Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:01)
Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Dominic Cummings, who was the chief advisor to Boris Johnson when he was prime minister. And before that, he masterminded the Brexit campaign.
Let's start with talking with your time in number 10, which is your time as chief advisor. What is the thing about the government and being in that famous ministry? What is it that most people don't understand?

**Dominic Cummings** (0:25)
When you go through that door, you're basically going into a sort of a kind of rabbit warren of old townhouses that have been kind of knocked together behind the scenes. It's nothing like any kind of modern office building.
It's a very, very odd physical environment. And I think probably you'd be struck by, first of all, just the constant string of chaos. I think people don't really appreciate what it's like being in a building like that. Every day, you've got, so for example, in one day on Covid, the day starts off with, are we going to have a lockdown?
It then proceeds to the prime minister's girlfriend going crazy about the media. It then involves Trump calling up saying, we've got to go and bomb all these people in Iraq. It then goes to the deep state coming in saying, we don't think we should because we're probably going to bomb the wrong people. Then other parts of the system come in and say, no, we should bomb them because we've got to stay friends with America. Then there's some other disaster on the news with something flooding. It's just constant. Obviously, some days are more crazy than others. If you haven't been in that environment, it's extremely hard to appreciate that you have these handful of people trying to come up with the right answers to extremely hard problems with all the weight of the news flooding in on you.
That makes it just intrinsically difficult. Then on top of that, you have these just incredibly old centralized bureaucracies actually trying to cope with all of this. In number 10, when we arrived, for example, there wasn't even a file sharing system. So a three-man startup could at least write a press release on Google Doc. For example, the British prime minister did not have access to such a system.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:30)
Was it because of security concerns? What was the reason?

**Dominic Cummings** (2:33)
Because the combination of bureaucracy, security concerns, arguments between... So it's actually a sort of interesting thing, the Google Docs thing. So we arrive in summer 2019 There is no system for file sharing. We say this is completely insane. We are going to create a system for file sharing.
Months of wrangling ensue. Two different parts of the deep state basically argue about whether Teams or Google Docs is more susceptible to China and Russia intercepting. No resolution. This actually ends up affecting Covid. We force a resolution. We get GCHQ to build a system.
Still now, four years after we started this discussion, the Cabinet Office of Number 10 are still fighting about Google Docs versus Teams and have now recently resolved to hire some consultants for millions of pounds to spend a year doing a study on it. So one very small little thing in a way, but probably certainly anyone who's been at a kind of high functioning company would just be completely stunned by a lot of how the core of a G7 state actually works.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:41)
Yeah, yeah. Hopefully the consultants are allowed to use Google Docs to decide whether you're allowed to use Google Docs.

**Dominic Cummings** (3:46)
Quite.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:47)
You go into government, afterwards you've written on your blog, I had these priorities, these main things I want to accomplish.
Day to day, you have all these things that are coming up. Do these things feel like distractions from the thing you went to the government to do? Do they all feel important? I mean, you have this big picture idea and all these things are coming up. I mean, what does that feel like?

**Dominic Cummings** (4:09)
A fundamental problem with how the British state works is this question of prioritization and the prime minister's time. So you have all of these normal parts of the system that essentially can't really do anything quickly at all, even in a crisis. So the prime minister's time and the prime minister's prioritization is the most important asset. But also it's something which is constantly pulled hither and thither by all of this craziness. One of the things that obviously we wanted to do was fundamentally reorient No. 10 away from what it's been since Thatcher, which is a kind of press entertainment service, where the whole building is just built to respond to what the media says. And instead say, what do we actually think is important?