Dwarkesh Podcast
Tony Blair - Life of a PM, The Deep State, Lee Kuan Yew, & AI's 1914 Moment
26 Jun 2024
I chatted with Tony Blair about:- What he learned from Lee Kuan Yew- Intelligence agencies track record on Iraq & Ukraine- What he tells the dozens of world leaders who come seek advice from him- How much of a PM’s time is actually spent governing- What will AI’s July 1914 moment look like from inside the Cabinet?Enjoy!Watch the video on YouTube. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.Sponsors- Prelude Security is the world’s leading cyber threat management automation platform. Prelude Detect quickly transforms threat intelligence into validated protections so organizations can know with certainty that their defenses will protect them against the latest threats. Prelude is backed by Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners, The MITRE Corporation, CrowdStrike, and other leading investors. Learn more here.- This episode is brought to you by Stripe, financial infrastructure for the internet. Millions of companies from Anthropic to Amazon use Stripe to accept payments, automate financial processes and grow their revenue.If you’re interested in advertising on the podcast, check out this page.Timestamps(00:00:00) – A prime minister’s constraints(00:04:12) – CEOs vs. politicians(00:10:31) – COVID, AI, & how government deals with crisis(00:21:24) – Learning from Lee Kuan Yew(00:27:37) – Foreign policy & intelligence(00:31:12) – How much leadership actually matters(00:35:34) – Private vs. public tech(00:39:14) – Advising global leaders(00:46:45) – The unipolar moment in the 90s Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Full Episode
Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Tony Blair, who was, of course, Prime Minister of the UK from 1997 to 2007, and now leads the Tony Blair Institute, which advises dozens of governments on improving governance, reform, adding technology. My first question, I want to go back to your time in office. And when you first got in, you had these large majorities.
What are the constraints on a prime minister, despite the fact that they have these large majorities? Is it the other members of your party are fighting against you? Is it the deep state? What part is constraining you at that point?
The biggest constraint is that politics, and in particular political leadership, is probably the only walk of life in which someone is put into an immensely powerful and important position with absolutely zero qualifications or experience. I mean, I never had a ministerial appointment before.
My one and only was being prime minister, which is great if you want to start at the top, but it's that that's most difficult. So you come in and you often come in as, when you're running for office, you have to be the great persuader. The moment you get into office, you really have to be the great chief executive. And those two skill sets are completely different.
And a lot of political leaders fail because they've failed to make the transition. And those executive skills, which are about focus, prioritization, good policy, building the right team of people who can actually help you govern, because the moment you become the government, you end up leaving aside the saying becomes less important than the doing.
Whereas when you're in opposition, you're running for office, it's all about saying. So all of these things mean that it's a much more difficult, much more focused and it's suddenly you're thrust into this completely new environment when you come in. And that's what makes it, that's the hardest thing. And then of course, you do have a situation in which the system as a system
It's not that it's a – I'm not a believer that there's this great deep state theory. We can talk about that. But that's not the problem with government. The problem with government is that it's not a conspiracy, either left-wing or right-wing. It's a conspiracy for inertia. The thing about government systems is that they always think we're permanent. You've come in as the elected politician.
You're temporary. And, you know, we know how to do this. And if you only just let us alone, we would carry on managing the status quo in the right way. And so that's the toughest thing. It's making that transition.
Okay, so that's really interesting. Now, if we take you back everything you knew, let's say in 2007, but you have the majorities
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