Dominic Cummings: Vote Leave, Brexit, COVID, and No. 10 with Boris — Manifold #28

 

Dominic Cummings is a major historical figure in UK politics. He helped save the Pound Sterling, led the Vote Leave campaign, Got Brexit Done, and guided the Tories to a landslide general election victory. His time in No. 10 Downing Street as Boris Johnson's Chief Advisor was one of the most interesting and impactful periods in modern UK political history.  Dom and Steve discuss all of this and more in this 2-hour episode. 

0:00 Early Life: Oxford, Russia, entering politics 

16:49 Keeping the UK out of the Euro 

19:41 How Dominic and Steve became acquainted: blogs, 2008 financial crisis, meeting at Google 

27:37 Vote Leave, the science of polling 

43:46 Cambridge Analytica conspiracy; History is impossible 

48:41 Dominic on Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of him and the movie “Brexit: The Uncivil War” 

54:05 On joining British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s office: an ultimatum 

1:06:31 The pandemic 

1:21:28 The Deep State, talent pipeline for public service 

1:47:25 Quants and weirdos invade No.10 

1:52:06 Can the Tories win the next election? 

1:56:27 Trump in 2024? 

Transcript

Audio Player

References: 

Dominic's Substack newsletter: https://dominiccummings.substack.com/

Sahil Lavingia: Founding Gumroad, The Minimalist Entrepreneur, and our AI LLM future — Manifold #27

 

Sahil Lavingia founded Gumroad at the age of 19 and built it into a leading digital commerce platform. He is the author of The Minimalist Entrepreneur and an investor in early-stage startups. 

Steve and Sahil discuss: 

0:00 Sahil's upbringing and start as an entrepreneur 

9:35 Tech founder at 19 and VC investment from Kleiner-Perkins 

24:15 Backstory of Gumroad 30:30 Crowdfunding Gumroad 

37:09 Experiments with OpenAI LLM, ChatGPT, and the promise of AI 

Transcript

References: 

Sahil's web page 

https://sahillavingia.com/ 

Ask My Book: interrogate Sahil's book via LLM 

https://askmybook.com/