Daniel sent us this follow-up after we talked about diplomatic cables and note-taking. He's fascinated by the people who actually sit in the room during high-level government meetings and produce those records — the ones that might end up before a commission of inquiry or get published under freedom of information laws. Who are these people, what's their job, and what makes their notes useful when everything's on the line?
He specifically asked us to leave court stenographers aside, which I think is smart — that's a whole separate rabbit hole about phonetic typing and chorded keyboards. What he's really asking about is the institutional note-taker. The person in the photograph behind the prime minister who's scribbling while everyone else is just listening.
By the way, today's script is being generated by DeepSeek V four Pro.
Alright, so let's start with the most obvious example because Daniel mentioned it — the White House. The United States has probably the most formalized version of this role, and it actually sits in an office most people have never heard of.
The Office of the Executive Clerk. It's part of the White House Office, and within it there's a group called the Records Management team. But the specific role Daniel's describing — the person physically in the room creating a contemporaneous record of what the president does, who they meet, what's said — that's actually produced by the Presidential Diarist.
That's the actual job title?
That's the actual job title. And it's not one person — it's a small team, usually career civil servants, not political appointees. That's important, by the way, because it means they survive across administrations. The same people who were doing this for Trump's first term were probably still there for Biden and will be there for whoever comes next.
These are people whose entire professional identity is being invisible in the room.
And that invisibility is the point. If you're a political appointee who was hired because you share the president's ideology, your notes might be seen as slanted — either intentionally or just through motivated perception. The career staff are trained to be neutral recording instruments.
I want to push on that word "diarist" though, because it sounds almost personal. Like Samuel Pepys writing about the Great Fire of London. Is it actually a narrative document?
It's not. The Presidential Daily Diary is a minute-by-minute log. It records where the president is, who's with them, what event or meeting is happening, and any official actions taken. It doesn't transcribe conversations. It's more like a ship's log than a diary in the literary sense.
If the president has a phone call with a foreign leader, the diary says "the president spoke with Prime Minister so-and-so from this time to this time in the Oval Office," but it doesn't say what they discussed?
The substance of the conversation would be captured elsewhere — by National Security Council staff, for example, who write memos of conversation, often called memcons. The Presidential Diary is about the skeleton of the day. Every movement, every handshake, every door the president walks through. It's granular to an almost absurd degree.
Give me an example of that granularity.
The diary will record things like "the president walked from the Oval Office to the Rose Garden at eleven oh two, accompanied by the chief of staff and the press secretary." It tracks motorcade departures to the minute, arrivals at Andrews Air Force Base, when Air Force One's wheels are up and when they touch down.
What's the legal or practical reason for tracking bathroom breaks and garden walks?
Two reasons, and they're both fascinating. The first is the Presidential Records Act. Since nineteen seventy-eight, all presidential records belong to the public — they're not the president's personal property. The diary is the master index that makes sense of everything else. If you're an archivist at the National Archives and you have a memo that says "discussed with POTUS," you need the diary to know where the president actually was that day, who was present, what the context was.
It's almost metadata for the historical record.
That's exactly what it is. And the second reason is operational. The White House is a machine that has to move the president from point A to point B to point C. The diary is what the advance teams, the Secret Service, the military aides, and the communications staff all coordinate around. If the diary says the president leaves at nine fifteen, the motorcade is ready at nine fifteen.
Daniel's question is really about the meetings themselves — the bilaterals, the cabinet sessions, the crisis moments. Who's capturing what's actually said?
That's where it gets more interesting, because it's not one person. It's a layered system, and who takes notes depends on the type of meeting. For cabinet meetings, there's a formal Cabinet Secretary — that's a Senate-confirmed position — and they produce official minutes. For National Security Council meetings, the NSC's Executive Secretary assigns a note-taker, usually a career staffer from the NSC directorate most relevant to the topic.
For one-on-one meetings with foreign leaders?
That's the most sensitive category. Typically, the note-taker is a senior director from the NSC, sometimes the national security advisor themselves. The president's own note-taking is famously inconsistent. Some presidents keep their own notes — Reagan wrote in a diary every night, Obama reportedly took notes during meetings. Others delegate completely.
I've read that Trump often didn't want note-takers in the room for certain calls, which became a whole controversy.
That's right, and it illustrates exactly why this role matters. When there's no official record, you're relying on memory and interpretation. The first Trump impeachment was triggered in part by a whistleblower complaint about a phone call where the formal memcon was placed on a restricted server. The whole question was about what was said and who could verify it. If there's a neutral career note-taker in the room, you have at least one version of events that was recorded contemporaneously.
Let's be realistic — even a career civil servant is still a human being. They're not a tape recorder. Their notes will reflect what they noticed, what they thought was important, what they could physically write down fast enough.
And that's actually the skill. The best note-takers are not the ones who write the most words. They're the ones who have the judgment to know what matters in real time. A junior staffer might transcribe everything verbatim and miss the one exchange where the tone shifted. A seasoned note-taker knows to capture the inflection points.
This connects to what we said in the diplomatic cables episode — the best cables weren't just transcripts, they had analysis baked in. The "so what" alongside the "what.
And in government, that analysis is often separated from the raw record. You have the note-taker's contemporaneous notes, and then you have the memo that's written afterward, which synthesizes and interprets. The notes are supposed to be as close to objective as possible. The memo adds the layer of judgment.
Let's move beyond the White House. Daniel mentioned Israel — he talked about the open wound of October seventh and the lack of a proper commission of inquiry. What's the Israeli equivalent of this role?
Israel's system is different and, frankly, less formalized. The Prime Minister's Office has a Cabinet Secretary — that's a legal position under the Basic Law on the Government. The Cabinet Secretary is responsible for recording cabinet meeting minutes, tracking government decisions, and maintaining the official record. But the role has been criticized for being more administrative than substantive.
What do you mean?
Israeli cabinet minutes are often quite sparse. They record decisions, not discussions. So you'll see "the cabinet decided to authorize military operation X," but you won't see who argued for it, who opposed it, what the alternatives were. The deliberation itself is often not captured in detail.
Which means when a commission of inquiry comes knocking, the paper trail is thin.
And that's been a recurring criticism. The Winograd Commission after the Second Lebanon War, the various inquiries after the Yom Kippur War — they all struggled with incomplete records. The State Comptroller has repeatedly called for better documentation practices in the Prime Minister's Office.
Who's actually in the room during a bilateral between the Israeli prime minister and a visiting head of state?
Typically, you'll have the Military Secretary to the Prime Minister — that's a senior IDF officer — plus a political advisor or the prime minister's chief of staff, and often a note-taker from the National Security Council. On the other side, you'll have the visiting leader's equivalent staff. The photograph Daniel described, with rows of aides behind each leader, is exactly right.
At least one person on each side is documenting.
Yes, but here's where it gets tricky. In many governments, including Israel's, the note-taker is often a political appointee, not a career civil servant. They work for the prime minister, not for the state. Their loyalty is to the person, not the institution.
That's a crucial distinction. In the American system, the Presidential Diarist is a career professional who's going to be there for the next administration. In a system where the note-taker is a political loyalist, there's a built-in incentive to... let's call it selective documentation.
That's not a theoretical concern. Look at the British system. The UK Cabinet Office has a Secretariat that produces official minutes of cabinet meetings. These are supposed to be neutral, but the cabinet secretary is appointed by the prime minister, and there have been repeated debates about whether minutes have been sanitized or slanted. The Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War spent enormous energy reconstructing what was actually said in meetings because the official records were incomplete.
I want to go back to something Daniel said about the moment of crisis — those pivotal first thirty minutes. When you read about September eleventh, the record of what President Bush did and said in that Florida classroom, who was with him, what calls were made — that exists because there were people whose job it was to capture it. The Presidential Diary recorded that he was at Emma E. Booker Elementary School. The White House photographer was there. The military aide carrying the nuclear football logged the communications.
The note-takers were scrambling. We know from memoirs and later testimony that Condoleezza Rice was taking notes during the crisis meetings. Ari Fleischer, the press secretary, was jotting down the president's exact words on a legal pad. These were not formal "note-takers" in the job description sense. They were whoever happened to be in the room and had the presence of mind to write things down.
Which raises an uncomfortable question. If the people taking notes during a crisis are political staffers with a stake in how history remembers things, how reliable is that record?
It's inherently unreliable. That's not a conspiracy theory — it's just human cognition. People under stress remember selectively. People with political loyalties frame events in ways that favor their side, consciously or not. The only real safeguard is multiple independent records. The 9/11 Commission didn't rely on any single note-taker. They triangulated between the Presidential Diary, the NSC logs, the Secret Service records, air traffic control transcripts, phone logs, and dozens of participant accounts.
So the truth lives in the gaps between different people's versions.
That's the intelligence analyst's entire worldview, by the way. You never trust a single source. You look for corroboration and contradiction across multiple independent streams.
Daniel mentioned Andrew Bustamante, the former CIA officer, saying that tradecraft is applicable to business. The triangulation principle is a perfect example. If you're running an enterprise sales team and everyone's updating the CRM with their own version of a client meeting, the smart sales manager isn't reading one rep's notes and calling it a day. They're comparing across the team, looking for inconsistencies and patterns.
That's where the diplomatic cable style Daniel found so entertaining becomes relevant. A good cable doesn't just say "the foreign minister said X." It says "the foreign minister said X, but seemed hesitant, and his deputy was visibly uncomfortable during this part of the conversation." That's the note-taker adding a layer of observation that you can't get from a transcript.
Let's talk about what makes someone good at this job. Because Daniel's right — if something goes wrong, these notes are going to be scrutinized by lawyers, investigators, journalists, and historians. The note-taker is producing a document that might be Exhibit A in a future trial or inquiry.
The first quality is speed, obviously. You have to capture a lot of information in real time. But speed without judgment is useless. The second quality is what I'd call signal detection. You need to know which five seconds of a two-hour meeting actually matter.
How do you train for that?
In diplomatic services, it's part of the basic training. Foreign service officers learn to write cables. They practice summarizing meetings, extracting the key points, identifying what headquarters actually needs to know. The US State Department has a whole course on it. The British Foreign Office does the same. It's treated as a core professional skill, not a clerical task.
For the person sitting behind the prime minister in a bilateral, that's not a junior foreign service officer. That's someone who's already been through years of filtering to get into that room.
By the time you're taking notes in a leader-to-leader meeting, you've probably been doing this for a decade or more. You've learned what matters by making mistakes in lower-stakes settings. You've seen how your notes get used downstream — what gets quoted in policy papers, what gets ignored, what gets misinterpreted.
There's also a specific writing style that these people develop. Daniel described the diplomatic cables as having a slightly sardonic tone. I've noticed the same thing. It's almost like the writers are allowed to be more candid because the audience is internal.
That's exactly the dynamic. A cable is written for other diplomats and policymakers who share the same background knowledge. You don't have to explain who the players are or what the context is. You can say "the foreign minister was in full evasion mode" and your reader knows exactly what that means because they've seen it before.
Whereas if you were writing for the public, you'd have to say "the foreign minister avoided answering direct questions and instead pivoted to talking points about regional stability.
Something is lost in that translation. The candid version is actually more accurate. It captures the human reality of the meeting. Diplomats are people. They have tells. They get defensive. A good cable captures that.
Let's circle back to the question of legal liability. Daniel brought up commissions of inquiry. When a government fails — whether it's October seventh or the Iraq War or the financial crisis — the first thing investigators do is demand the records. Who was in the room? What was said? Who made which decision?
That's when the difference between good note-taking and bad note-taking becomes existential for the people involved. If the notes are detailed and contemporaneous, they can be exculpatory. "Here's the record — I raised this concern, I was overruled, here's the timestamp." If the notes are vague or nonexistent, you're left arguing about memories years after the fact.
There's an irony here. The people who resist creating detailed records because they're worried about accountability are actually creating more legal exposure for themselves. Without a record, you can't prove you did the right thing.
That's the argument that good institutionalists make. Document everything, not despite the risk of scrutiny but because of it. If your decisions were defensible, the record is your friend.
That assumes good faith. What about when the decisions weren't defensible?
Then the note-taker is in an impossible position. Do you record accurately and implicate your boss? Do you leave things out and risk being accused of a cover-up? Do you resign? These are real ethical dilemmas that play out in governments all the time.
Have there been cases where note-takers blew the whistle?
The most famous is probably Alexander Butterfield, who was a deputy assistant to President Nixon. During the Watergate investigation, Butterfield was the one who revealed the existence of the White House taping system. He wasn't a note-taker per se, but he was the keeper of the ultimate record. And his testimony changed everything.
That's a different category though — the recording system versus the human note-taker.
True, but it illustrates the principle. The person whose job is to maintain the record has enormous power. They know where the bodies are buried. That's why the role is often filled by people who have proven their discretion over many years.
Let's talk about the technology question. Daniel mentioned seeing people "furiously scribbling into a notebook or furiously tapping into a keyboard, depending upon the policies of the institution." What's the current state of play on that?
It varies enormously. The US government has strict rules about what devices can be in sensitive meetings. In a SCIF — a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility — you can't bring in a personal laptop or phone. You use government-issued equipment that's been secured. In some of the most sensitive meetings, note-takers still use pen and paper because paper can't be hacked.
Paper can be photographed, lost, or left in a briefcase.
Everything has a threat model. The concern with digital devices is remote exfiltration. The concern with paper is physical theft or loss. Different meetings have different risk profiles, and the security people make the call.
I've heard that some note-takers use a specific kind of shorthand, not quite like court stenography but a personal system of abbreviations and symbols.
If you look at the notes of experienced diplomats or intelligence officers, they're often illegible to anyone else. That's partly speed and partly security. If someone glances at your notepad, they shouldn't be able to read "the prime minister is considering resigning.
That's a form of encryption by obscurity.
Low-grade, but yes. And it works because the note-taker is going to type up a clean version within hours, while the memory is still fresh. The handwritten notes are just a temporary medium.
Which brings up an interesting point about memory. The act of typing up notes later is actually a second pass through the material. You're not just transcribing — you're reconstructing, filling in gaps, making sense of what you wrote down.
That's a feature, not a bug. The process of turning rough notes into a clean memo forces you to think through what actually happened. You catch your own misunderstandings. You realize "wait, I wrote down that the minister agreed to the proposal, but actually they only said they'd consider it." The second pass is where the analysis happens.
This is why I've always believed the person who takes the notes should be the one who writes the summary. If you hand off your notes to someone else, they lose the nonverbal context. They don't know that when you wrote "hesitated," you meant a thirty-second pause with a specific facial expression.
In government, that principle is often violated. The note-taker in the room might be a junior staffer, and the cable is written by a more senior officer who wasn't there. The senior person reads the notes and synthesizes, but they're missing the texture.
Is there a government that does this particularly well?
The British civil service has a strong tradition in this area. The Cabinet Office secretariat that I mentioned earlier — these are people who spend their entire careers documenting government decisions. They're trained to be neutral, precise, and comprehensive. The minutes they produce are not verbatim transcripts — that's actually forbidden in British cabinet meetings to encourage candid discussion. But they capture the range of views expressed and the basis for decisions.
Verbatin transcripts are forbidden?
The principle is that if ministers know every word is being recorded, they'll speak for the record rather than actually deliberating. The official minutes record the substance of the discussion without attributing specific quotes to specific people. The idea is to preserve candor.
That's fascinating. So the note-taker is actively making editorial decisions about what to include and how to attribute it.
And those decisions are politically consequential. If the minutes say "concerns were raised about the cost of the program" versus "the Chancellor of the Exchequer strongly objected to the cost," those are very different records, even if they describe the same meeting.
The note-taker is making that call in real time, with no ability to pause the meeting and ask for clarification.
That's the pressure of the job. You're making judgments that might be argued over by historians and lawyers for decades, and you're making them at typing speed while the meeting continues around you.
What about the physical positioning? Daniel mentioned the arc around the leaders. Where the note-taker sits actually matters.
Ideally, you want to be close enough to hear clearly but not so close that you're in the leaders' eyeline. You don't want them performing for you. In some settings, the note-taker is positioned behind and slightly to the side of their principal, which also gives them a view of the other side's reactions.
You need to see faces. If you're just hearing voices, you're missing half the information.
A good note-taker is watching body language the whole time. Who's leaning in? Who's checking their watch? Who flinches when a particular topic comes up? That's the stuff that makes the final memo valuable.
This connects to something Daniel said about CRM systems in business. When a salesperson logs a client meeting, the best entries include those human observations. "The procurement director seemed skeptical about the timeline — she asked the same question twice." That's actionable intelligence for the rest of the team.
Most people are terrible at it. They log the facts — "discussed pricing, they want a twenty percent discount" — and miss the subtext entirely. The diplomatic cable style is actually a much better model for business note-taking than what most companies teach.
Let's address one of Daniel's specific questions head-on. Who's got this job at the level below the prime minister or president? Ministers, agency heads, senior officials — they all have meetings that need to be documented.
It depends on the country and the ministry, but there are a few common patterns. In the US, cabinet secretaries typically have an executive secretariat — a small office that manages their schedule, correspondence, and records. Within that office, there's usually a designated note-taker for internal meetings and a separate person or team for external engagements.
Are these political appointees or career staff?
The executive secretary themselves is often a political appointee, but the staff doing the day-to-day work are usually career civil servants. The balance varies by department. State Department has a very strong career culture. Some of the newer or more politicized agencies lean more heavily on appointees.
What about the actual output? What does a minister's meeting note look like compared to a presidential-level document?
Less formal, usually. It might be an email summary rather than a structured memo. But the core elements are the same: who was present, what was discussed, what decisions were made, what follow-up is required. The difference is that a minister's meeting note is less likely to be declassified and published fifty years later. It's more operational, less historical.
Unless something goes wrong. Then it's suddenly very historical.
And that's the trap. You never know which meeting is going to matter. A routine Tuesday morning briefing might turn out to be the meeting where a major crisis was first discussed. If your notes from that meeting are sloppy, you've lost a crucial piece of the historical record.
There's a philosophical question underneath all of this. What is the purpose of keeping these records? Is it accountability?
All three, and they sometimes conflict. Operational continuity requires detailed, candid records so that the next person in the job knows what happened. Accountability requires records that will stand up to external scrutiny. Historical accuracy requires context and nuance that might be politically embarrassing in the short term.
The British cabinet system prioritizes operational candor over historical accuracy. By not recording verbatim who said what, they're trading historical precision for better decision-making in the moment.
That's a legitimate trade-off. The question is whether the institution is honest about the trade-off it's making. If you're telling the public "we keep comprehensive records" but actually your system is designed to protect ministers from embarrassment, that's a problem.
Daniel mentioned freedom of information laws. Many countries now publish the diaries or schedules of public officials. The White House releases the president's daily schedule to the press. The UK publishes ministers' meetings with external organizations. How does that change the note-taker's job?
It creates a dual consciousness. You're writing for two audiences — the internal operational audience that needs the unvarnished truth, and the external public audience that might read your notes years or decades later. That tension is unavoidable.
Presumably it leads to a certain amount of self-censorship.
It has to. If you know your notes might be FOIA'd, you're going to be more careful about how you characterize people. You might write "the minister expressed reservations" instead of "the minister thinks this is a terrible idea and said so in colorful language.
Which is a loss of information, honestly. The colorful language version tells you more about the minister's actual state of mind.
But from the note-taker's perspective, you're protecting your principal from a future headline. And you're protecting yourself from being the person who created that headline.
Let's talk about one more category Daniel hinted at — the crisis moment. The first thirty minutes of a terrorist attack or a natural disaster or a financial collapse. In those moments, the formal note-taking systems often break down. Everyone's in the room, nobody's designated as the scribe, and the adrenaline is through the roof.
This is where preparation matters. The best organizations have a crisis protocol that includes a designated note-taker. In the White House Situation Room, there's always a watch officer whose job includes logging everything. In military command centers, there's a battle log. These systems exist precisely because people know that in a crisis, nobody will think to take notes unless it's someone's explicit job.
Those logs become crucial afterward. The 9/11 Commission reconstructed the morning minute by minute using a combination of the Situation Room logs, the FAA logs, the military's NORAD logs, and phone records. Without those systems, we'd have a much fuzzier picture of what happened.
The Israeli example Daniel raised is instructive here. One of the many criticisms of the government's response on October seventh is that the paper trail is insufficient. What was the prime minister doing in the first hour? Who did he speak to? What decisions were made? These are questions that a proper note-taking system should be able to answer definitively.
If it can't, the vacuum gets filled with speculation and political spin.
The absence of a record is not neutral. It creates space for competing narratives, and the most politically powerful narrative usually wins, regardless of what actually happened.
What makes a great note-taker, in your view? Boil it down for me.
First, the ability to be invisible. If people are aware of you taking notes, you're doing it wrong. You need to know what matters in real time, without the benefit of hindsight. And third, speed plus accuracy. You need to capture enough detail that your notes are useful, but not so much that you miss the next thing while writing down the last thing.
I'd add a fourth. The willingness to be boring. The best official records are not literary masterpieces. They're clear, precise, and unremarkable. The diplomat who writes colorful, sardonic cables is entertaining, but the note-taker whose work holds up in a commission of inquiry ten years later is the one who stuck to the facts.
That's a fair point, though I'd argue the best cables do both. They're factually precise and stylistically sharp. But it's a rare skill.
Rare and undervalued. Nobody becomes famous for taking great meeting notes. It's not a job that attracts glory seekers. But when the notes are absent or inadequate, everyone notices.
The invisible infrastructure of governance. That's what we're really talking about.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The average cumulus cloud weighs about one point one million pounds — roughly the same as one hundred elephants — and yet it floats because the weight is spread across millions of tiny water droplets over a vast area.
One point one million pounds. Floating above our heads.
I'm never looking at a cloudy sky the same way again.
The invisible infrastructure of the atmosphere, apparently. This has been My Weird Prompts. If you want more episodes like this one, find us at myweirdprompts dot com or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Corn.
I'm Herman Poppleberry. We'll catch you next time.
