in the head like no I'm not [ __ ] 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 in incompetence I think they would have um very very large of the country quite possibly over half the country would have said clearly this is um this is this is some kind of conspiracy and they've tried to lock him up with the lawfare they've lost these cases the Supreme Court's throwing everything out okay well now they've shot him so that they so so that they they've got rid of them 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 K the the terrible assassination of Bobby Kennedy well like8 weeks later or whatever it was um uh you know that was serious profound shock for America sparked a lot of riots a lot of violence I think you know you'd have to in a parallel world I think you'd have to you'd be pretty lucky to escape that having that happening isn't it fascinating that the consequence of the action is indicative of 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 that the Dems would say oh this is or whatever is the third of of democrat voters that would say uh this was to improve his chances to become president obviously not and exactly um uh but it's just 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 obviously the the Secret Service lady is now gone uh I mean did you watch any of that hearing where it didn't unfortunately no I meant to it sounds like another [ __ ] show oh she got it was it was like really really really aggressive just the most vehement you can't think of you know this woman incompetent as she may be and driven by Dei and blah blah blah doesn't care about Trump and all the rest of it every you can throw every accusation that you wanted to but this woman was eviscerated on TV for forever and they basically lined up every different uh person that was going to have it and every single one of them had a tightly defined five minute segment where they just punched her in the face over and over and over and over again I saw even um the only thing I saw was on on Twitter I think where I saw AOC asked a pretty like very very very good question that like just obviously doesn't have any kind of respectable answer right yeah it was uh it was rough but yeah I mean just thinking about what would have 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 as close as it's possible to be without it happen literally and it's just a story now it's a meme there's t-shirts about it he kicked the hwk tour girl off the top of the Mema verse for a couple of weeks and now we're talking about kamla Harris and oh is this this is the real Insurrection because they've sub subverted the Democratic process of getting a candidate in and blah blah blah I'm like hey what about the guy he got shot in the head only a little yeah it is and wait till I say the the next thing that's going to happen is you know you can see on the in Ukraine now um what's happening with these with with with the incredible growth and sophistication of these drone attacks right like that's coming to domestic terrorism Across the Western World right you don't you don't develop all this technology and then it just stays in [ __ ] Ukraine so at some point we're going to see that crazy [ __ ] happening over here 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 have 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 going to fly a [ __ ] fpv C in and and and zapping with that right so the whole way in which we think about these events how politicians interact with the public I think is going to change sharpish I mean hopefully like the tragedy is normally historically these things only happen after a complete disaster and and and sadly enough to the disaster that you get all of the consequences without any of the disaster so ideally what happens is like this prompts a kind of like complete Roo and Branch rethink of what the hell how the hell do we do the IP Security in this age and then the Drone stuff comes into that and they get ahead of it um that happens like that's best case scenario right but um if not at some point the is going to happen yeah I I had Eric princeon guy that founded Blackwater private military contractor guy and he was telling me about how I think previously to take down one of the Russian tanks you need uh I think it's a javelin missile and they're about 300 grand for the missile and then you also need all of the apparatus to be able to launch it plus the team to be able to do it too and once you've launched two of them the Heat sign ature is so identifiable that your position is then given up so you have this sort of whole already you know Javelin missile like when I hear that I think Blackhawk Down you know hardcore Advanced military technology and he's kind of making it sound like I'm referring to a [ __ ] trebuchet or something I we're we're going to pull pitch off the top of the ramp Parts onto them or something um you just it sounds ancient and then he's saying you know you can do the same job as I don't know let's say it's a couple of Mill plus the team plus the exposure of all of this stuff with an fpv drone which I think all in including the beeran sized amount of C4 or whatever pick your explosive of choice stra to the front of it is maybe 1,500 bucks or 2,000 and you've got a guy with a set of goggles on and if you've got a repeater a signal repeater you can do I think up to four miles away and you can destroy a tank that's worth millions and millions of dollars uh and then the tanks they're now developing these nets sort of around them they've got these special Nets they're finding the weaknesses that the fpv drones are exploiting and they're patching them so then the drones are getting bigger or stronger so that it's exact you know literal arms race that you're observing happening in real time here and yeah I me when did that video about the the killbots thing do you remember that where they they do yeah kind of Auditorium um I would guess like roughly yeah like roughly seven8 10 years ago yeah and for the people that hadn't seen it it was basically talking about sort of micro drones that would have some kind of biometric signature maybe it was uh DNA or walking gate or facial recognition or something and they would just be poured out of the back of some airplane and they would fly down with tiny little C4 charges land on someone's head and kill them and it would allow you to do that and then there was you know this sort of uh nightmare scenario maybe it was a Black Mirror episode where you would have a a dark web uh sort of Ransom attack thing where this drone would be released if this money wasn't given and then it doubles and it doubles and it doubles and you know I you're right I mean I hadn't thought about it before but yeah the the Drone Warfare is not just going to be kept and taking down tanks during an active military campaign it's going to be for everything it's going to be a risk for everybody uh in the same way so the original iPhone I think cost sort of per adjusted for inflation something like $5,000 or $10,000 and then all of the rich people that wanted cool technology brought it down so that the normies could buy it too uh already at that stage with these drones so they're only going to get cheaper and to roll on top I I hate to bring up China because it feels like an obvious thing to say the US government shutting down all domestic drone production from all of the different producers and companies that were wanting to do it because they were worried that it was going to create a Flight Risk which completely opened up the market for for DJI to come in a Chinese owned company and now DJI is some obscene amount of the market share when it comes to uh per personal drone use so okay maybe the most important Warfare technology of the next 10 years is owned majority owned by one particular country that lots of us probably have some concerns about 100% And I remember I wrote a Blog in in 2014 I'd been over to California actually um for one of these kind of like weekend conference things I was talking to a bunch of people on the Drone stuff then I came back and I wrote a Blog and I said then like the future is like some a competent person with less than a million dollar is going to be able to like fly a bunch of drones over and and um blow up the houses of Parliament and no one will know what the [ __ ] has just hit them and when I wrote that as usual like the normal media was like this is stupid what the [ __ ] is all about 5 years later I was then in I went when I went into number 10 I sat down with the um with one of the senior officials at number 10 and said what is the actual plan for defending Against drones in Downing Street if we have a G7 event and the PM standing there with the US president and the Chinese president and Putin and whatever how the [ __ ] do you stop like like three smart 15y olds right sitting in St James's Park and sending over a drone and just whacking entire G7 list and of course the answer is uh well we haven't got anything Dominic like basically if someone wants to do that then they're going to do it um I asked someone uh from the cabinet office about three weeks ago um has any of this changed like have they woken up on the Drone stuff they're like no of course not just the same [ __ ] show they haven't got any so again you know you see this pattern you see historically where um where regimes just get caught short by certain technological changes it seems weirder now because like we can actually see it on TV or on YouTube in Ukraine so people kind of the natural assumption is well you know we spend all of this massive amounts of money on Ministry of defense and all this stuff like obviously these guys must be on the [ __ ] right but then you go and talk to them and the people actually responsible for it of course have the head in the hand saying we can't get funding from the mod no one wants to fund it it's so difficult people think it'll be embarrassing if like if we start if we make this public then it'll be just actually an admission that we can't do early about it so everyone wants to keep it quiet like yeah but then all you're doing is keeping quiet until some set of smart fanatical people take advantage of us doing nothing and then we're going to be in big trouble right until you can noid it it's very exactly it's very all of that stuff is is is is deeply worrying hopefully the best best case scenario is that the Trump thing is like to kick up the ass for everybody but my fear is these institutions are so pathological that basically just go back to sleep uh it certainly seems that way even if you take you know the sort of public response to it and you think well I mean they've moved on so internally there'll be some investigation there'll be a which is going to take away by the way from the precise resources that are needed in the buildup to the November election because it's going to be Secret Service agents it's going to be internal meetings it's going to be you know the oxygen in the room is going to be sucked out by an inquiry which takes it away from the very thing that they're trying to inquire about uh but yeah I think the main thing mate learning from uh your conversation with dwesh mutual friend and and reading your stuff is just how [ __ ] incompetent the inside of government really is and you just hope that there's someone in there and yeah like you say there are probably you know a few competent people scattered around and maybe they're holding it together but the rest of it cell tape and cable ties and and fairy dust uh just hoping for the best and you in that article I referenced earlier on uh the five rules of how government really works I want to go through I want to I want to quickly go through those so first not even nuclear weapons are taken seriously so never assume the problem leading the news is taken seriously yeah so I spent a lot of time in 2019 2020 like really really really digging into the um the situation with nuclear Enterprise in Britain obviously most of the things are illegal are illegal for me to talk about but the core of it is legal to talk about and it's that over a 20 30y year period the country has basically neglected a whole bunch of the core infrastructure at every Point pretty much of the whole kind of chain um uh for for how these weapons are deployed the whole infrastructure um and they've neglected building what needs to be built and they've classified all the cock-ups so highly that it's like I can't not allowed to explain in detail to you like what they all are right and this again this this it's this pathological cycle where there's a failure and then you rather fix the failure it's all covered up and then the budgets just get bigger and bigger and it means actually that it has a ripple effect which is they basically have to keep stealing money from the conventional budgets inside the mod to patch up this like un unseen unacknowledged huge disaster of 10 and tens and tens of billions of dollars in ukar Enterprise and my point there is like everyone sort of thinks oh well yeah they might get that wrong and they might [ __ ] that up but like the most important things obviously the system must be really really focusing on and my point is that's the wrong way to think about it unfortunately like things have got so bad that it it's sort of the other way around the ministers run around spending stupid amounts of time on trivia that's on the front page of the sun whilst actually just systematically neglecting really the actual core things like how to do making sure the nuclear weapons are sorted out uh and even since I said that they've had a couple of like public disasters right they had that test in the Atlantic which went it up and the missile just popped out and sank they had a missile a nuclear sub that nearly sank off the coast of Scotland so you know some of the rot that I talked about a few years ago is now starting to come out into the open JD Vans uh made a pretty interesting comment he was asked about what does he think where does he think will the first Muslim country to get a nuke uh and and he said Britain yeah I didn't see exactly what he said I saw like third third third time reports of it is that he was making a crack there about like the growth of Islam he was he was s or whatever he was indeed very interesting second one from your five rules of government roughly all the most talented people at building things are excluded from our civil service the politicians you vote for have roughly zero power to hire fire or incentivize officials so they have no real power yes so if you think you know anybody who's trying to build anything uh everyone knows like the single most important thing is for the CEO of whether it's Microsoft or the CEO of a of a private hospital or whatever is can you actually build a team right can you H can you Can you hire them can you fire them can you incentivize them can you trade them and uh a British government Minister has no power to do any of those things things with a single civil servant so you have the the ministers are officially responsible to Parliament for what the system does but they have zero power over the management of the system so like nothing in the world that works works like that right it's like nothing so we shouldn't be surprised that these things are are dysfunctional third if you think of the most fundamental principles that lie behind the most successful organizations in history principles like extreme speed and clear responsibility then our government works almost totally on exactly opposite principles yeah so you know look at Elon look at how Elon does SpaceX incredible intensity incredible speed incredible attempts to like simplify to to to cut things out that aren't needed um and uh if you try and apply that those kind of principles inside government then the whole system reacts like you're a virus and it's an immune system and it's like got to try and close you down it fights to stay the way it is one obvious way in which you see that happening now right is with the is with the AI companies on the one hand the Deep state is try trying to talk the AI companies and interact with them but the Cycles at which the British state or Washington work is just like 10x or 100x slower than the speed at which s Alman works right so samman is like working on this speed and then he's trying to interact with Washington it's just two completely different two different clock speeds um I guess that's why you see this sort of lumbering Behemoth in terms of legislation that that falls behind you only need to look at the workarounds that people have come up with for states that don't legalize weed to go oh well Delta 8 is now oh well Delta 9 is now available if we just adjust one molecule here we know that we can get huge Runway out of a drug that essentially does the same thing that is the one of the one that's prohibited and we know it's going to take they're basically factoring in the satellite delay for legislation exactly yeah exactly and you see that everywhere fourth the MPS are usually not focused on the election which is usually far away they're focused on what they think they need to tell the media today to improve their chances of promotion yeah so um as we discussed earlier on the kind of the theory of democracy is that that one of the reasons why we we get S why democracy is sort of trend towards improving problems is that the MPS uh want to win the election but we're now in a situation that kind that that sort of incentive is is basically broken and they actually spend all their time just on this daily on this Daily News cycle and once that happens um uh two fundamental things happen one they stop paying attention to actually good government and two they stop thinking about the voters and they think about what the editor of the New York Times thinks or you know the Laur kbur at the BBC etc etc um and that fundamental dynamic is behind why we know why it's so hard to fix all of these things yeah I think Tony Blair recently described the government as a conspiracy of distraction from what actually matters and uh I thought that was so funny uh fifth the Civil Service and politicians top priority is not doing a good job for voters it's preserving existing power and budgets if you don't share this priority you don't get promoted yes so if you look if you look after covid um what's happened basically like the officials the the people who approved right and who saved thousands of people's lives have almost entirely 100% gone from public service um often hounded out um uh the excellent woman who ran the vaccine task force for example was trashed all over the media um uh whereas officials who got completely screwed up did a shocking job cost many lives cost huge economic damage have have largely been promoted and often given gongs um the nightmare woman who um who who gave us Duff advice after Duff advice in February through March like don't close the borders masks are counterproductive and don't work all this kind of crazy [ __ ] um she was promoted and put in charge of the new bio security agency that was created to replace the complete [ __ ] show biocurity agency that that fell apart in in covid right so it's like Oh The Entity is supposed to do the job completely collapsed we've got to set up a new entity who should we put in charge oh the woman who the person who broke the last one and that's that is the system working as intended right that's that's absolutely that absolutely like SS up I wanted to ask you about sort of personally what the last few years has been like it it seems to me that you've been uh the sort of evil nefar guy behind the scenes or in front of the scenes for a bunch of different things whether it was masterminding brexit whether it's utilizing new kinds of digital advertising whether it's driving to barn and Castle whether it's you know coming up with Co whether it's the language that you're using what has that been like being a human with all of the normal flaws and emotions that humans have to have sort of gone through this wartime uh public de cry so I think like I think I'm lucky psychologically in that um I've never been both like I've always just been interested in trying to do the thing I've never been interested in uh I've never been bothered about the media and there's a sort of trade-off in public life right I think which is that um if you focus on the media it's almost impossible to get anything worthwhile done like your social life in lots of ways is better uh um you Potter around you're not a hate figure but if you're optimizing for that like basically everyone who optimized for that it achieves nothing uh um and the entire existence in politics is basically completely pointless if you do what approach it the way I have then um you're a hate figure the media hate you but what does that mean at the end of it like it doesn't really mean anything or to me it doesn't anyway like what is it actually if you think about a lot of the problems that people in life have to face are you getting shot at No like is it real consequences no it's just people writing nasty things about you so I've never really cared about that the the only exception to that obviously is um you know 2019 20120 like a few times I had to move my family out of the house because of death threats from psychos and stuff like that that's obviously bad when you've got a small child um but that's the only thing actually that that that was genuinely difficult I would say like that's obviously uh um tricky and you don't want to have to no one wants to have to deal with that in their life but that's the only thing I would say is bad the rest of it never bothered me at all you didn't mind being a a hate figure for some people no I I didn't I think you know you have to um if you're going to you know if you're going to try and do things on the on the historic scale of brexit you have to accept that a lot of people are going to be pissed off you're a public figure people have got a right to you know have abuse about you and be angry about it I think what's the point of being upset about it right that's just that's just life it's never going to be any different so um so why let it get you down it's a very admirable approach I think for anybody that's in public life but yeah it's just very it's very interesting I think uh talking about kayfabe and WWE and stuff um you may have had the Misfortune of kind of fitting into a slightly established role of the uh guy behind the scenes that doesn't maybe seem to be too touchy feely that kind of doesn't really [ __ ] care and then you know Benedict Cumberbatch gets to play you in a movie about brexit maybe the American viewers won't know but there's a an entire movie made about sort of the the brexit process with Benedict [ __ ] com like Doctor Strange play play you in a movie I mean there's not many people that can say that how how did that feel so I've never actually watched like I should watch the movie yeah you should watch the movie D I kind of I didn't at the time I kind of said like I'm not watching the movie until brex happens and then I kind of after that I never I kind of never got around to it I've seen a few clips on YouTube and stuff so I should watch it it was a weird thing like he came I think the whole thing was slightly odd to be honest because I think there's a very nice guy who wrote the script for it guy called James gram and I think originally what happened is he kind of sort of bought the whole [ __ ] conspiracy story from Carol KY wer and everyone that this was some kind of like weird um like the brexit trump it was all connected with Putin the whole digital advertising was kind of secretly coordinated with Facebook behind the scenes you know you know how that whole kind of Russia gate hoax took off in Britain and America right so the original premise of it was like that was sort of true but then James Graham spent time with us talking to us and then realized that like the actual story of the media was fake and to give him credit he was honest enough to sort of change it but but therefore the movie has SL your odd feel right because it starts off you started off writing it on the premise that the story was sort of true but then realized the story actually wasn't what what would be in the media um yeah but it was weird having a kind of method actor come around to my house he sort of sat there my wife sat on the window seat sketching him and Ben didn't come about sat opposite me having dinner till like 2: in the morning and as he as he was sitting opposite me he kind of like started to become me so he started mimicking my my gestures and stuff and it turns out that like I've got this habit it seems of like I started like to sort of sit like that and I kind of like just sort of put my head over my arm over my own head and suddenly I'm watching it benedi Kat is doing all the mirror mirroring back my gestures at me and started to talk like me so it was a very odd uh it was it was a it was a very odd experience yeah I wonder how much you learned about yourself watching Benedict Cumberbatch be you or you learned that you put your hand every I'll let I'll drop you an email when I when I when I watch the film yes you've prompted me to actually I should sit down and watch the whole thing from start to end instead just watching a few clips on YouTube yeah I think he got he got the accent not bad yeah I seem get the accent not bad um the thing was at the time I was just the whole thing in like when they were doing the film the whole situation in Parliament was so depressing like the like the Tories had in the country into this cult called the sack the biggest constitutional crisis in the century it just felt like no one could move and the whole thing like actually doing the referendum was a a truly nightmarish experience like I've never recovered from it physically it [ __ ] up my health um I kind of never I used to be a brilliant sleeper no not not again I got basically so exhausted like something basically broke over that over that that what was is that just stress sleep deprivation too many stimulants I think it was I think it was like sleep deprivation yeah and then I had um I had a baby about like 12 14 weeks or something before the vote oh that was bad so really really bad timing and then he was Ill he was in hospital so it's like there was like a horrible week where I was in the office from 7: till midnight and then I was going from Midnight to the hospital then like watching him and so I like didn't sleep for like day after day and floor started moving and I started getting these weird zigzag lines in my head um [ __ ] so yeah that was um so when so when the movie happened I was like I don't I don't want to go back and start I don't I don't want any reminders of that right it's like pts PTSD exactly like I don't want any PTSD so I kind of just ignored it Jesus we're talking about um sort of retrospectively learning about yourself since moving to the US I've learned a lot about the UK in comparison I'd say I probably learned more about the UK since being in America than I did whilst being in the UK and I think the main one that I've noticed from a a group perspective is the massive lack of patriotism that we have in the UK you know every Brit knows the Fourth of July and what it stands for and almost no Brits know when St George's day is and it's wild to me I I it's kind of dispiriting you know the fourth of July's just been in gone so maybe I'm still in the honeymoon Afterglow of of seeing all of these people be proud and happy about their country even for all that it's a horrible xenophobic racist transphobic bigoted you know hellscape uh there is a there are so many people on every single street that are just proud to talk about their country and what it means and the values that it stands for and then I think about the UK British culture our history Our Heritage and it's there's just none of that at all and uh it's sad it's it's sad to think that a guy that flies an America flag outside of his house is called a patriot in America and a guy that flies an England flag outside of his house is called a racist in the UK yeah I completely agree it is disable you know there's there's a there's a famous essay that allwell wrote in I can't remember exactly but like 1940 to 1942 sort of period and he he wrote in there about how the how like this weird phenomena whereby the British intellectual class had essentially become like so anti-british right that instead of people who had all been brought up to be patriotic 50 years before suddenly with the exact opposite in fact they all now were were were brought up and encourag to sneer at the country and think that was the sophisticated take and um and that was true about that transition like you know we have Russian Revolution 1917 you have this wave of surge of support for the for the Communist party after 197 that that really changed Western intelligen and intellectual Elites a lot and to a large extent right we're still we're living still living out the consequences of that of that process and and a big part of the reason like you know you you come from um very similar part of the world to me you know that if you go back to the to where me and you were brought up there's lots and lots of workingclass people who are patriotic who do think the Brit are going country and but the culture is like a thousand miles away from a lot of the dinner parties that you'd have in in central London right where if you talked if you talked in those dinner parties Central London the way that you talk where me and you go home to see our our families it's extremely different it's talking cheese culture right yeah well I mean there's there's a lot of uh below the surface criticism I think now of what's happening with the UK uh there's a a great great YouTube Channel called Balden bankrupt and this guy has done dark tourism around the world he got trafficked across the border from Mexico into the US he was held in a Russian jail for a while because they were worried about what he was whether he was some sort of spy there and then he decided to take on his final boss of very scary potential areas to travel through which was British Seaside towns and he's going through all of these you know just the Classic dead High Street bard up Windows and graffiti everywhere and trash and there's no one and and the few people that are there don't speak the language and there's just no remnant of British culture and I saw this phenomenal tweet basically referring to the same thing which is I think Britain's Got the whatever sixth highest economy in the world something like that uh and he said no it doesn't like the the UK or England doesn't have the sixth largest economy in the world London does and the UK is a very poor country attached to a very wealthy City and that's the way to see it and again so many people everybody's focused on London maybe a tiny bit on Manchester and apart from that the rest of the country is just elsewhere so um in terms of news in terms of media in terms of cultural significance no one gives a [ __ ] about Liverpool yeah or or or Wakefield or Birmingham or suly Hull or or anywhere like that no one cares so yeah you don't have the sort of cultural Focus uh you don't have the financial support at all it's everywhere in the country is pretty much [ __ ] except for London uh and yet you can kind of hide behind this uh macro Trend all of the micro Trends are hidden within the big macro one and uh yeah it's sad man it's sad and like I say in retrospect just something that I've I've learned since not being there you get to see it's the sort of fish going through water asking the other fish how's the water today and you think why is it that way why is it that we don't have the kind of support and cosmopolitanism and and and uh this other Insight that I learned about how I think both the UK and America have two spots two or three spots in the top 10 universities in the world so we share the same number and yet the US produces a huge times more entrepreneurs than the UK does well why it's because America still in encourages people to believe that he can go and do stuff and the UK's just got this zero some water locked mentality where our aspirations are as sort of exciting as the weather and I just wish I could change it I really wish that I could re-inject some of the enthusiasm that I've learned since being over here back to the UK I think it would make daily life and the outcomes that we have you know politically commercially socially I think I think it would make a really good difference yeah I totally agree and I mean what you say is completely correct I one of the one of the weird and terrible things about Westminster is just like um the only part of Britain that they care about is London they care more about what's happening in in in America than they do about what's happening in Birmingham or Manchester or Liverpool or Newcastle like none of those places have any like no one cares at all what's going on there and these things become a vicious circle right because it means that like the money is sucked down to London the infrastructure all points down at London when I was in in government in 2020 we went through this huge spending review on infrastructure and we were trying to say um look for like decades the INF the infrastructure has been built around like serving London we've got to start thinking about what infrastructure to build to help other cities what does ma need what Newcastle need um and you know all these officials they don't give a [ __ ] about any of that they just like well like London's where the money is so that's where we should focus infrastructure but yet that's like a self-referential self-build thing right we're not saying that to be anti- London right London's London's making money good for London but you can't just have a country decade after decade where all the talent comes to London you don't build anything everywhere else and all these other places just end up getting boarded up and and like written off and it's connected to the fact that the Brit no so if you look back at when Britain was the number one country in the world right go back to say 1850 or 1880 if Birmingham wanted to build something Birmingham built it the idea that whether or not Birmingham like builds a train station or builds a school or builds a hospital would be decided by some [ __ ] economics graduate in the treasury who says oh no I don't think that like Birmingham should do that right if you'd said to people in 18 1870 Birmingham that in like 150 years time some 27 year old PP student is going to decide whether or not Birmingham can build a hospital then have said well if that's the future I guarantee you I guarantee you that Britain is no longer than a power right because that's clearly its Saye and that's what's happened when Britain when Britain were had a powerful navy when Britain was the center for um for for science for technology for industrializations ETC we were much much more decentralized and there were different Power centers all around the country specializing in different things doing worldclass things in different places and since then we've gone in this completely different direction where the money has all being suuck to London we are more centralized than any other European State nobody else has a situation where so much money is raised at the center and then spent at the center everyone else has much more taxes raised locally and much more money spent locally and that you know these things are all all all come together I wonder whe I mean it's an argument for uh becoming Federal right uh you know to to sort of have these things chunked up and to allow local principalities to govern themselves at least in some form or another because at least then people can campaign for the things that you're doing because even the whether you're the dude looking after clacton or the the guy looking after Bladen or whatever your particular Council area of choic is where do you work who are your colleagues who are you hanging around with what do they care about what's in Vogue for you to talk about when you do get down to whiteall when you do spend your time in Westminster what are they all talking about they're not [ __ ] talking about what's going on around St james' Park in the northeast of the UK they don't give a [ __ ] about that so yeah I uh I see that from one of the things I triy to do so in 2020 one of the things I said to Boris was um like Tory party is rotten we haven't won in the 2019 election because the Tory party is some healthy thing or it's a Lov thing right we we' won because it's a massive constitutional crisis because the MPS and Westminster have tried to overturn the biggest Democratic vote in our history because po Corbin is rubbish and because me and the vote LEF team have come into number 10 and grabbed the broken thing and sorted it out and we're much better at politics and campaigning than than the rest of the clowns in Westminster are but that's not like that's not a long-term solution to stuff we essentially have to like close the old Tory party down and turn it into something new and one of the things we should do for example to do that is we should close the whole rancid structure of the of the HQ in London and we should reopen the headquarters for the party up in Manchester or Birmingham or somewhere and say that's the new headquarters and the people who are hired to run the conservative party are actually living up there like 200 miles away from from London and that's the sort of thing like if you're actually going to rejuvenate the country if you're actually going to rejuvenate politics it has to become much more connected to the actual voters it has to stop being the self- referential game where everyone's looking in within like you know like 500 square meters of of of Westminster and we have to go back out and look at we have to be engaged with what the important things are in the world and we have to focus on the voters not ourselves but the more dysfunctional politics gets the harder it is the more M so when I say that right normal people outside London think well yeah that's just obvious but that sounds more and more insane to people inside the system and that's where you know that's where that's where the problem that's where a big part of the problem go it's why London was so shocked by the referendum right because they're all sitting here talking to each other in central London and they never realized what was happening outside the M25 what are you doing now what are you working on what are your plans for yourself for future so I spent most of my time uh as I SP PL my time just basically like reading history books and studying and writing on blogs um uh I've got a substack your some of your some of your subscribers might be interested in um and dit on projects that come up people come to me with problems and say like will you have a have a look at this and help me out and if it's interesting might spend two three months looking at something for them um but I've never been driven by money um and I never do any political thing for money I only do it because I actually agree with it so that's quite limiting from a commercial point uh I don't fly around the world like running elections Here There and Everywhere um I could make a lot of money doing that but um I just don't I just don't like that I don't like the idea of it um what I'm thinking about now is like you know the British situation is depressing as we've been discussing what I'm thinking about is setting up something new um setting up a new political campaigning thing to try and grip it and try and force change and to try and bring in people from outside politics and try and do the whole thing differently so I'm talking to people now quietly about it I'm talking to some donors about funding it I'm trying to figure out how to structure it I've talking to some potential staff and things like that um and what would that be is that going to be a a party a think tank like what is this it's definitely not a think tank um and to begin with it definitely won't be a party I think like it's not the right time to launch an actual party now but I think what you could do is build a very unusual political organization that does a bunch of valuable things and builds support I think pretty quickly you you could get um you get get somebody that has more supporters than than Tories and labor put together that um that tries to represent what the actual voters think who basically hate all the parties and think they're all rubish and then who knows down the line right if you can build this thing in the right way and you can get on the one hand support from voters on the other hand get a lot of Elite Talent involved with it then who knows who knows down the line what what what might be possible but um Westminster left to itself can't rejuvenate itself and history says that usually what happens is these kind of broken systems just like keep going until they hit a massive crisis of some kind um and then they break and then there's a disaster so the question is like can we build something that can force change short of some terrible disaster but if you're going to do that it needs needs to be something the rejuvenating Force has to come from outside the system it can't come from inside Westminster it has to be great people in the country sick of the old system saying right we're sick of it and we're going to build something new [ __ ] me that's disruptive if well it's hard right like if we can do it if we could do it it'll be cool but like you know it's hard to do it's hard to do these things I I go back and forth on it um it's clear very hard but on the other hand you know like doing brexit seemed really hard in summer 2015 no one really thought it was possible um but it ends up happening so like the core thing is right if you just look back over that period people why did we win 2016 because people are really sick of the current system and they wanted massive change why did the vote Le team win the 2019 election because people were really sick of the old system and they really want massive change why the CH has suffered the biggest ever defeat ever in 200 years because people really sick of the whole system and really want m jway if if Boris had stuck with our deal in 2019 that we did in 2019 and spent four years doing what we said we would do in 2019 and 2020 the situation will be completely different instead him and Carrie decide get rid of vote leave just [ __ ] around and do nothing for four years they get kicked out the public now voted them out and voted storing and they're desperate for change but they're not going to get massive change again right so we keep having this system where the voters keep vote saying we want massive change we are completely sick of the old thing and the old thing says yeah we're not giving it to you how much do you lay the failure of the last four years at the feet of Boris personally I mean you got to blame him a lot right you know we had the whole in summer 2020 there's a historic moment we had an 80 seat majority we had um a once Century crisis with covid you had the collapse of all the core institutions of power in number 10 in the cabinet office and you had the Civil Service Civil Service knew that the system had collapsed and essentially surrendered to us and said well okay the economy needs rebuilding the health system needs rebuilding the Civil Service needs rebuilding you guys got an e majority Clearly Now like you're going to do it so let's work out work out the terms for that and for about eight weeks or so Boris like went along with that and was okay we're actually going to do it we're going to smash it and we're going to build up a whole bunch of things and then qu like tragically he turned his back on that historic opportunity essentially it was because weirdly because he saw starma so he started doing pmqs with starma and dealing with starma in Parliament and he decided starma was so rubbish in politics that I actually don't need to change a lot of things we'll beat him easily I'll beat him easily in 2024 and secondly of course his girlfriend said well Boris isn't going to be really in charge of all the details so why should it be Dom in charge of it like I want me and my friends to be in charge of it so you had this combination of Boris thinking I don't really have to change much so his bis's attitude was if things are really difficult and I've got to build a whole bunch of things then I need to vote leave people here because they're the only people that could do it and I can't do this with the usual Tory Cloud show but once you realized or decided I don't actually have to build very much I could just Coast because stor is so bad of politics then he was like I don't really need to have the vote leave people around because I don't really need to do anything and everyone hates them anyway so why don't I get rid of them and then his girlfriend is saying everyone hates them get rid of them and put my friends in charge so you have this like huge historic moment opportunity to change the trajectory of the country an 80 seat majority and people desperate for it to happen and then you know he walks up to the Penalty spot and hoofs out the [Laughter] stadium wow Dominic Cummings ladies and gentlemen do I uh I really appreciate your insights there's very few people that are able to be as sort of candid uh and and explain what's actually happening inside of government even if it would be significantly more comforting to feel like the people in charge knew what they were doing I I I really I genuinely really appreciate the insights where should people go for your substack and and other stuff just Dominic cummings. substack tocom if you click on that you'll you you you'll see and thanks very much for having me on Chris um really enjoyed our chat um hopefully come back on and chat maybe about the US election or something in the future oh I'd love that I'd love that I appreciate you man cool if you enjoyed that episode you will love a selection of the the best clips from the podcast over the last couple of months 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