2023-11-15
2 小时 34 分钟Okay, 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?
When you go through that door,
You're basically going into a sort 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 would 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 no so for example On in one day on COVID the day starts off with Are we gonna 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 it's probably going to bomb the wrong people and 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 you know something flooding and it's just constant and okay obviously some days are more crazy than others but I think it's very
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.