Anglofuturism

Part two begins, as promised, with Louis pulling down his trousers. The underpants in question — a toile de joie printed with pastoral scenes labelled Seductio, Commiditas, Protectio — turn out to be the origin story of the entire British Cræft Prize. What started as a quest to produce bespoke boxer shorts from Northern Irish linen eventually mutated into a £60,000 national prize for maverick craftsmen.The conversation then turns to whether cræft can serve as a binding agent for a country that no longer shares an informational commons. Louis presents his framework of 16 Dreams of Britain — from Royal Britain and Workshop Britain through to Silly Britain (Mr Blobby, cheese rolling, Paddington Bear as psychopomp) and New Britain (Stormzy’s stab vest, Oswald Boateng’s BA uniforms). His claim is that excellence in making — the deep hand-eye-mind entanglement of cræft — cuts across all of them. Calum pushes back hard: these are competing aesthetic and moral universes, not fragments of a whole.Submit to the British Cræft Prize. £60,000. Deadline: 31 August 2026. [link]The episode explores:* The boxer shorts to national prize pipeline, via Saint Pantalone* Why Irish linen is grown in Flanders* The 16 Dreams of Britain and whether they can coexist* Calum’s objection: competing aesthetic universes cannot be synthesised by goodwill* Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism and Paul Ricœur’s defining question* Hiroki Azuma’s database animals and the collapse of the grand narrative* The Magdalen College library debate: homage or imposition?* Why the Anglofuturist typeface has borrowed from five traditions and still doesn’t have a full alphabet* The Peter Thiel two-by-two and why definite pessimism has no joy* Sprezzatura as the missing ingredient in British national renewal This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

From the King Charles III Space Station — whose thatch is in a worrying state of disrepair — Tom and Calum welcome Louis Elton, founder of the Cræft Prize, a new £60,000 national award for maverick craftsmen, makers and technologists who fuse heritage crafts with cutting-edge technology.Louis begins with the crisis: Britain’s heritage crafts are dying. The handmade cricket ball is officially extinct in the UK. Thatchers, stained glass makers and stonemasons are retiring without apprentices. The economic model is broken and the younger generation all went to university. But the answer isn’t pure revival. Louis traces the word cræft back to King Alfred’s translations of Boethius, where it meant something closer to virtue — a deep entanglement of hand, eye, mind, body and material intelligence, all forged into excellence.The conversation then turns to whether new technologies can produce genuinely new aesthetics rather than endless pastiche. Louis points to Carmelite monks in Montana building a monastery with CNC-milled stone, a Chinese studio using robotic bricklaying to create patterns no human could construct, and a children’s clothing brand applying origami principles to make garments that grow with the child. The enemy throughout is slop — content without form, without virtue, produced to satisfy a single metric. The default setting of modernity is the slop machine. Cræft is the antidote.The episode explores:* The Anglo-Saxon meaning of cræft and why it matters more than craft* Why the handmade cricket ball is dead and what that tells us about British manufacturing* AI slop versus cræft as opposing forces in modern culture* CNC monks, robotic bricklaying, and 3D-printed Cornish lobster pots* Whether Silicon Valley’s obsession with taste is just pattern recognition* The trad wife aesthetic as craft pornography* Iranian AI Lego propaganda as an unlikely signal of the future* What humans are actually for in a post-AGI world* The Cræft Prize: £60,000 for inventions that fuse heritage wisdom with frontier technologyKing Alfred's translation of Boethius' De consolatione philosophiaeGeeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolutionNot Quite Past — AI Delftware in Stoke-on-TrentMonumental Labs / Gondor IndustriesAki Union — Shanghai parametric brick galleryAtelier Missor This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

From the King Charles III Space Station, Tom and Calum welcome Louise Perry — reactionary feminist, space romantic, and descendant of Second Fleet convicts — to discuss Artemis II, the furthest humans have ever travelled from Earth.Louise makes the case that enthusiasm for space exploration is an overwhelmingly Anglo phenomenon, something between an anthropological pathology and a civilisational birthright. But the last great age of exploration coincided with an incredible cheapness of life, a tolerance for suffering and death that modern societies have entirely lost. Can you be expansionist with a 0.7 birth rate and no appetite for risk?This leads into Louise’s theory of the century: that birth rate collapse is not a policy failure but an evolutionary bottleneck. The people who make it through — more religious, more conservative, more willing to bear the costs — will inherit the Earth. Democracy probably can’t survive the gerontocracy that’s coming. The state pension certainly won’t. Your best hedge, she argues, is several children.The episode explores:* Why space exploration is an Anglo pathology — and why that’s glorious* The Moral Maze’s case against Artemis II, including the claim that astronauts are defiling Navajo ancestors on the moon* Whether modernity has made us too comfortable to be expansionist* Louise’s infant mortality theory of everything: low death rates cause low birth rates* The evolutionary bottleneck and why wokeness is demographically doomed* The techno-theocracy: orienting innovation towards the Christian good* Why your pension won’t exist and children are a better investment* The overview effect as a threat to chauvinistic adventure* Mars as tax haven, Noah’s Ark selection criteria, and the Bishop of MarsThank you for supporting Anglofuturism. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Back from the break and fuelled by Diet Coke, Tom and Calum push Josh on the harder questions. If HomeDAO is selecting for a new elite — relentless, agentic, indifferent to the rules of polite society — what kind of elite is it? The aristocrat as leader, or the aristocrat as exploiter?Josh mounts a defence of Pump.fun against charges of exploitation, arguing that the real narrative distortion comes from Silicon Valley incumbents who control both capital and media. Google is an advertising company. Revolut’s revenue is almost entirely from crypto trading. The difference is that Pump.fun never needed to take venture capital from the people who set the terms of respectability.The conversation then turns to what good companies actually do. Josh’s framework: they automate layers of the civilisational stack, freeing people to focus on higher-leverage work — the same logic that runs from the Black Death through the Industrial Revolution to self-driving cars. Britain’s declining birth rate, he argues, could be a blessing in disguise if it forces investment in automation rather than cheap labour. But the automated cavalry isn’t coming on its own. Someone has to build it.The episode closes on aesthetics: why Anglofuturism’s AI-generated thatched cottages on the moon are a cry for something better, why the answer might be neo-neo-Gothic, and how Tom once stole a brick from Keble College.In this episode* The aristocrat as leader versus the aristocrat as exploiter — and where startup founders fit* Why Pump.fun is more honest than most of Silicon Valley* Josh’s framework for social value: automate the civilisational stack* The Black Death as the bullish case for declining birth rates* Grammar schools, nuclear energy, and the policies that might actually matter* Why Anglofuturism needs a coherent aesthetic — and what neo-neo-Gothic triple-glazed stained glass might look likeThis conversation took place in November 2025 and was delayed in publication due to triggering an Environmental Impact Assessment from Oxfordshire County Council. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

From a hand-dug allotment in Stroud, Tom and Calum announce a fundamental change of direction for the podcast. After eighteen months of speaking to founders, technologists, and policy thinkers, they have come to an uncomfortable conclusion: it was all wrong. Growth is a trap. GDP is a fiction. The SMR under the village green was never going to save us. What Britain needs is less.The conversion happened gradually, then all at once. Calum attended a silent retreat in Totnes where a man named Giles explained that fusion energy would simply allow humans to destroy the biosphere more efficiently. Tom read a pamphlet about doughnut economics on the FlixBus from London to Oxford and wept. They have since decommissioned the King Charles III Space Station and replaced it with a community pottery studio.The episode explores:* Why GDP is a meaningless number and Britain should stop chasing it: Every guest on this podcast has said something like “Britain needs to grow.” But what is growth? More cars? More data centres? More Georgian townhouses? Tom and Calum now believe that true prosperity is measured in leisure time, hedgerow density, and the number of independently owned bookshops per capita. “We looked at the data and realised we’d been measuring the wrong things. The happiest people we’ve ever met were on Pitcairn Island.”* The case for shutting down Britain’s tech sector and replacing it with cooperatively owned farms: Technology has given humanity targeted advertising, algorithmic anxiety, and a website where you can bet on meme coins named after dogs. Britain’s attempt to replicate this is not a national strategy — it is a cry for help. What if, instead of incubators, we had more allotments? What if, instead of AI, we had more canal boats? Calum explains why the Coase theorem actually supports a return to subsistence agriculture if you think about it hard enough.* Deindustrialisation was actually good and we should finish the job: The listeners of this podcast have spent two years complaining about deindustrialisation. Tom and Calum now believe it didn’t go far enough. Why does Britain still manufacture anything at all? Every factory is a moral injury to the landscape. The Lake District doesn’t need a semiconductor fab. It needs to be left alone.* Immigration, but for trees: Britain’s real population crisis is botanical. There are fewer mature oaks in England than at any point since the Domesday Book. Tom proposes a radical visa programme for ancient woodland — expedited planning approval, no environmental impact assessment, immediate indefinite leave to remain. “If we treated trees the way we treat care workers, the New Forest would have a unicorn by now. But it wouldn’t need one, because it’s a forest.”* Why this podcast will now be released quarterly, on handmade paper, delivered by bicycle courier: The subscription model is itself a form of growth ideology. Anglofuturism will henceforth be an Anglopastoralism zine, printed on recycled copies of The Economist, available at selected zero-waste shops in Frome and Hebden Bridge. Calum will illustrate each edition with potato prints.Plus: why notice periods are actually too short, why the overseas territories should be returned to the seabirds, the case for replacing the House of Lords with a citizens’ assembly selected exclusively from people who have never read a Substack, and whether Georgian townhouses on the moon were, in retrospect, a warning sign.Tom and Calum recorded this episode by speaking into a hollowed-out gourd connected to a length of twine. The audio quality reflects this. They will not be taking questions. Aeron has been fired. This episode was recorded on 1 April. Normal service will resume once we get the biodiesel engines back up and running. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

From the King Charles III Space Station, Tom and Calum descend into a drone-filled kitchen in West Oxford — the home of HomeDAO, a startup programme that’s part incubator, part monastery, and part answer to a question British universities have stopped asking: what do you do with the most relentlessly ambitious young people in the country?Josh, HomeDAO’s co-founder, has been running the programme since he was 21. The model is unusual: 18 members per year, $350,000 each, no requirement for a fleshed-out idea or even a co-founder. What HomeDAO selects for above all else is commitment — the willingness to go all in. The results so far include Pump.fun, now essentially a Twitch competitor built on meme coins; ExoLabs, a distributed inference company attracting serious AI investors; Rhinestone, Ethereum infrastructure born out of a hackathon; and Footium, a virtual footballing universe that raised over $3 million in an NFT sale in under an hour.The conversation turns to why Oxford’s universities have become hostile to the disagreeably ambitious, what it takes to build institutions that endure, and whether Britain could capture the next generation of global founders simply by opening the door.The episode explores:* Why HomeDAO selects for commitment over raw intelligence — and what that looks like in practice* The idiosyncratic origins of Pump.fun, ExoLabs, Rhinestone, and Footium* How universities have excluded the maniacally ambitious in the name of openness* The Coase theorem applied to startup formation and why coordination costs are falling* Oxford vs Silicon Valley vs Bali: what makes a place magnetic to founders* Whether Britain has a massive immigration arbitrage opportunity — and why problems of taste don’t scaleThis conversation took place in November 2025 and was delayed in publication due to triggering an Environmental Impact Assessment from Oxfordshire County Council. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Katie Lam came to Westminster via Goldman Sachs, Number 10, the AI company Faculty, and the Home Office. She has seen the British state from the outside and the inside and her verdict is the same both times: it is less than the sum of its parts. Bright people, right intentions, and at the end of another week, no progress on where things stood at the end of last week. The problem is not obstructive civil servants — those are rarer than the cliche suggests. The problem is a machine with many people who can say no, almost nobody who can say yes, and every single one of them incentivised to avoid risk. The cumulative effect is a state that tries to do everything and achieves almost nothing.Tom, Calum, and Katie discuss:* The state as a ratchet that never goes back: Every crisis creates a new team, a new association, a new point person. Brexit, COVID, each one added barnacles that never get scraped off. The wedding venue association. The ten-person team on banking access equality, set up by a coalition minister, still running. “Any department at any one time will have so many top priorities.” Keir Starmer has twenty-five number one priorities. If everything is the top priority, nothing is.* The moral case for a smaller state — not the ideological one: The version of this argument that says the state is abstractly bad will fail. The version that says this system cannot work at this size, and here are the specific things it will do well instead, might win. “Whatever arm of the state my constituents have been interacting with has let them down. The most common thing people say to me is: nothing works.”* The individually justifiable, collectively intolerable problem: Michael Gove’s line about planning applies everywhere. Each regulation makes sense on its own. Together they are strangling the country. You have to win each small argument and the big argument simultaneously. That is why it is hard. That is why it has not been done.* Nuclear or nothing on energy: The highest industrial energy prices in the developed world. Second highest domestic. No economy has ever grown meaningfully with a relative energy price like Britain’s now. “The only way to solve for price and security in the long term is tons of nuclear baseload.” Intermittent renewables make sense at a domestic level. They cannot power a country.* Mass immigration as economic self-sabotage: The health and social care visa was projected to bring 6,000 people a year. In three years, 600,000 came. Threshold salary of £20,500. These are not the physics professors or Goldman colleagues that educated professionals picture when they think about immigration. “We decided we would rather have people who are basically underpaid than pay people enough to do those jobs.” Meanwhile Britain builds fewer industrial robots than Turkey or Thailand.* The urban professional mistake that broke British politics: Educated people in cities looked at their French and Italian colleagues at Goldman and thought: this is immigration. It was not. Those people were a vanishingly small fraction of who actually came. “They conflated the people they knew with the people who were arriving.” Governments listened and were persuaded. A terrible error.* What conservatism actually is: Not that nothing should change. “That is the parody of conservatism.” Conservatism is knowing what is infinitely precious — the king on the chessboard — and being willing to move or sacrifice every other piece to protect it. In Britain that means the village cricket clubs, the ukulele choirs, the medieval churches, the instinct of people who end up in the same place to build something together. “It doesn’t need to be improved. It just needs to be allowed to be what it is.”* What the government can do that nobody else can: “What real political leadership can do is say to the people: we believe in ambition, in being bold and brave and trying things, in understanding that success only comes through failure.” Then back it up with tax and regulatory policy. The current government believes everything is a job for government unless you can prove otherwise. Katie believes the opposite.Plus: being bowled out by a sixteen-year-old Afghan refugee at the village cricket club, why the birth rate probably cannot be fixed by policy but might respond to hope, the Laminators and their ambitions for a Gaddafi-style female bodyguard unit, and whether Katie Lam is an Anglofuturist. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Ben Judah spent time as a special adviser to David Lammy at the Foreign Office, which means he worked on the Chagos deal, knows what Diego Garcia actually does, and cannot tell you. What he can tell you is that the deal was initiated by David Cameron, pushed hard by the Biden administration, and that the Americans were genuinely considering cutting Britain out entirely and handing the islands directly to Mauritius. Once you understand that, the deal looks rather different. It also turned Ben from a progressive Atlanticist into something closer to a Britanno-Gaullist — because the Chagos story is really a story about what happens when you are completely dependent on an ally who keeps changing its mind.Tom, Calum, and Ben discuss:* What Diego Garcia actually does, and why it gives you vertigo: Ben can’t tell you under the Official Secrets Act. What he can say is that in the 1960s the Americans identified these remote islands, halfway to everywhere and commanding the approaches to India and China, as the ideal location for certain supercapacities that only a true hyperpower could build. Britain got access in exchange for staying. The deal was extraordinary value. It is also not available anymore.* Why the deal was inevitable, whoever was in government: The legal perimeter was collapsing through lawfare. Mauritius was on the verge of binding rulings. The Americans — under both parties, across multiple administrations — were telling London the same thing: do a deal or we pull the investment and move the capacities to Hawaii. “The only way Britain could hurt us is by not doing this deal.” Cameron started the negotiations. Labour finished them.* The Chagos problem is really the America problem: Being bullied into a deal by one part of the American system, unable to rely on the other part to hold indefinitely, watching the asset be used as a tool of American domestic politics. “It’s a really sorry story, but the problem is our relationship with America.” Ben’s Damascene conversion to Anglo-Gaullism happened in the Foreign Office.* Britain is squandering its overseas territories: A map on the UN website lists Britain as having more colonies than anyone else put together. Almost every single one is in some kind of crisis. British Virgin Islands: money laundering, corruption, Russian and Chinese influence. Turks and Caicos: Haitian gangs. Pitcairn: fifteen inhabitants, one young person left, no groundwater. St Helena: 4,000 people on one of the most strategically crucial islands in the Atlantic. “We might wake up in 80 years, a weaker Britain cornered by lawfare, no inhabitants, and how can we prove we should stay?” The French made their territories overseas départements with seats in the National Assembly. Marine Le Pen campaigns in Réunion. Nobody in the British cabinet visits Bermuda.* The case for overseas kingdoms: Ben’s plan, developed during his time at the Foreign Office, is to incorporate the territories as overseas kingdoms of the United Kingdom, give them seats in the House of Lords, run them from a central ministry rather than the Foreign Office, and remove them from the UN’s naughty list. “There is no reason there should always be a very small population in the Falklands. If these islands belonged to the Americans or the Chinese, they would have dreams for them. Where are ours?”* The left needs to discover futurism: AI, biotech, hydrogen, fusion — all right-coded, all ceded to the right by default. “That is f*****g stupid.” The degrowth movement is Luddite moralism that doesn’t understand what it’s talking about. “If you’re centre-left and you’ve got a friend who’s a de-growther, please pitilessly make fun of them.” What’s needed is a progressive futurism: grab the technologies of the 21st century, deploy them for better outcomes for British people. De Gaulle came to power when France had nineteen governments in ten years and a quagmire in Algeria, and threw the whole country into a quest for French modernity. There’s something in that.Plus: what the Americans really think of British access to their supercapacities, why Malta’s bid to become an overseas kingdom was killed by Treasury mindset, the military perimeter that goes unspoken in every public discussion of the Chagos treaty, and whether the right needs to own up about Brexit’s role in the Boriswave. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Part two of our conversation with Will Orr-Ewing gets into the harder questions: whether a genuinely meritocratic elite is more dangerous than an aristocratic one, why AI tutoring has solved the wrong problem, and what it would take to build an Odyssean education for Britain’s most talented kids.Tom, Calum, and Will discuss:* The internet should have produced a generation of Einsteins — it didn’t: Eric Hoel’s provocation that the most naked conclusion you can draw from the internet, and now AI, is that the constraint was never information availability. The knowledge was always there. We’ve done something bad to intrinsic motivation. “Where are all the people who used the internet to teach themselves untold knowledge?”* Why AI tutoring has solved the wrong problem: Alpha School puts children in pods on the 35th floor of a New York skyscraper, not allowed to communicate, staring at screens. Will’s friend visited and saw four tantrums in a single school trip. The problem isn’t personalisation — it’s that children don’t need education adapted to their interests. They need their interests adapted to what’s worth learning. And AI cannot do the one thing that actually works: be someone a child wants to become.* The meritocracy trap: A genuinely meritocratic elite is a terrifying thing. They owe nothing to anyone because they earned everything themselves. Whereas the aristocrat could never quite believe he deserved his position — it was an accident of birth — and so noblesse oblige followed naturally. “You look at the winners of the last 20 or 30 years. They just don’t seem to have a sense of obligation to their country.”* The Odyssean curriculum — Britain as the school of the world: Cummings’ essay argued England could be what Athens was to Greece — a model for how to educate statesmen and scientists. Will wants an Odyssean version of the King’s Maths School from age 14: Thucydides, Lee Kuan Yew, applied geopolitics. Cohort effects like the Brit School at the Grammys. Currently the maths olympiads have barely 600-700 entries a year. “Our future disproportionately relies on those people. And at the moment their track leads to being a quant at a hedge fund.”* Elite kids as asset managers of their own human capital: Daniel Markovitz on how the most ambitious families in the world — Will has offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, London — are depleting their children through constant striver credentialism. Nonverbal reasoning tests that you forget the moment you’re through them. “If it was Dostoevsky, at least it might stay with you. But most of these competitive entrance exams have no enduring value whatsoever beyond your LinkedIn trajectory.”* What Will actually wants for his children: Walking through Parliament and knowing every statesman on the wall. Walking through the countryside and knowing every tree, every bird. “Education properly done is a vitalising force which enchants your everyday perception.” And one other thing: if they’re in a room of a thousand people and 999 say sign the document, the moral courage to say no.Plus: Rory Stewart’s dad recreating Waterloo in Hyde Park before school, the Anglofuturist Great Hedgerow of Britain as a children’s internet firewall, Korean tutoring centres prohibited after 10pm, and whether Singapore has started workshopping “thinking outside the box” with an actual drawn box. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Will Orr-Ewing has spent 20 years tutoring and founded Keystone Tutors, but he’s not here to tell you to hire a maths tutor for your nine-year-old. His argument is bigger: that Britain once had a culture of self-directed intellectual growth that state schooling quietly strangled, that the billion-pound tutoring industry is almost entirely pointed at the wrong goals, and that the GCSE system is simultaneously boring the top of the cognitive distribution and failing the bottom. Tom and Calum receive him in the somewhat dusty schoolroom of the King Charles III Space Station to design an Anglofuturist curriculum—and debate whether the state can ever do what a parent, a tutor, or a good book can.Tom, Calum, and Will discuss:* Why tutoring is a superpower pointed at mediocre ends: “You’ve got this massive potential for intellectual expansion, but directed at very menial, mediocre ends.” The billion-pound industry is almost entirely Kumon-style drilling or GCSE cramming. The mimetic relationship between tutor and student—where the neophyte absorbs not just knowledge but how someone thinks—is almost entirely wasted on exam prep.* The autodidactic culture that state schooling killed: Before the 1870 Education Act, elite education meant acres of childhood time for reading, with tutors as a clinic to check progress rather than the engine of learning itself. “All education is self-education,” as Charlotte Mason put it. The state provided for the bottom but quietly smothered that instinct everywhere else.* GCSEs are failing everyone except the middling: Thirty percent fail maths and English GCSE every single year. The top of the distribution is bored stiff. “It’s only the middle runners who are really being served.” Schools are so incentivised to chase results that any choice between intellectual stretch and hammering assessment objective three goes the same way.* The case for releasing kids at fourteen: The bottom thirty percent for whom the credentialist conveyor belt—GCSEs, university, graduate scheme—is “clearly so unenticing.” A more apprentice-based model, local relationships with employers, learning a trade. Michael Faraday was a bookbinder’s apprentice for seven years. A lot of fourteen-year-olds would rather be on an Isambard factory floor than in another PowerPoint-driven lesson—if the smartphone weren’t in their pocket.* The state cannot replace parental culture: “The real problem is that the state cannot replace the role of a genuine parental culture.” Any attempt to enforce it through the curriculum cheapens it. The dirigiste continental model—school as nation-building—turns what was once emergent into a bureaucratic goal liable to be rewritten by a single pen. And yet: do we trust modern parents to deliver? “I’m not sure I do.”* Schools as the last mile of the welfare state: Teaching children to use the loo. Brushing teeth. Breakfast clubs. “Whenever there’s an issue we decide as a society that we care about—the environment, AI literacy, financial literacy—it gets shoved into the curriculum, further bloating it and further undermining the chances of delivering something excellent.”* The Anglofuturist village school prospectus: Gowns and mortarboards. Blackboards. History running from Æthelstan rather than Rosa Parks. Drone-building classes. A wall between the boys’ and girls’ houses patrolled on a mathematically complex schedule—crack the algorithm, and what awaits you is left as an exercise for the reader.Plus: why Æthelstan would be confined to a cartoon on a Twinkl worksheet even if teachers wanted him, the left-wing case for aristocratic tuition, education savings accounts in half of American states, and whether sourdough is woke. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

In part one, we explored why drug development costs are exploding and how better software could fix it. In part two, we get practical: what’s actually stopping Britain from becoming a biotech superpower, and what would it take to get there?Meri pulls no punches. The single hardest thing about building Lindus Health in the UK? Three-month notice periods. Want to staff up for new trials? Wait three months for people to work out their notice—during which they’re not exactly doing their best work. “It’s incredibly ineffective. It acts as a transfer from the most productive companies to the less productive companies people are resigning from.” Meanwhile, US contracts have no notice period or a couple of weeks max.But notice periods are just the start. The real bottleneck is that Britain produces excellent early-stage research but can’t capture the value because we’ve made ourselves an unattractive market for drug sales. NICE’s role has become “get the lowest price possible, even if that means greatly delaying when the drug is distributed in the UK.” We’ll spend five years negotiating a thousand pounds off a course of treatment while people literally die. The solution? Turn the NHS into a pharma company—have it fund and run trials like the RECOVERY trial that discovered dexamethasone, then earn royalties by selling the drugs to America.From ethics committees run by religious volunteers who delay STI trials to promote abstinence, to why Brexit was actually good for medical devices (FDA approval now automatically carries over to UK), to the limits of in-silico trials and why randomised control trials are “literally magic,” Meri lays out a vision for fully automated luxury NHS—and explains why everything comes down to clinical trials, even in the age of AI.Tom, Calum, and Meri discuss:* Why Meri’s company had to go transatlantic: “We haven’t moved to the US—we’re transatlantic. About 150 people, half still in UK. But look, I’m not going to deny there are strong forces pulling us to the US.” Not capital availability—European investors funded them to Series B. It’s the market. “Markets aren’t big enough in Europe to sustain global category dominant companies. If you want to build category defining companies in the UK, you need to grow the economy.”,* Three-month notice periods are killing British startups: “The single hardest thing about building the company so far in the UK has been notice periods. We’ve won new trials, need to staff up, hire good people—takes time. Then they have three months between resigning and joining us. It’s incredibly ineffective because once you’ve resigned, you’re not doing your best work.” US contracts: no notice period or couple weeks. “Even a couple weeks is enough to fully hand over even a senior productive person’s work.”,* What Lindus Health actually does: Design overall study, find sites, train them, oversee operations through software that integrates with health records and labs. Monitor for errors and patient safety risks in real time. For home-based trials like ME/CFS: “We employ nurses directly to visit patients in their home or have video calls. We do pretty much everything.”,* Adaptive trials that analyze data in real time: “Clinical trials today are very waterfall. Design, run, analyze months after it’s wrapped up. Our software runs every trial adaptively. We don’t know how many patients we’ll enroll or what ratio between control and treatment. Software automatically randomises patients in a way that boosts statistical power and stops enrolling as soon as we’ve enrolled enough to show statistical effect.” Not p-hacking—stays blinded,* Testing multiple variations in parallel: “Should be testing multiple in parallel. One control arm of 100 people, indeterminate number of arms with slight variation of dose or patient population. For the same time and massive cost saving, get way richer data.” Already doing this today,* Why in-silico trials are limited: “RCTs are literally magic. By randomizing participants fairly, you control for all possible variables without needing to know what they are. To run effective in-silico experiments, you need to know what all possible variables are, which is essentially impossible because humans are incredibly complex.” Where they work: late-phase cancer (unethical to give placebo) and psychedelics (you immediately know if you got ketamine),* Brexit was actually good for medical devices: “If you get FDA approval for a medical device, you automatically get approval in UK—been a big triumph post-Brexit. What would be amazing is to have it both ways.” For drugs, you still need slightly varying requirements for each country but one expensive phase three gets approval in Europe, Japan, US, South Korea,* Ethics committees run by unhinged volunteers: “Someone delayed phase two oncology trial—so people were going to die—because they felt the font was too small in documents. Delays by at least four weeks because the committee only meets every four weeks.” One person delayed STI test trial because of religious conviction, insisted on promoting abstinence,* Just pay for private ethics committees: “In US you can pay private regulated company to convene ethics committee. Costs five or ten grand but we get quick good feedback and can start in a week. That’s a no-brainer—same centralised system but pay the people, implement rigorous standards, make it self-funding.”,* The COVID trials that worked: Recovery trial—Martin Landray ran very fast pragmatic trial testing different COVID treatments. Discovered dexamethasone was effective at reducing mortality. “Extremely cheap in drug trial terms.” Their VP of clinical operations was key person behind panoramic and principle trials, both fully remote. “By really tight integration with health system, you can run trials so much faster and cheaper in a way that’s not possible unless you are the health system.”,* Turn the NHS into a pharma company: “Have NHS run trials for free or very low cost like RECOVERY. In return they own a share of the drug. We’ve run phases 1-3 on NHS very quickly—now we’re the distributor or we sell license to pharma and earn significant royalty. British patients get access sooner and it would be incredibly profitable because you run these trials so much cheaper than on US healthcare systems.” Would require fundamentally re-architecting NHS around for-profit model,* Why speed matters more than people think: “Because of how patents work in life sciences, every day that ticks by is literally on average worth hundreds of thousands for the average drug. That’s less revenue you could be earning before the patent cliff when drug goes off patent and becomes generic.” Speed should be incredibly important—and they reinvest that revenue into fundamental R&D,* The vision for 50 years from now: “If we can crack opening this bottleneck—safely test 10x, 100x as many iterations of potential drugs at scale—you inevitably get healthcare bioabundance. This has to happen to cure cancer, cure Alzheimer’s, live to 200. Everything comes down to clinical trials. Until AGI can completely simulate the human body, you literally cannot objectively claim you’ve cured cancer until you’ve tested it in enough humans.”,Plus: Why lipids massaged into mouse hair could cure Tom’s Norwood 2, the meeting rooms named after James Lind’s original trial arms (cider, seawater, oranges, lemons, barley water, garlic paste), and why they randomised people onto different drinks at their early parties.Your clinical trial success depends on notice periods—who knew? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.anglofuturism.coIt’s Valentine’s Day morning and Calum woke up with Rupert Lowe promising to restore Britain. Tom made bacon sandwiches and tea with plenty of sugar. And Britain’s vertical launch dreams just died—Orbex, the country’s great hope for homegrown rockets, has collapsed into administration. Is this a tragedy or were they building the wrong rockets all along?What follows is a sprawling argument about whether Britain should mourn or celebrate, why the government won’t fund proper space ambitions, and the deeper aesthetic war underlying every political debate in this country. From Jim Ratcliffe’s “colonisation” comments triggering the PM to demand an apology, to the question of whether HCBGs or keffiyeh-wearing Oxfam shoppers represent the real Britain, Tom and Calum diagnose why we can’t have nice things—and what it would take to build an O’Neill cylinder with cricket fields anyway.Tom and Calum discuss:* The Orbex collapse as Britain’s space 9/11: The vertical launch company went into administration after a Franco-German takeover fell through. Tom mourns the loss of Union Jack rockets. Calum says “they were building the wrong rockets”—small satellites when SpaceX’s super heavy lift has made that model obsolete. “We’re doing this weird combination of all space in industry, very little government funding, but we want the totemic sexy capabilities. We’re not providing a market for them.”,* Britain’s actually brilliant space sector: Space Forge with their 1,000°C furnace and Pridwen heat shield named after Arthur’s shield. Surrey Satellite Technology Limited pioneering shoebox-sized satellites. Astroscale doing “space MOTs”—fixing and removing orbital debris. “We do have a pretty cool space sector in terms of the small stuff, the space engineering frontier.”,* The milestone payment model SpaceX used: “You offer fixed amounts of money as milestones. If you hit the milestones you release more.” Tom Kalil’s Renaissance Philanthropy approach. “If you put up money for competitions you only have to pay out if you get the capability.” Far better than cost-plus contracts that create infinite money pumps and overruns,* The regulatory sandbox is actually good: Companies working on new space tech can “send someone to sit in a room with someone from DSIT and come up with regulation in real time.” If you want to test nuclear propulsion in space, “the cold hand of DSIT reaches out even that far. It will gently tickle you instead of totally throttling you.”,* The mythic quality Britain’s missing: Lord Kempsell asked what the plan was to get an Englishman on Mars. No answer. “I think it’s the mark of a healthy country to have that kind of ambition. I think it’s good to foster the ambition of young men who might wish to die defending the British settlement on Olympus Mons.”,* The real aesthetic war in Britain: Not HCBGs vs reformers. It’s “Green Party style—privilege is bad, keffiyeh as your style statement, women with quite short-cropped hair, big boots, Doc Martens with Superman socks. A kind of lower-middle-class earnest, very morally fierce Britain of suburban middle towns.” In Cornwall: coastal towns are “Joules, Jack Wills, Helly Hansen, HCBG Central.” Inland towns: “two vegan restaurants and an occult bookshop.”,* Jim Ratcliffe and elite defection: Said Britain has been “colonised by immigrants.” PM demanded apology, Number 10 welcomed it when he gave soft apology. Tom’s friend on football group chat: “plainly racist.” Tom: “I don’t think it is. Strong meat linguistically, but not plain racism.” Government wasting time on words instead of integration issues,* Why the PM shut it down so fast: Not strictly semantically accurate but “there is something in it—whole areas have changed, people staying, sending remittances home, organized crime. You could say there’s some truth to the word colonisation. The fact there’s some truth to it is why the PM has been so quick to shut it down.”,* The progressive theory of speech codes: “If you punish people hard enough for breaking the speech code, the problem will go away. Because there was no problem anyway. The problem was the working class getting false consciousness because of elites like Ratcliffe.” So you punish Ratcliffe at the source—despite him being a tax exile which doesn’t help his public image,Plus: Tom’s 10pm tatty scone gammon eggs Benedict, why Calum thought he’d be grooming talent at Civic Future, the milkman arriving at KC3, fake smoke allegations at British rocket companies, and whether frame-mogging Chinese astronauts requires large bums like skeleton bobsledders.

The pharmaceutical industry has a dirty secret: it takes $2 billion and a decade to approve the average drug, and these numbers are getting exponentially worse. While computing power doubles every few years, drug development costs double every decade—a phenomenon called Eroom’s Law (Moore’s Law backwards).Lindus Health was founded to fix this crisis. Named after James Lind, the Royal Navy surgeon who ran the first randomized controlled trial in 1747 (discovering that citrus prevents scurvy and accidentally creating the Sicilian Mafia in the process), the London-based company is slashing clinical trial costs and timelines through better software, smarter processes, and a willingness to actually keep up with FDA guidance—which, remarkably, the industry ignores.In this first part of our conversation, we explore why pharmaceutical shelves are lined with miracle drugs gathering dust, how the NHS simultaneously possesses world-class health data while being catastrophically bad at purchasing new treatments, and what Britain could gain by becoming the world’s biotech testing ground.Tom, Calum, and Meri discuss:* Why drug development costs are doubling every decade: Eroom’s Law means $2 billion and 10-12 years per drug on average. “A tech bro would say ‘it one shot me’ right? How have we got this incredibly important industry getting exponentially less efficient when all the inputs—genome sequencing, compute—are getting exponentially more efficient?” The vast majority of costs are in phase 1-3 clinical trials,* The COVID vaccine trials were archaic: Meri volunteered and “it was like stepping back 30 years.” He had to download Microsoft Edge because the signup website didn’t have an SSL certificate. “That sounds trivial and silly, but that probably puts off at least half of potential volunteers, which makes it twice as long to enroll and potentially twice as expensive.”,* Pharma shelves are lined with miracle drugs gathering dust: “You would be shocked. There are just umpteen compounds sitting on shelves gathering dust.” Often shelved for ridiculous reasons: “This was a pet project of this guy who got fired and no one else wants to touch it.” Or outdated NPV thresholds. Because trials are so expensive, it’s not worth their time,* The regulations are surprisingly permissive: “This will sound controversial but I think the regulations have an appropriate level of risk modulation. You can literally go on the FDA’s website and see briefing documents where they are admonishing pharma for not being innovative enough. What other industry is the regulator trying to force private companies to be more innovative?” Most barriers are self-imposed,* James Lind and the Sicilian Mafia: In 1747, Lind ran the first RCT to cure scurvy—up to 50% of sailors on long voyages just died. Six treatment arms, oranges and lemons won. “One of the key innovations that powered the British Empire.” The demand for citrus was so great the Royal Navy went to Sicily, and “the Sicilian Mafia formed as a collective bargaining organization to help producers get a fair price.”,* The low-hanging fruit argument is cope: “Most people would say ‘oh well maybe we’ve discovered all the early targets and all that’s left is really hard to drug.’ That just seemed like terrible cope. 30-40 years ago we discovered medicines by zapping them into mice randomly. Now we’ve sequenced the human genome.”,* Britain has incredible advantages it’s squandering: The NHS has “probably the best health data set in the world. Completely longitudinal cradle to grave, all one system, records coded the same way.” UK Biobank is world-class. “There’s a lot of early phase research that originates in the UK. But when you’re running later trials, you want a good early adopter market. That unfortunately is not the UK.”,* The NHS purchasing problem: NICE has decided its role is to get the lowest price possible “even at the expense of waiting five years to acquire a drug that could be life-saving. We’ll spend five years negotiating a thousand pounds off a course of treatment and you think, is that worth it? People are literally dying who could have not died.”,* The dream scenario for Britain: “The NHS will fund the entire clinical trial and in return the drug will be free on the NHS. Maybe the NHS earns money off royalties of sales in other markets. That would be incredibly powerful, incredibly accretive to the British economy, but it would require political will.” If everyone’s going to worship the NHS like a deity, at least make it productive,* GPs are secretly based: They’re “basically private companies and thus much more flexible and fast and easy to work with” than NHS hospitals. Lind runs many trials through GP surgeries and patients’ homes to avoid hospital bureaucracy,* The ME/CFS trial: Running a trial for chronic fatigue syndrome with a German pharma company entirely remotely because “the sickest patients are literally bed-bound.” Using a drug already approved elsewhere. “I don’t care how the disease mechanistically works. I just care that we can run a proper experiment. If it works, I kind of don’t care how it has an effect as long as it works.” Testing beats theory,* Why the industry won’t innovate: “Incredible inertia driven ultimately by pharma having huge regulatory barriers to entry and thus very little competition and thus little pressure to innovate.” COVID vaccines succeeded because there was “for once, intense competition.” The problem isn’t that regulations are too strict—it’s that nobody bothers to follow guidance that would make things faster,* What Lindus Health actually does: Makes clinical trials faster and cheaper through better tech and processes. Uses AI to generate higher quality trial documents, quality control protocols, find patients more efficiently. $80 million raised, majority of trials now in US because “healthcare market is dominated by the US.” Over half of clients’ trials are American,Plus: The hellish anti-snoring device, why thalidomide broke our risk tolerance, how decentralized trials work, the bitter lesson of machine learning applied to pharma, and why Meri thinks Britain could create the next Novo Nordisk if we just got our act together.Part two coming soon. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

In our first episode of 2026, we’re back aboard the King Charles III Space Station to review the year that was and set our ambitions for the year ahead. What follows is two hours of sprawling conversation about dinner party politics, whether culture can emerge from hinge, the declining willingness to fight wars, Chinese peptides, home counties baby girls, and why Britain’s irrelevance might actually be our greatest strategic advantage. Plus: would any of us actually sign up to fight? What defines an existential threat? And is Tom finally going to get married?Tom, Calum, and Aeron discuss:* Dinner party theory of politics and why it causes decline: Our legislators aren’t very intellectual, so they’re strongly affected by what other elites think. They don’t want legislation that embarrasses them at dinner parties. This creates consensus-seeking that produces median outcomes. When power is diffuse, people stay strictly in line. But give them confidence and they’ll act outside the distribution,* The LFG question: Can you change Britain through charismatic campaigning and elite support? Or do you need deeper institutional power? Lawrence Newport had success with the bully campaign, but what’s next?* The Green Belt debate: Tom argues for preserving culture. Calum argues culture and market efficiency are at odds—prioritizing abstract goals while people suffer is like hammering screws into washing machines. The synthesis: build on it, but make it beautiful. “Culture will happen anyway. People want to talk, innovate, meet. The fruits will follow.”,* Would we fight for Britain?: Tom: “If it was existential, of course.” But what counts as existential? Do they have to be in France? We’ve become shielded from risk. In the Falklands, HMS Sheffield caused huge outcry. Russia’s tolerance vastly exceeds ours. “It’s difficult to fight a war if you can’t lose any troops.”,* The HCBG (Home Counties Baby Girl) problem: Silicon Valley has ABGs. We need HCBGs to fill this role in Britain. Core features: Whispering Angel, Barbour with cartridge pockets, drives the will to power in British founders,* The space vision: There’s a clear tech tree: cheap energy → compute + manufacturing → space. “Britain should be doing everything it can to get to space as the new frontier.” As more mass becomes accessible in space vs Earth, your country’s starting size becomes irrelevant—it’s purely about timing. “I really believe Britain should be the wealthiest country in the galaxy.”,* Why Britain’s irrelevance is our advantage: US and China are locked into war. Like European land wars during our Industrial Revolution, they’re tied up while “we can focus on ourselves. Self-care.” We’re passing into irrelevance and that’s a blessing—we can build while they fight,* Aeron’s child prodigy plan: A forecasting outfit put 80% on emergence of a child with “heretofore unforeseen powers” in 20 years. Aeron has the criteria: speaks 4-5 languages, Grandmaster chess by 18, Math Olympiad medal. “He won’t be able to tie a shoelace. Very aristocratic.”,* Tom’s dating Calendly: The plan for HCBGs to book dates with Tom. An AI evaluates your Pinterest—how many Bath stone houses? What’s your Emma Bridgewater pattern? “Show me your Aga abundance, your Barbour jacket abundance.”,Plus: Muscular Anglofuturism returns (six kilos of muscle minimum), sending a space Aga into orbit, teaching humanities bluffers to build drones, chicken wine discourse, and why reading is literally elitist now.Full 2026 kickoff out now. Go forth, conquer, multiply. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

In the second half of our Christmas special aboard Theatreship, Tom and Calum welcome Benedict Springbett (the railway man working to give London a better network than Paris) and Aeron Laffere (our producer, who’s raising Britain’s birth rate one child at a time while building coordination technology). What follows is a deep dive into Coasian economics, the decline of English composers, and why Aeron believes Brian Eno is one of Britain’s greatest artists for composing the Windows 95 startup sound.Benedict reveals his plan to build five new Crossrail lines (one more than Paris) that can pay for themselves through housing development. Aeron explains palendr, his project to reduce coordination costs and help people form communities beyond just shagging and drinking. And we learn that the optimal amount of Christmas cracker explosions is greater than zero—perhaps significantly greater if you’re allowed to fire Roman candles at annoying relatives.Tom and Calum discuss with Benedict and Aeron:* Six Crossrail lines to beat Paris: Benedict’s working on giving London a total of six cross-city rail tunnels (five more than we have). The Old Castle Line would be just 5km of tunnel to join north and south of the river, relieving the Northern Line. Crossrail 2 would connect Clapham Junction to King’s Cross/Euston, serving both with one 250m train,* Britain’s secret railway blessing: We inherited 12 separate railway termini because 19th century companies refused to cooperate and just grabbed territory from each other through “cutthroat capitalism at its most ruthless.” Now we can join them up with relatively short tunnels,* The F1 supply chain is a national treasure: Germany doesn’t have it. When German customers ask Isambard about lead times for exotic materials, they’re confused that the answer is “hours not weeks.” The F1 industry created material stockholders who can deliver overnight because Grand Prix engineers need new parts immediately,* The pewter tankard with a glass bottom: Benedict’s Christmas gift—historically used to check if you’re being press-ganged into the Royal Navy by spotting a coin in your drink. Calum plans to use it to avoid doing the washing up,* Coasean Christmas: The problem of pollution is reciprocal. A noisy pub imposes costs on neighbors, but if neighbors stop the pub being noisy, they impose costs on the pub. Either way, somebody pays. The solution: bargaining. The pub could buy out the High Court judge who got the beer garden shut at 7pm,* Aunt Margaret’s Mariah Carey problem: Should Gerald compensate Margaret for loss of festive atmosphere when he demands she stop playing “All I Want for Christmas” on repeat? Or vice versa? Benedict suggests putting a baby in the room—won’t mind the music, Margaret doesn’t feel lonely, Gerald escapes,* The optimal amount of fire is greater than zero: Benedict argues we shouldn’t worry about Christmas cracker externalities. We have far fewer fires than we used to (because no more open fireplaces). Calum wants Roman candles he can fire across the table at annoying relatives,* Why palendr exists: Aeron and a friend met through Anglofuturism built a machine for eliciting preferences using embeddings and vector maths. It’s like “Hinge meets Palantir”—you answer prompts, the system extracts meaning, puts you in a space where similar people and events are “a short hop mathematically”,* The coordination tax: Groups in this space keep independently building dashboards, duplicating work. The British progress community formed partly through high-agency people and big Schelling points, but “those constraints don’t scale.” Lower coordination costs = more communities = more people organizing toward something better,* Why in-person matters: “It’s hard to really grok how another person thinks until you spend quite a bit of time with them, probably over a couple of pints.” Once you have a mental model for how someone sees the world, you can predict their thinking—”that just oils the wheels so much more easily”,* Britain’s club tradition is our secret weapon: Medieval European rulers required permission from the king to form associations. England didn’t, which is why we could easily create the London Stock Exchange, cooperative movement, working men’s clubs, private members clubs. “The spirit is still there even though people do it quite a lot less”,* Blackballing is good actually: Open invite policies risk “one person comes along and ends up causing a lot of drama.” Having members proposed and seconded, with ability to blackball, keeps things open while maintaining quality. Getting people to pay also forces commitment,* Why England has no great composers: The center of gravity was continental for centuries. By the time British royalty could be patrons, fashion was for French and German things. Victorian composers like Vaughan Williams and Elgar? “Not one of them wrote a symphony to the steam engine.” They’re guilty men of history for pastoral fantasies during the Industrial Revolution,* Brian Eno is Britain’s greatest modern composer: Progenitor of ambient music, understanding that music would become “like wallpaper” long before streaming. But critically: he composed the Windows 95 startup sound. “To compose a three second piano ditty that plays every time you turn on your computer, I think is wonderful”,* Thomas Tallis gets the other vote: “The basis for all music should come from vocal music” and “the early English choral tradition is just stunning. There is absolutely nothing in the world which holds a candle to it.” Unfortunately Spem in Alium is now associated with Fifty Shades of Grey,* The great work is dead (except in cinema): No one does the big impressive novel anymore. Cinema retains the auteur because it has scarcity—you must sit down to enjoy it. But books and music? Too much supply, not enough consumption. “We’re in a post-literate society.” Sally Rooney explicitly retreats from the concept of the great work,* The text auteur is the great tweeter: If text has become background noise, then the person who’s mastered the medium where text is most engaged is the Twitter poster. “There are great tweets that sit and reminisce.” Calum is “struck by reading someone’s jpeg of a dril tweet”,* Benedict’s 60-second triumph: “I’m on a train heading from London up to Glasgow. It’s a maglev.” Proceeds to describe immaculate connections, restored Beeching lines, freight trains carrying British Antarctic Territory ores to Northwest factories, punctuality matching Switzerland and Japan. “Nobody complains about them. They’re no longer a national laughing stock.” Massive applause.Plus: Aeron can identify Tom’s “um” by sight (it’s “a lovely ovaloid”), Calum wants a pre-Columbian Christmas with peacock and pottages shaped like animals filled with the wrong meat, the TOPJAW comparison and who’s more photogenic, and why we need a Tudor-themed restaurant where you eat off bread trenchers and watch a cockfight.If you missed it, go back and listen to Part 1. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Tom and Calum recorded this Christmas special aboard Theatre Ship on the Thames with two guests whose bosses have already graced the podcast: Andrew Kramer from Isembard (the manufacturer re-industrializing the West) and Rebecca Wray from Looking for Growth (the grassroots movement fighting Britain’s decline). What follows is a chaotic celebration of British manufacturing, temperate rainforests, and the extended Anglofuturism universe—complete with a disastrous “Just a Minute” game about life in Britain 50 years from now.We learn that Isembard is scaling from one machine and one camp bed to 25 factories by end of 2026. That Germany lacks Britain’s incredible F1 supply chain (material stockholders can deliver exotic metals in hours, not weeks). That Rebecca waded through a mysterious Oxford rubbish pile in white trainers for content. And that the entire progress community is coalescing into something that might actually save Britain—if they can avoid getting arrested or bogged down in debates about rewilding the Peak District with stunted oaks.Tom and Calum discuss with Andrew and Rebecca:* The Isembard explosion: From one Park Royal site with one CNC machine to four factories (soon to be 25 by end of 2026), expanding into the US and potentially continental Europe. They’re moving beyond precision machining into assembly, sheet metal, and other manufacturing methods,* Why Britain’s F1 supply chain is a secret superpower: German customers ask Isembard how many weeks they factor in for raw materials. The answer? Hours. The F1 industry created a hub where money is no object and parts need to be ready overnight—which means Britain has material stockholding for exotic metals that Germany simply doesn’t have,* The Oxford rubbish pile mystery: Someone got arrested. Rebecca went to investigate in white trainers. It was wet, soggy, disgusting, possibly council waste (needs more investigation). The important thing is LFG got there fast and got footage,* “Designed by Apple in California, Made in China” was always a fallacy: Andrew argues you cannot separate design and manufacturing—the embedded tacit knowledge in the manufacturing process is integral to innovation. This is why we’re going to make iPhones in Britain,* The average machine shop owner is nearing retirement: Decades of underinvestment and outsourcing to China hollowed out British manufacturing. But there’s cause for optimism—young apprentices are now running successful factories. Isembard’s Exeter GM started his apprenticeship just five years ago,* Defence as the wedge: Re-industrialization is easier in defence because there’s an obvious need for sovereign production. But it’s not where you finish—Isambard is already doing consumer parts. The goal is total re-industrialization across all sectors,* Culture is downstream of decline (and upstream of revival): Rebecca argues Britain is stuck in a “doom loop” and needs a cultural reset about what we want the future to look like. Andrew says reindustrialisation is downstream of telling positive stories about British manufacturing—F1, electronics, the incredible companies already doing extraordinary things,* Rebecca wants to rewild England: Specifically with temperate rainforests. She’s from the Peak District and is a moss and fern aficionado (”ferns are really prehistoric plants”). Calum: “Sorry to realise you’re a Natural England plant.” The ingredients for rebuilding Britain: moss and metal,* The Jacquard loom question: Calum was talking with friends about building a Jacquard loom (early programmable looms with punch cards that inspired Babbage and Lovelace). He got shouted down—”No, we should build drones instead.” Russians coming over the horizon > nice fabric,* LFG’s origin story: Rebecca met Lawrence two years ago during the Bully campaign and thought “this is what’s been missing—very focused campaigns that highlight why things are so f*****g wrong.” She went to the first LFG meetup, got asked to do a podcast, said no initially, then said yes,* The extended Anglofuturism universe is real: Everyone at LFG events knows each other. There’s a genuine community forming between LFG, Anglofuturism, and others. It’s becoming a coordinated movement rather than isolated initiatives. “I think we’ve got a good chance to save Britain.”,* Isembard needs your entrepreneurial engineering friends: They’re hiring and recruiting heavily. Send your drawings and step files. They can do thermoplastics, exotic materials, titanium radar-absorbent Antarctica models if needed,* The disastrous “Just a Minute” game: Andrew manages 20 seconds describing flying taxis and lab-grown Full English breakfasts in his Georgian townhouse on the moon. Rebecca gets to “I see the bright lights of Chesterfield” before repeating “Leeds” twice. Tom delivers a masterclass: thatched orbital space stations, English wool pyjamas, bangers and mash in microgravity, billowing smoke from Northern chimney stacks, and the Shackleton Colossus in British Antarctic Territory.Plus: Why Aeron should bring a soundboard to live recordings, why the podcast is “quite camp actually,” the mystery guest who messaged at 4:37am to say he wasn’t in a suitable condition, and Calum’s Druidic ritual of reawakening these Britannic majestic isles (before immediately eliminating himself for repetition).Part 2 coming soon. Let’s f*****g go. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

In part two of our conversation with James W. Phillips and Laura Ryan, things get weirder and more ambitious. We move from the structural problems of academia into the actual scientific missions these labs could pursue—from cells-as-agents to neuromorphic AI to using brain organoids as compute. James reveals his plans to spend January investigating whether Zen meditation practices can tap into healing mechanisms through the gut-brain axis, and Laura makes the case for massive automation in biology.The conversation also gets into the hard questions: Can you really trust taste over metrics? Would philanthropic funding create the same perverse incentives as multiple stakeholders? How worried should we be about engineered pandemics? And is Britain’s ossification just an inevitable consequence of having too many old people?Tom, Calum, James and Laura discuss:* The missions Lovelace Labs could tackle: Drugging disordered proteins (proteins without fixed structures that current methods can’t target), bacterial learning and intelligence at the cellular level, neuromorphic AI that actually models the brain properly, and using brain organoids as biological compute,* Why biology needs massive automation NOW: Laura describes spending a quarter of her PhD time creating gels, running things through gels, analyzing bands—work that should obviously be automated or done by centralized facilities with shared reagent libraries. But academia won’t drive this transition because PhD students are “free labour” to professors,* Calum’s bacterial learning pitch: He wants to build large automated facilities where biologists can upload scripts, run 1,000x more experiments, and get results same-day instead of doing manual pipetting,* The AI integration question: Will AI empower scientists to do more creative thinking? Or create a dystopia where humans are “meat robots” moving plates between machines because it’s cheaper than automation, while hypothesis-generating LLMs compound existing replication problems?,* James’s Zen Buddhist science project: Starting January, he’s investigating whether embodied meditation practices can tap into healing mechanisms through the mind-body connection. He spent time in Zen monasteries and thinks new tools can finally probe these questions scientifically,* Body waves are the new brain waves: Virginia Rutten engineered zebrafish cells to fluoresce when active, then recorded every cell in the body—revealing waves of coordinated activity we’d never seen before. James thinks mystery conditions might involve deficiencies in these body waves, just like we talk about brain wave disorders,* The vagus nerve revolution: You can now turn on just the specific vagus nerve branch that innervates one particular organ using tools from neuroscience. Physiology—declared “dead” in 2011—is being rejuvenated the way neuroscience was 20 years ago,* Tom Forth’s geographic critique: Are you just sloshing money around the Southeast? Laura responds that scientific excellence must guide location, but there are bright spots elsewhere—Lee Cronin’s automated chemistry lab in Glasgow, Liverpool’s work. The problem is London policy bubble can’t see beyond the Golden Triangle,* ARIA nearly died before it began: Treasury tried rolling back agreements after the misfits left. James Price saved it by ensuring everything went to the Chancellor’s desk—meaning they could write the reply. On Boris’s last day, the official advice was “wait months for a business case.” Nadhim Zahawi: “I’ll take the unprecedented option.”,* Boris on quantum computing: “James, I’ve still got no idea what a quantum computer is, but I love it.” He’d punch his hands in the air whenever he saw James: “Science superpower, build back better!”,* The engineered pandemic threat: It’s become “a lot easier to artificially create pandemics and the number of people you would need to do it is trending towards one quite fast.” James was in meetings where officials said it wasn’t possible—”well here’s a paper from 10 years ago where they did it.” The COVID inquiry is “not fit for purpose.”,* The demographics doom loop: Are Bell Labs and LMB only possible when boomers were the right age? Now we have more old people than ever, listening to the Rolling Stones forever, blocking all institutional change. James: “In my more cynical moments I wonder if we’re pushing against fundamental civilizational trends toward bureaucratization.”,* Tom’s solution: “We have to shag for science, basically.” Silence from across the table.Plus: Why methods papers are poorly cited despite being more important than discovery papers, why the Dalai Lama’s one paper will win an instant Nobel Prize, James almost becoming a cave hermit instead of fixing British science, and Stefan Roberts’s vision of “the UK as an R&D lab with an economy attached.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

James W. Phillips and Laura Ryan are former neuroscientists who’ve written a proposal to save British science by basically blowing up the university system. Or at least building an alternative to it. Their diagnosis? The best scientists they know have all quit academia—not because they failed, but because they succeeded and realised the game is rigged. The incentive structure rewards safe, incremental research that gets published quickly rather than ambitious, years-long projects that might actually change the world. Frederick Sanger won two Nobel Prizes while publishing three papers in 20 years. Today he’d never get tenure.Their solution is Lovelace Labs—a network of institutions modelled on Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and the Cambridge LMB, where scientists would be core-funded for 15 years, assessed internally by colleagues who understand their work, and freed from the tyranny of grant applications and citation metrics. Where engineers work alongside theorists, where 30-year-olds run labs instead of spending a decade as research assistants, and where the founding director gets told by Number 10: “Here’s your money, we’re not going to mess around.”Tom and Calum discuss with James and Laura:* Why the smartest scientists quit: Laura’s smartest friend from her Cambridge PhD—someone who always wanted to be a scientist—left because the system is fundamentally unfair. James’s entire cohort of rising stars, the people doing work featured in the New York Times, have all left academic research except one,* The replication crisis stems from broken incentives: Foundational Alzheimer’s research papers were fraudulent for 25 years because everyone benefits from piggybacking on existing results rather than exposing problems. Brain imaging studies lacked statistical power but it took 20 years for that to become common knowledge,* Leo Szilard’s 1948 prophecy: He wrote a satirical story about a wealthy man who wanted to slow down science, so he invented peer review—pulling scientists out of labs into administration and forcing everyone to work on ideas that three peers would approve, killing all unusual fresh shoots,* Peter Higgs couldn’t survive today: He published sparingly over 20 years, doing deep work that eventually won a Nobel Prize. Today’s system demands papers every six months with positive results—negative data is considered “time wasted” even if it’s exemplary science,* China has overtaken us on neuroscience: Nine of the top 10 institutions in leading journals are now Chinese (it was two five years ago). Their packages to recruit talent: “Come over, we’ll give you your own lab, strong core facilities, hire whoever you want.” The UK’s pitch: “But we have Oxford!”,* The Number 10 science establishment blocked honors: During the pandemic, two researchers (Bonner and Kataraman) created the rapid testing program with modeling that proved crucial. The science establishment blocked their honors and gave them instead to senior people who’d been blocking the rapid testing program,* Alan Kay was 30 at Xerox PARC: When James asked him about top-down direction, Kay revealed he was the oldest person there at 30. In the UK, these people would still be postdocs working as research assistants. Demis, Dario, Sam Altman—all in their 30s when founding DeepMind, Anthropic, OpenAI,* Max Perutz’s recipe for great science: “No politics, no committees, no reports, no referees, no interviews—just gifted, highly motivated people picked by a few people of good judgment.” The Cambridge LMB followed this and produced Nobel Prize after Nobel Prize,* The UK over-indexes on universities: We rely more heavily on the university department model than almost any other advanced science nation. Germany has Max Planck and Fraunhofer. America has DOE labs and tech company research. We have... more universities in Midlands towns acting as jobs programs,* Westminster ejects the misfits: James was part of the Cummings misfits experiment. As soon as key supporters left Number 10, the team began leaving. The Vaccines Task Force was crushed, the data science unit repeatedly attacked. Two of Labour’s three great appointments—Matt Clifford and Poppy Gustafsson—have already left. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.anglofuturism.coTom and Calum dissect John Fingleton’s damning nuclear regulatory review, play Sacred Cow with the greenbelt and Zone 1 council housing, and explain why Shabana Mahmood’s “tough on immigration” reforms are actually quite soft. Plus: nuclear policy specialist Robert Boswall drops by fresh from the pub to explain why the ONR reports to the Department for Work and Pensions, and why Birmingham City FC’s new chimney-adorned stadium might be the most important piece of architecture in Britain.Tom and Calum discuss:* The Fingleton nuclear report: Santa came down the chimney with a huge sack of regulation-cutting proposals—£700 million fish discos, eight different regulators for defence projects, and the revelation that civil servants defer to regulators who defer back to civil servants in an endless loop of inaction,* Robert Boswall’s pub celebration: Fresh from carousing over the nuclear report, nuclear policy specialist Robert Boswall explains why tolerability of risk matters, why the ONR bizarrely reports to the Department for Work and Pensions, and why his favourite regulation to abolish is “regulatory justification”—a random EU inheritance that costs millions and achieves nothing,* Sacred Cow carnage: Calum slaughters the greenbelt (”most of it is disused petrol stations”), executes Zone 1 council housing without hesitation, but spares Christmas and national parks. Tom meanwhile shows his kindness towards farm animals,* Shabana Mahmood’s immigration mirage: Blue Labour are delighted by her “tough” reforms—20-year wait for asylum seekers!—but there are carve-outs everywhere (jewellery confiscation exempt if “sentimental”), new safe and legal routes opened up, and asylum seekers can choose the 10-year track instead. Chris Bayliss in The Critic calls it out as vibes over substance,* Elite defectors and vibe shifts: Tom argues that Westminster consensus on immigration is cracking and elite opinion is shifting against mass migration. Calum counters that this means nothing if Reform sweeps in on northern Red Wall seats while London dinner parties stay the same,* Birmingham City FC’s chimney stadium: Thomas Heatherwick’s design with 12 enormous brick chimneys evoking Birmingham’s industrial past. Tom loves it as history finding echo in architecture. Calum worries it’s pastiche—until Tom destroys him with facts and logic about Houses of Parliament crenellations.

In the second part of this conversation, Shiv Malik goes deeper on why millennials never organised around housing despite it being the defining material issue of their generation. His book tour for Jilted Generation in 2010 drew audiences full of chest-beating boomers—but almost no millennials showed up. Was it that they saw housing as a personal failure rather than a systemic one? That complaining about rent wasn’t intellectual enough for degree-educated people who’d read theory? Or has social media created weak bonds and the illusion of political action through likes?In the second half of this two-part conversation, Shiv, Tom, and Calum discuss:* Why millennials never protested housing: Shiv’s book tour drew boomers who either self-flagellated or accused him of wanting them dead, but almost no millennials—possibly because rent isn’t intellectual enough for degree-educated people who prefer causes with “great bodies of theory,”* The cavalry isn’t coming: a major decision-maker told Shiv that building a city “is not the kind of thing we could do in 21st century Britain” and asked where his generation’s protests were—because politicians would act if young people actually demanded housing,* The social contract, not cities: Shiv doesn’t only care about cities—he cares about restoring the promise that if you work hard you can buy a house and raise a family. The city is just the only vehicle that might get past all the NIMBYs,* Development corporations as tools: the Olympics legislation took nine months and had spades in the ground within 18 months. HS2 failed because it had to negotiate bat tunnels with every parish along the route,* The aesthetics problem: how do you bring back decoration without being slavish to the past? Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Art Deco represent the last moment of both futurism and ornamentation before the brutalists threw out decoration entirely,* Manufacturing charm: Richard de Haan transformed Folkestone by renting to creative businesses at peppercorn rates. But can you manufacture what 220-year-old London pubs have imbued into their fabric, or does it just happen? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Shiv Malik is the would-be founder of Britain’s first new city in over 50 years. He and Joe Reeve from LFG have identified 45,000 acres east of Cambridge for a million-person city, complete with cross-laminated timber skyscrapers, trams, proper sewerage, and enough infrastructure that NIMBYs might actually be won over by three new hospitals and 300 schools appearing on their doorstep.In the first of this two-part conversation, Shiv, Tom, and Calum discuss:* The vision: a pedestrianised city centre with wooden skyscrapers reaching 60 storeys, trams running through it, and sewerage done right for once—plus all the ideas that can never be retrofitted into Victorian streets,* Why Milton Keynes is Britain’s secret productivity miracle: it’s the most productive place outside a few London boroughs, and if everyone lived as richly as Milton Keynes residents, we’d be 50% richer as a country—not because of roundabouts, but because recently-built infrastructure is simply more efficient than Victorian stairs,* The stakeholder nightmare: West Suffolk Council met Shiv for 90 minutes, Lord Vestey owns a third of the land, 8,000 current residents need convincing, and the development corporation model that built Milton Keynes in six weeks of public consultation is now viewed as dangerously autocratic,* Why NIMBYs have a point: the houses are terrible, there’s never infrastructure with new developments, Section 106 bargaining is an irrational barter system, and people are right to oppose ugly pylons and Barratt Homes extensions that crater village life without delivering train stations or hospitals,* The intergenerational thesis: Britain created a new leisure class that never existed in human history—retirees with incomes equal to workers but derived from capital, not labour—and they have time to dominate local politics while exhausted workers can’t fill out planning responses at 9:30pm,* The Boriswave outrage: Shiv gets told to “go home” online and understands why people are angry. He agrees with Shabana Mahmood that immigration policy has been a total failure—but why haven’t we built a reservoir in 30 years, and why doesn’t Haverhill have a train station? Immigration didn’t cause those failures,* The cavalry isn’t coming: Baroness Claire Fox asked Shiv if his book was “just a giant whinge,” and she was right—millennials and Gen Z protest about Palestine but don’t organise around material circumstances like housing, which is why Joe Reeve’s “we are the cavalry” moment convinced Shiv to dust off his old city plans,* The economics: community land trusts for housing, special economic zone tax breaks like Canary Wharf for commercial land, 80 acres in the city centre for ACDC (Albion City Development Corporation) to capture uplift, and the precedent of the Docklands Development Corporation proving this model works,* Phase one goals: convince Housing Secretary Steve Rayner to greenlight the development corporation, raise £200 million for master planning and site surveys, get spades in the ground by the end of this Parliament, and prove to Lord Vestey that selling up (or investing) beats getting CPO’d. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

James Kingston works in the digital asset industry and is the author of Profitable Peripherals: Maximising the potential of British CDOTs. He came aboard the KC3 to explain why the Cayman Islands, Jersey, and Britain’s 17 overseas territories aren’t tax havens draining the exchequer—they’re innovation labs pumping foreign capital into British banks and employing British lawyers to service Chinese deals.James, Tom, and Calum on:* Why the narrative that CDOTs are a “shadow empire for British finance” draining tax revenue is measurably wrong—Jersey alone supports a million UK jobs annually through £1.4 trillion of intermediated capital, and 68% of deposits in Jersey banks flow back to Britain despite only 29% coming from the UK,* The comparative advantage problem: 70% of the world’s hedge funds are domiciled in the Cayman Islands ($2.7 trillion, more than the US), and 66% of British Virgin Islands assets concern Greater China deals—meaning British lawyers in London tax revenue from Shenzhen transactions they’d never otherwise access,* Why these jurisdictions succeeded where hundreds of other offshore centres failed: international investors trust the common law system and know that if something goes wrong, they can ultimately rely on London—but if Britain ever seized the money (as one MP proposed to fund the NHS), the entire edifice would collapse overnight,* The innovation case: Jersey passed data trust laws, the Isle of Man is releasing Data Asset Foundation legislation, and the Cayman Islands created legal structures for DAOs—Britain should partner with CDOTs as regulatory sandboxes for tech rather than just finance, creating British jobs in data stewardship and AI development,* Why the “finance curse” criticism—that Britain’s best minds waste their lives writing tax-efficient contracts rather than founding energy startups—is the most compelling argument against CDOTs, but also why abandoning comparative advantage in pinstripes would be economically illiterate,* The security question: can Britain actually defend these territories in a multipolar world, or should we follow Philip Cunliffe’s argument that claiming places you can’t defend is a fiction? James says giving things up willy-nilly (looking at you, Chagos) isn’t the answer—economic activity strengthens claims, like the East India Company did,* The vassalisation problem: Britain spent decades being completely open to the world, but CDOTs are really nodes in a US financial imperium—British tech stacks run on American platforms, and conflating US interests with British interests means we’ve forgotten to ask what independent leverage looks like,* James’s 50-year vision: British spaceships launched from Ascension Island, Jersey-domiciled mining outfits in the Oort Cloud, interstellar cargo ships flagged with the Isle of Man, and Britain remaining in the top tier of nations with trillion-dollar companies built here rather than accepting managed decline as a “normal European country.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.anglofuturism.coDon’t forget to sign up for November’s Anglofuturism meet-up in London. Check the blog for more information.After being featured in both a Hope Not Hate hatchet job and a New Statesman meditation on “British hüzün,” Tom and Calum defend their vision against critics who keep mistaking them for nostalgic romantics when they just want Britain to build factories again. Plus: why the first castle built in Britain for a century looks like a multi-storey car park, ARIA’s remarkable success at funding cutting-edge science, and Matt Clifford’s case that Britain simply needs to be wealthy again.Tom and Calum on:* Why every critic keeps describing them as Young England romantics wandering gothic landscapes when they actually just want factories—as Rian Whitton put it, they don’t want Blake’s New Jerusalem, they want the dark satanic mills (ideally both),* The castle problem: Britain’s first castle in 100 years has been built and it’s absolutely hideous—a Grand Designs disaster with PVC windows that cost £7 million, proving you cannot trust architects or educated elites to have your interests at heart,* ARIA’s golden period: why Britain’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency is successfully funding AI scientists, programmable plants, and self-driving labs whilst selecting genuinely brilliant people—plus Calum’s application to build biological automation robots that could enable runaway technological progress,* The inevitable NASA-style bureaucratic drift that will eventually destroy ARIA, and why you just have to start new institutions every generation rather than trying to reform sclerotic ones that have lost their edge,* Matt Clifford’s speech at the LFG conference arguing Britain simply needs to be rich again—citing Bradford as once the wealthiest city in the world with a town hall like the Natural History Museum, now a symbol of decades of managed decline and why this message resonated so powerfully,* Why the British right is more right-wing than American Trumpers on national identity (81% vs 65% worry about losing it through immigration) but simultaneously more left-wing on state involvement—the “hang the paedos, fund the NHS” coalition that Reform represents,* The death of noblesse oblige and why modern meritocratic elites are more dangerous than hereditary aristocrats—when status comes from beliefs rather than bloodlines, you get luxury beliefs and educated ignoramuses who haven’t done the reading outside their narrow expertise,* Why people viscerally hate inequality and billionaires now despite billionaires living basically the same lives as us—but in 20 years when life extension and neural modulation are available first to the wealthy, humanity will genuinely bifurcate and make current debates look like child’s play,* Dutch Bato-futurism: the next Dutch PM is promising 10 new cities including one raised from the sea (£20 billion, 60,000 homes), Orbex successfully simulating a rocket launch in Scotland, and China drilling 3km deep into Antarctic ice whilst Britain maps the bedrock then publishes it for everyone,* The Zack Polanski problem: why Britain is producing its own version of Mamdani-style socialist politics, and whether the sovereign individual thesis about elites escaping nations was wrong about the direction of travel in the 21st century.

Don’t forget to sign up for November’s Anglofuturism meet-up in London. Check the blog for more information.Tom and Calum visit Space Solar at Harwell to meet co-founder and co-CEO Sam Adlen, who’s attempting to solve Britain’s energy crisis by putting massive solar arrays in geostationary orbit and beaming the power down as microwaves. No new physics required—just the unglamorous work of becoming the Toyota of space infrastructure.In the episode:* Why space-based solar delivers 13 times more energy than ground panels and provides baseload power 24/7, making it economically competitive with terrestrial solar even at today’s launch costs,* The technical solution: kilometere-scale satellites made of hundreds of thousands of coffee table-sized modules that beam power down using phase conjugation, with no moving parts and power density a quarter of midday sun (safe enough that birds won’t cook),* How Space Solar’s system works like a “giant interconnector in space”—instantly switching beams between countries to balance grids, support renewables when wind dies, and redirect power where it’s needed, potentially saving over a billion pounds annually in UK energy system costs,* Why they’re not trying to invent new physics but rather optimise industrial process—the challenge is manufacturing a million modules, perfecting logistics, and automating assembly in space using robotics that construct truss structures in orbit,* Britain’s fatal flaw: brilliant at innovation, terrible at scaling, with orders of magnitude less investment going into space than AI or fusion despite space being “bigger than AI” and strategically critical as the new waterways for global power,* The regulatory reality: UK space regulators have been “superb” and energised, even on grid connections that normally take 15 years—the real bottleneck is financing early-stage infrastructure rather than venture capital’s preference for low-capex software,* Sam’s vision for 2075: Britain as a leader in space infrastructure, power no longer a constraint, and a generation with genuine abundance ahead—but only if we move now, because “there’s no second mover role” when barriers to entry spike after first movers climb the cost curve,* Why Starship’s success is the step change moment for space: 24 launches in 24 hours transforms everything from orbital data centers to asteroid mining, and Britain needs to commit two orders of magnitude more investment immediately or watch others colonise the economic high ground. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.anglofuturism.coAfter being featured in a Hope Not Hate report linking Robert Jenrick to Anglofuturism, Tom and Calum reflect on their newfound infamy while developing their theory that Pingu represents English settler colonialism, discussing plans to rebuild Britain’s castles, and making the case for British domination of space.Tom and Calum on:* Their appearance in a Hope Not Hate exposé as “the most intellectual vision” of Anglofuturism, despite the organisation’s history of libel cases and treating any immigration scepticism as fascism,* The Straussian reading of Pingu: why the show is clearly about English settlement of Antarctica, with Pingu as a third-generation settler family complete with nuclear family structure and grandparents—”indomitable, curious, restless, resourceful,”* The Pendragon Foundation’s plan to rebuild Britain’s crumbling castles as living cultural centres rather than preserved ruins, learning from French château restoration and Japanese craft traditions that maintain skills through continuous building,* Why buildings must evolve rather than be frozen in amber—the challenge isn’t preservation but having the confidence that new additions enhance rather than damage, avoiding both museum-ification and CBeebies-style vandalism,* Boris Johnson’s continued defence of mass immigration despite acknowledging integration has failed, and why his generation of Tories remains traumatised by the “nasty party” narrative and temperamentally incapable of restriction,* How cultural narratives around immigration and integration have shifted over generations, and why the smartphone age presents challenges for assimilation,* Why no financial incentive can solve Britain’s birth rate crisis when market logic has made children economically irrational, and the grim possibility that medical technology is amplifying fertility problems,* Britain’s new orbital defence sensors against Russian laser attacks, and why now is the moment for some bloody-minded figure to champion British domination of space warfare before the opportunity passes—defending satellites today, commanding the high ground tomorrow.With additional audio from Calum’s appearance on Hugo Rifkind’s Times Radio show and an excellent YouTube clip.

Curtis Yarvin steps aboard the KC-3 to argue that Britain should exploit America’s imperial exhaustion to become the new leader of the West, starting with dismantling the cathedral of unaccountable bureaucrats that has replaced genuine sovereignty. It’s a path that runs through Oxbridge, extraterritorial Chinese Oakland, and possibly some Ayahuasca for Elon Musk.Tom, Calum, and Curtis on:* Why the Deliveroo economy is more dehumanizing than Victorian servitude - with social distance replacing the personal bonds that once connected masters and servants,* How Elizabeth I’s delegation to the Cecils created Britain’s first “deep state” of Platonic guardians, leading directly to today’s unaccountable oligarchy of Sir Humphrey Applebys,* The pornography of democratic power: why voting makes you feel sovereign when you’re actually just a consumer demanding better customer service from an autocracy that pretends to care about your opinions,* Why gain-of-function research is like coming home to find your ten-year-old setting fire to the kitchen curtains “for science” - and how experts’ conflict of interest makes them create the crises they’re paid to solve,* Napoleon’s maxim that “the crown of the Western world is in the gutter” - why Britain can simply pick it up with its sword now that American imperial energy has dissipated and the State Department can’t stop you,* The case for neo-colonialism as win-win: reverse extraterritoriality in West Oakland with Chinese police in white gloves, reclaiming Jamaica and Ceylon’s tropical highlands, and why Africa needs to be “regoverned” before it can thrive. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.anglofuturism.coTom and Calum explore "dark abundance": a more muscular approach to progress that combines deregulation with decisive state action against disorder and dysfunction.* Why Trump's state visit was peak "museum Britain" - bringing out the fine china for foreign guests while using enamelware the rest of the time,* The taxonomy of abundance politics: from Ezra Klein's soft progressivism to "dark abundance", which posits that some people need locking up until their frontal lobes develop,* How special interests capture reform - from civil servants empire-building through risk assessments to public sector workers voting Labour to preserve their comfortable sinecures,* The eternal tension between Manchester Liberal free trade and the need for order: why you can't have abundance without deterring bus fare dodgers and ensuring violent criminals actually face consequences,* Victorian-style pacification of the country through decisive punishment, inspired by Britain executing 16 times more people per capita than Prussia in the 19th century,* Their architectural philosophy for the coming new towns boom: why Poundbury succeeds despite its mongrel-like mixing of styles, and the case for illiberal design codes that ban modernist innovation in city centres until we figure out what the hell is going on in architectural schools.

Industrial policy researcher Rian Chad Whitton makes his second appearance to dissect Britain's manufacturing decline, arguing that energy costs and economic orthodoxy have systematically dismantled what was once the world's fourth-largest industrial base.Tom, Calum, and Rian on:* Why 1999 represented a high-water mark for British industry - the fourth-largest manufacturing base globally with functioning steel, chemicals, and automotive sectors, before China's rise blindsided everyone including FT columnists,* How Britain's "tolerance for lower margins" problem means we exit markets entirely while Germany and Japan fight to stay competitive - illustrated by ICI's dismantling versus Jim Ratcliffe's successful INEOS empire built from the wreckage,* The devastating impact of energy costs on heavy industry: 20% of gross value added for energy-intensive sectors, 80% for steel production, while competitors enjoy massive state subsidies that Britain refuses to match,* Why the government's £51 billion energy support budget (the size of the defence budget) still isn't enough to paper over the fundamental problem of expensive electricity and misguided net-zero policies,* Ryan's fantasy 50-year plan for industrial revival: import substitution for steel and cement, building the world's largest 200,000-ton forge press, and learning from Chinese entrepreneurs who consider profit margins above 5% "economic inefficiency,"* The irony that Britain followed American economic orthodoxy perfectly - green energy, liberal immigration, foreign direct investment - only to be mocked by Americans for becoming a "vassal state" that sucks at everything. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Space policy expert Peter Hague joins from his emergency shuttle to discuss Labour's decision to fold the UK Space Agency into a larger department, effectively ending Britain's independent space ambitions just as the new space age begins.In this episode:* Why the UK Space Agency's absorption into DSIT represents Britain "quitting before it started" - losing budget autonomy and direct ministerial access just when space is becoming strategically crucial,* The historical pattern of British space failures: from abandoning the successful Blue Streak rocket (which could have rivaled Atlas) to the disastrous Europa program where continental partners kept sabotaging British components,* Why the Apollo program wasn't popular at the time but became mythic afterward - and how political leadership means doing unpopular things that future generations will thank you for,* Peter's "Penny for Space" campaign: spending just 1% of government budget on space (compared to 33% on welfare) as a "civilizational pension" for Britain's future in the 22nd century,* The coming space revolution that will make 2029 politically embarrassing: private space stations, Indian human spaceflight, and potentially Chinese or American boots on Mars while Britain has no space program at all,* Why we need a new UK space agency focused on building rotating space habitats in Earth orbit - stepping into the gap as America abandons permanent orbital presence for lunar missions.Peter asked us to higlight the recent work of Progress in building a technology-forward Britain. We recommend trying out the excellent Nick, 30 ans simulator. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Tom and Calum reflect on 25 episodes of the podcast that allegedly influenced Robert Jenrick to declare himself an Anglofuturist, while grappling with accusations of dangerous nostalgia from Southampton academics.Tom and Calum on:* How Robert Jenrick's declaration that he's “what you would call an Anglo-futurist” at a Westminster nationalism conference proves their growing influence* Defending themselves against Francesca Melhuish's academic paper attacking the “nostalgic politics of Anglofuturism”* Why talk of British civil war misses the point - the real question is whether there's a genuine constituency for radical change beyond angry WhatsApp groups and hotel protests,* Tom's new book, and his journey from effective altruist malaria-net maximizer to someone worried about civilizational collapse,* The thrilling prospect of geoengineering our way out of climate change through stratospheric aerosol injection and iron ocean fertilizationThe Anti-Catastrophe League: The pioneers and visionaries on a quest to save the worldA new Elizabethan age: The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) and the nostalgic politics of Anglofuturism This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Conservative MP Alex Burghart and AI expert Dr Laura Gilbert argue that Britain's mediaeval past holds the key to mastering its technological future–from Alfred's burghs to sovereign data centres.Calum, Tom, Alex, and Laura explore:* How Alfred the Great's response to Viking invasion mirrors today's AI challenge–using crisis as the moment to forge new order when "the metal is hot," creating institutions that lasted centuries,* Why the collapse of Roman Britain offers hope for our post-imperial moment: just as Alfred built something more durable than Rome from chaos, we can create lasting prosperity from current decline,* Laura's insider account of building i.ai within government–attracting world-class talent with the mission to save lives and money, while navigating civil service "antibodies against change" and demands for "Whitehall Sherpas,"* The case for sovereign compute power and data ownership as national security imperatives–why relying on foreign AI models could leave Britain vulnerable to future Donald Trump Jrs turning off access,* Alex's vision for technological Anglo-Saxonism: virtual reality mead halls where the nation's "Witan" assembles annually, plus genetically enhanced oaks growing fast enough to maintain our aesthetic inheritance,* Why the next government needs to break the bureaucratic paradigm that's paralysed Britain since 1990–and why Conservative experience of governmental frustration makes them uniquely positioned to "seize the liquid moment."Sovereignty, Security, Scale: A UK Strategy for AI InfrastructureProfessor James Campbell (historian)Clip from “Harold Godwinson” used with permission from The Skaldic Bard. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Political theorist Philip Cunliffe argues that globalism is dying and Britain has a rare chance to lead the world into whatever comes next - but only if it rediscovers what sovereignty actually means.Philip Cunliffe on:* Why we're witnessing the collapse of globalist political structures that layered transnational governance over democratic nation states,* How ruling elites from the 1980s onwards deliberately fragmented political power to escape working-class demands, creating the regulatory "blob" that can't build railways or defend territory but excels at shuffling PowerPoint decks,* The failure of populists like Trump and Meloni to break free from globalist institutions, despite their rhetoric - and why even "America First" gets sucked back into Middle Eastern quagmires,* Why Brexit was a precocious early move in this global transition, giving Britain unique advantages as other nations will "inevitably have to follow us down as globalism continues to decay,"* The case for "new nations" - not territorial breakups but politically renewed nation-states that can actually defend their interests, requiring proportional representation, ending devolution, and forcing politicians to think in terms of national interest rather than international virtue signaling,* How a revitalised Britain could seize unprecedented opportunities in a multipolar world without a single hegemon - if it's willing to focus on what sovereignty actually means.The National Interest: Politics After Globalization This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Dan Tomlinson MP, Labour's official growth mission champion, boards the KC-3 to discuss what Britain needs to sacrifice for economic growth and whether we're still a country capable of big things.Dan Tomlinson on:* Why Britain has lost the ability to do "big and bold" things like the Apollo missions, trapped by endless processes, consultations, and judicial reviews that would make a modern space program impossible,* Testing Labour's growth priorities against various "sacred cows" - from building on the greenbelt (yes) to fracking and North Sea drilling (no) to social housing in central London (complicated),* Whether high immigration helps or hurts growth, arguing that the recent scale (equivalent to adding Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield and Liverpool combined) has unclear benefits for GDP per capita despite official studies,* His three-pillar growth strategy of stability, investment, and reform - particularly planning reform that could add £7 billion to GDP - and why he believes Chancellor Rachel Reeves has the right approach,* His vision for Britain in 50 years.Further readingDan asked us to share this clip of a happier time, when the country struggled under the weight of GP appointments that were simply too easy to obtain: Watch it on YouTube. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

From the King Charles III Space Station, Tom and Calum welcome Alex Fitzgerald, founder of Isembard - a micro-factory startup that's building Britain's manufacturing future one CNC machine at a time.Alex explains how Britain's manufacturing crisis isn't just about big factories closing - it's about the hidden supply chain of small family-owned machine shops that actually make the parts for everything from F-35 jets to AirPods. With 95% of CNC machines owned by small businesses, and those business owners now retiring en masse, the West faces a manufacturing capacity cliff just as geopolitical tensions increase demand.“Fundamentally, how you build great product is having engineers ingest pain and then output product.”The episode explores:* Whether distributed manufacturing is more resilient than centralized factories* How Britain's hidden aerospace and defense supply chains actually work* Why small machine shops are the real manufacturing base, not big assembly plants* The role of risk capital in building trillion-dollar manufacturing businesses* How software and AI are transforming traditional machining and production* What young engineers can do to build world-changing manufacturing businessesFurther readingIsembard - Faster, Cheaper, Greener ManufacturingThe Manufacturing ManifestoCareers at Isembard This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Santi Ruiz is a policy researcher at the Institute for Progress and host of the Statecraft newsletter and podcast. He's one of the editors of the Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook, a comprehensive strategy document produced by three American think tanks to help the US compete with China's manufacturing dominance. The playbook outlines concrete policy proposals across frontier science, energy abundance, and national security—from creating special compute zones to reforming naval shipbuilding and accelerating geothermal development.The Society for Technological Advancement (SoTA) is organising a hackathon on 31st May and 1st June focused on geoengineering and weather control. Click here to find out more.Episode outline* How China's 230x shipbuilding advantage over America represents an existential threat to Western naval power* The X-Labs proposal to fund cutting-edge research institutions outside traditional universities using flexible block grants* Special compute zones that would fast-track energy infrastructure for AI development in exchange for security commitments* Why America's Loans Programs Office has funded every nuclear plant built this century and shouldn't be dismantled by DOGE* How regulatory carve-outs for geothermal energy could unlock abundant clean power using proven oil and gas drilling techniques* The critical minerals challenge where China could crash markets to destroy American mining operations* Why American naval shipbuilding fails because design is outsourced instead of done in-house like it used to be* Whether Britain should be America's lapdog or develop independent techno-industrial capacity focused on European threats* How elite consensus matters more than popular mobilisation for implementing transformative policy changes* The difference between financialisation that enables productive investment versus financialisation that replaces itMentioned in this episode:The Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook: How to Kickstart America's Techno‑Industrial RenaissanceStatecraft on SubstackWhy FORGE Works by Tom Ough for IFP This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Joe Hill is Director of Policy at Reform and founder of the Greater London Project, a community initiative focused on London's future. A former Treasury civil servant with experience across government departments, Joe has become a leading critic of what he calls "everythingism"—the dysfunctional tendency to make every policy about every other policy, everywhere, all at once. His influential essay on this concept has gained significant traction in policy circles, offering a framework for understanding why British governance has become increasingly ineffective despite ever-expanding regulations and procedures.Calum and Tom talk to Joe about:* How "everythingism" manifests in absurd policy decisions like rejecting a nuclear power plant to protect Welsh language or requiring fish discos for reactor cooling systems* The rise of plus-oneism—how individual policy advocates each adding "just one more requirement" creates an unmanageable bureaucratic morass* Why statutory requirements like the Equalities Act and Climate Change Act have created unintended veto points that prevent sensible decision-making* The failure of technocratic governance through quangos and how these arms-length bodies have become accountability sinks* How social value procurement requirements waste billions by forcing contractors to prioritise secondary goals over core objectives* The paradox of parliamentary sovereignty—how ministers have the power to cut through bureaucracy but lack the knowledge or will to do so* Why successful government initiatives like the vaccine task force only work by exempting themselves from normal rules* The path forward: restoring personal accountability, rejecting everythingist thinking, and accepting that good policy requires difficult trade-offsSee below for transcript and further reading. Listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.Further Reading on Everythingism and British Policy ReformIf you enjoyed this episode with Joe Hill discussing the crisis of everythingism in British governance, here are some recommended resources to explore these topics further:"Everythingism" by Joe Hill - The original essay that defines and analyses the concept of everythingism in British policymaking.Greater London Project - Joe's community initiative and Substack focused on building a liveable future for LondonReform research - Various papers on planning reform, regulatory burden, and state capacityDan Davies on “The Unaccountability Machine” - Dan Davies explores the concept of unaccountability sinksBooks"The Uses of Knowledge in Society" by F.A. Hayek - Foundational text on the limits of centralised decision-making"The Blunders of Our Governments" by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe - Analysis of systematic failures in British government decision-making"The British Regulatory State" by Michael Moran - Academic examination of how Britain became a hyper-regulated society"Seeing Like a State" by James C. Scott - Classic work on why certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed"Simple Rules for a Complex World" by Richard Epstein - Legal scholar's argument for simplicity in law and regulation"The Death of Common Sense" by Philip K. Howard - How bureaucratic rules have replaced human judgment in governance"Why Government Fails So Often" by Peter Schuck - Analysis of the structural reasons for policy failure This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Marc Warner is CEO and co-founder of Faculty, a British AI company that partners with organisations to deploy artificial intelligence in the real world. After beginning his career in quantum physics research at UCL and Harvard, Marc shifted his focus to AI, believing it would be the most important science of the 21st century. Faculty first gained prominence for its fellowship program that helps PhD graduates transition into commercial data science, and later for its critical work with the NHS during the COVID-19 pandemic, using AI to predict hospital demand and resource allocation.Calum and Tom talk to Marc Warner about:* Britain's missed opportunities in cloud computing and foundation models, and what can still be done to ensure technological sovereignty* The challenges of aligning AI with human values and controlling frontier models as systems become increasingly powerful* ⁠Faculty's crucial role during COVID-19, developing world-leading predictive models that helped allocate healthcare resources and save lives* The bureaucratic obstacles that hinder innovation in government, including procurement rules that favour foreign tech giants over British companies* How Faculty evolved from an educational fellowship into one of the UK's leading AI companies helping organisations bridge the gap between data and effective decision-making* How AI's economic transformation could create both extraordinary wealth and potential risks, requiring thoughtful governance approaches This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Josef Chen is the founder of KAIKAKU, a London-based company developing automation technology for restaurants. A former Imperial College student, Chen created his first Bitcoin faucet at age 13 and previously worked as the first intern at Bitpanda (Austria's first unicorn startup). After growing up working in his parents' Chinese restaurant from age six, Chen has now returned to the industry with a mission to transform it through robotics and technology.Calum and Tom talk to Josef Chen about:Josef's remarkable journey from peeling potatoes in his parents' Austrian restaurant at age six to founding a cutting-edge robotics companyHow KAIKAKU's "living laboratory" approach enables rapid hardware development and real-world testing of restaurant automationWhy specialised robots designed for specific tasks will outperform humanoid robots in practical applicationsThe widespread misallocation of engineering talent in Britain, with top graduates being lured into finance instead of building tangible solutionsHow restaurant automation can free staff from mundane tasks to focus on genuine hospitality and customer experienceJosef's vision for rebuilding Britain's engineering culture through initiatives like London Micro GrantsListen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Substack. Produced by Aeron Laffere.Further readingSweetgreen’s S-1 Filing - Deep dive into a US tech-forward restaurant chain’s unit economics, vision, and automation strategyOcado’s AI-powered robotic arms: levelling up efficiency in online grocery and logistics - Case study of one of the few globally competitive UK hardware automation effortsNeko Health - Example of vertically integrated tech x real-world experience design, referenced by JosephLondon Micro Grants - A live initiative for empowering grassroots builders in the UK with small-scale funding Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Douglas Carswell is a British politician who served as a Member of Parliament from 2005 to 2017, first as a Conservative before defecting to UKIP in 2014. A prominent Brexit campaigner and co-founder of Vote Leave, he now runs the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank in the United States. Carswell is known for his advocacy of democratic reform, limited government, and economic freedom.Calum and Tom talk to Douglas Carswell about:Douglas's experience in Mississippi where free-market reforms have accelerated economic growth beyond the UK'sHow Britain's "Blairite Ascendancy" of 30 years has empowered unaccountable experts and regulatory bodies that block elected officials from governing effectivelyA detailed blueprint to restore executive power through orders in council, civil service reform, and judicial restraintProposals for public spending cuts of £170 billion and tax reductions including abolishing tariffs, lowering VAT, and reducing income taxesAddressing immigration through tighter controls and a voluntary "re-migration" program for non-contributorsThe cultural dimensions of Britain's troubles and the need to reassert Anglo-American values against cultural relativismHow these reforms could unlock British innovation and prosperity if leaders have the courage to endure short-term painListen on Apple Music, Spotify, and Substack. Produced by Aeron Laffere.Further readingMilestones: Nine steps to restore Britain - the essay outlining Douglas Carswell's detailed proposalsDominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland - Mentioned by Carswell as influential to his understanding of Western valuesLooking for Growth campaign - A UK initiative advocating for policies to boost British economic growthWhy Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson - Explores how political institutions impact economic successThe Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg - Examines the changing relationship between individuals and the stateEconomics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt - A classic text on free-market economicsState Capacity Libertarianism by Tyler Cowen - A blog post that reimagines libertarianism with a focus on effective government Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

We welcome Cllr Tom Jones to the KCIII. Tom serves as the Councillor for Scotton & Lower Wensleydale on North Yorkshire Council and is also an accomplished essayist.Cllr Jones joins Calum and Tom to discuss Anglofuturism, immigration reform, and how Britain can build a more productive, high-wage future:The origins and appeal of Anglofuturism as both an aesthetic and political movement responding to economic stagnation and declining living standards for young BritonsTom Jones' immigration paper "Selecting the Best" which argues Britain's reliance on mass immigration has created a low-wage, low-productivity economyHow "human quantitative easing"—importing cheap labor rather than investing in automation—has damaged British productivity and wagesThe car wash industry as a case study where cheap migrant labor replaced automated systems, creating exploitation and environmental problemsThe need to redirect state capacity toward strategic priorities like energy, manufacturing, and defence instead of dispersing resourcesHow greater automation and selective high-skill immigration could transform Britain into a high-wage economy capable of meaningful global influenceListen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Produced by Aeron Laffere. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

The government is attempting to seal its giveaway of the Chagos Islands: a crucial archipelago in the Indian Ocean that was uninhabited when the Portuguese found them, but to which Mauritius – thousands of miles away – has made a specious claim. Extraordinarily, the British government is trying to indulge that claim – and to pay billions to continue to use the island that hosts a military base.The public has still not been given a satisfactory explanation for the giveaway, but the prime minister and the attorney general are thought to be of the view that Britain should obey a non-binding judgment by a partisan international court. That court is stacked with enemies of Britain... but the wallet inspector must be obeyed!Starmer and co are inches away from sealing the giveaway. But they reckoned without a ruddy young Anglofurist...Our very own Calum Drysdale!Calum and Lord Kempsell are together launching a judicial review into the putative giveaway. As news breaks of the judicial review, Tom and Calum discuss:The history of the Chagos IslandsThe bizarre logic of the governmentBritain's slender hopes of keeping the islandsHMG now has 14 days to respond to Calum and Lord Kempsell.Co-presenters: Tom Ough and Calum DrysdaleProducer: Æron Laffere Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Calum and Tom on:- The history of British Antarctic exploration, from Captain Cook's mission to find Terra Australis to Shackleton's heroic survival after the Endurance was trapped in ice,- The geopolitical status of Antarctica, including Britain's territorial claims, the 1959 Antarctic Treaty that prohibits mining and militarisation, and how this could change after 2048,- The potential economic value of the British Antarctic Territory with its vast untapped resources (oil, gas, gold, and other minerals) and whether Britain should develop these resources before other nations claim them,Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.Timestamps(00:00:00) - Introduction(00:01:30) - Antarctic Overview(00:04:16) - Historical Expeditions(00:12:50) - Heroic Age(00:31:19) - Sovereignty Issues(00:34:58) - Antarctic Treaty(00:36:49) - Resource Potential(00:54:25) - Future ProspectsTranscript00:00:00 - IntroductionTom OughWelcome back to the King Charles III Space Station. I'm Tom Ough.Calum DrysdaleAnd I'm Calum Drysdale. And if you, our listeners, have a telescope handy, you might be able to see our orbital space pub speeding southwards. Tom's behind the bar with one hand on our ship's wheels and the other one clutching a pint of gin.Tom OughListeners, you can't see the wheel but let me assure you that it's fashioned of beautiful English oak. A perfect replica of the wheel on HMS Victory.Calum DrysdaleTom, tell me where you're taking us.Tom OughWell, take a look through that Mullions porthole we put in the floor.Calum DrysdaleYep, taking a look.Tom OughWhat do you see?Calum DrysdaleI see the Falklands to the west. South Georgia… and I think that must be the South Sandwich Islands to the east. And now it's a long rocky peninsula.Tom OughYeah, an enormous apparently inhospitable peninsula.Calum DrysdaleAnd yet, something about it feels like home.Tom OughCorrect. As we sweep over this frozen continent, you will need no reminding that we are looking over the British Antarctic Territory.I will stop the ship here.00:01:30 - Antarctic OverviewCalum DrysdaleListeners, the view is stunning. Mile upon mile of white wilderness with the southern lights dancing above it. But Tom, maybe you can tell the listeners why you've brought us here.Tom OughWell, in short, what we're looking at is Britain's most valuable overseas possession. It could be the ticket to a new age of British prosperity, but it's under threat. And I think it's high time the country pay the matter some attention.Calum DrysdaleWell, I think it's something that we often forget. In that it's notable when, well or maybe not so notable to some people, when we try to rid ourselves of a few tiny atolls in the Indian Ocean. But actually the idea that we own a whole sort of section of a slice of a continent is maybe even less well known.Tom OughYeah and let's put this in perspective because the Chagos Islands, important as they are, are pretty minuscule in terms of land mass. Whereas the British Antarctic Territory is about eight times the size of Great Britain. It's insane, it's absolutely enormous and I think it's high time the country paid the matter some attention.Calum DrysdaleI think it's a bit risky Tom, isn’t it? Because the more attention we draw to our overseas territories the greater risk that the FCDO tries to find someone to foist them off on.Tom OughYeah I do worry about this because I think our claim to the Antarctic territory is in fact weaker than our claim to the Chagos Islands. So if you are listening and you are a senior civil servant at the FCDO then please, please avert your ears. But we are going to do an episode on the British Antarctic Territory nevertheless.Calum DrysdaleAnd our first one without a guest as seemingly Tom you are appointing yourself as our resident expert in the field.Tom OughWell there is a there is a criminal dearth of enthusiasts about the British Antarctic territory and I hope listeners will over the next half hour or so come to understand why I think there's a dearth.Calum DrysdaleWhilst most people are going out to the pub and talking to women, what on earth have you done spending your time worrying about the British Antarctic territory?Tom OughI for one got nerd sniped by the BAT as they call it last year when a big oil and gas discovery was made in the waters surrounding it and that led me to look into the BAT to which I had not given much thought prior to that. I discovered that it's enormous. It could be very lucrative. It's very exciting. It's a frontier. There's an amazing British history there as well. Perhaps we can get into all of those over this conversation.Calum DrysdaleAbsolutely. Do you want to start us off, Tom? Why on earth do we own a slice of this icy pie?00:04:16 - Historical ExpeditionsTom OughThere's a story to this which explains why we make the claim and I think we can get into that very soon. But I think it's worth winding back a little further because Antarctica has a fascinating recent history. Ancient and medieval cartographers hadn't been there. They nevertheless assumed that because of all the land mass that they're aware of north of the equator that there would be a continent in the far south to counterbalance that land in the north.So that's not really evidence in favour of Antarctica existing but nevertheless a picture began to build and we had 17th century sailors coming home with stories of islands of ice trailing through empty seas.Calum DrysdaleI mean the counterweight stuff is funny right because actually there isn't really a continent down there. Most of the land on the globe is concentrated to the north, there isn't reason really to go. I suppose the southern ocean around Antarctica is so empty that actually it's quite an inhospitable place for a wooden hulled ship to go.Tom OughThe seas around there are full of ice. They're very stormy. There's a prevailing west wind that rushes clockwise around the continent, dragging this very strong current along beneath. So not only is it freezing, it's also a very difficult place to navigate. So you can sort of understand why nobody went, why nobody discovered Antarctica sooner than they did. But nevertheless, people were interested.Calum DrysdaleAnd there was a sense that there had to be something there, right? Like you weren't just venturing out into open ocean.Tom OughWell, it's almost a little spooky because if you look at some of the old maps, they will even insert a large southern continent called Terra Australis Nondum Cognita, which means the southern land not yet known. And so we had French sailors, Dutch sailors, English sailors, including Francis Drake, who all went on a hunt for this continent. Didn't find anything.Calum DrysdaleYeah, and I think it's interesting you talk about this unknown southern and counterweight continent as I think Terry Pratchett put it. When I’ve heard that term, it's always been in reference to Australia, right? And Cook's expeditions down south.Tom OughYeah, well, Cook's a very important figure here. And the background is that in 1768, he was chosen to lead an expedition, chosen by the Royal Society, and its putative purpose was to observe the transit of Venus. And the idea was that if the transit of Venus were monitored from various points on the surface of the globe, the Astronomer Royal could accurately determine the distance between the planets. So that, as I say, was a putative purpose of that mission in 1768. And they do it, Cook’s in Tahiti, and then in June 1769, still in Tahiti, he opens an envelope which he carried with him on the ship all the way from London and it contains secret instructions from King George III.Calum DrysdaleI mean this is the sort of thing that you really you read about in kind of Cold War spy thrillers. The dour Soviet commander get into the northwest passage, opens the letters and ‘Bomb Vancouver immediately, Comrade Captain.’Tom OughBut it is in fact even better instructions for a second mission and the mission was to find this mysterious southern continent Terra Australis and claim it for Britain.Calum DrysdaleWhich we love to hear.Tom OughWe love it. Aso he sets out to find to find Terra Australis. He finds New Zealand, he finds Australia, and fabulously none of his crew dies of scurvy because he's a wonderful captain, but no Terra Australis. And so Cook returns home.Calum DrysdaleReally, so he was actually was always looking for Antarctica?Tom OughHe was looking for Antarctica, yeah. He was looking for an even more southerly continent. I’d say he did pretty well, I’d say he discovered a continent it just happened to be the wrong continent.I'm not saying we should tear down all the statues and burn all the stamps bearing his face.Calum DrysdaleSo Australia found, still impressive. We're not cancelling Cook yet.Tom OughYeah, I think we can give him a pass. But he does not give himself a pass. He goes on another expedition. And so this is in 1774 and his ships entered the Antarctic Circle several times and it was, as I say, incredibly cold there and this means that they had to turn back when they were merely a hundred and twenty one kilometres from Antarctica's coast.Calum DrysdaleAnd is this because it's so cold that the sailors can't survive or is it because almost like stepping onto a conveyor belt that they start just being whizzed around the globe sort of sent sent careening off westwards that they have to withdraw?Tom OughWell I think we can we can turn to his own diary entry, ‘I who had ambitions not only to go farther than anyone had done before but as far as it was possible for man to go was not sorry at meeting with this interruption.’ So I think we can infer from that that none of the crew wanted to be there. Even Cook, one of the most adventurous seafarers in British history was like, oh my God, I really want to warm my hands on a fire somewhere.Calum DrysdaleWell, it's like that, the clip of Fernando Alonso coming up behind Schumacher. I can't remember which Grand Prix it was. And he's racing at his back end. And he says famously in the post-race interview, “I knew he was going to move. He's got a wife and children waiting for him at home.”Tom OughOkay, I'm going to give you a fun fact about Cook. He was married at 34. He was at sea for more than half his married life, yet he still had six children.Calum DrysdaleIt's good going.Tom OughGet a move on, Calum.Calum DrysdaleOkay so, Cook can't cut it. Our great explorer yet defeated by a bit of wind and a bit of a nip in the air.Tom OughYeah so Cook scuttles home with his tail between his legs and it's such difficulty to navigate that it's another 40 years till something really significant happens in this endeavour to find this mystery continent and what happens is that the commander of the first Russian Antarctic expedition, whose name is Fabian Bellingshausen…Calum DrysdaleWhich doesn't strike me as a particularly Russian name.Tom ONo, nor me. It’s all very suspect. What is more suspect is that his manuscript charts shows a patch of blue at the lower edge. And that is said to be the first departure from blank space on those maps near the pole, because that could very well be a sign of a continent.Calum DrysdaleAnd are we sure that he didn't just spot a significantly sized ice floe or, you know, a particularly large seal or something like that?Tom OughWell, we will get to that. But not two days after Bellingshausen's sighting of that little patch of blue, an officer in the British Royal Navy, Edward Bransfield, saw something else.I’ll give you a bit of background on the great Edward Bransfield. He was born in Cork, he was press ganged at the age of 18 into joining the Navy. He went through the ranks and at 34 or so he was posted to the Navy's new Pacific squadron off Valparaiso…Calum DrysdaleIs that how you pronounce it?Tom Ough…in Chile. Yeah, I believe so. Our Chilean listeners, who will be very angry about this episode as it is because of the contested claim in the Antarctic, can correct me.But Bransfield on 30th of January 1820, which as I say was two days after Bellingshausen sighting, saw Trinity Peninsula which is the northernmost point of the Antarctic mainland.Calum DrysdaleWhich we are now hovering above.Tom OughWhich we are hovering above right now. And so the Russians have this claim to have seen it first, but from the 1960s there is some Cold War revisionism in which I think it was British scientists who said, well actually Fabian Bellingshausen did not see the continent. He just saw some sea ice.Calum DrysdaleI'm glad that my sort of inherent chauvinism lines up with 1960s British scientific attitudes.Tom OughSo Edward Bransfield is a hero and we saw it first.But sadly people did not realize the significance of this at the time. It would seem in 2000 the Royal Mail wanted to issue a commemorative stamp in Bransfield's honor but nobody knew what his face looked like. Nobody had painted a portrait of this guy. So unfortunately the stamp depicted instead RRS Bransfield, which was a surveying vessel named after him.Calum DrysdaleI had an English teacher at school who was called Ben Bransfield. I wonder if he was any relative thereof. I remember him being particularly rosy-cheeked, a sort of a man who I think would do well in cold weather.Tom OughI guess we'll never know because this age of exploration is over, or is it?Calum DrysdaleBeautifully teed up there, Tom.00:12:50 - Heroic AgeTom OughWell, before we get on to present-day Antarctica, I do want to talk about what is called the heroic era. And this is an amazing era in British exploration. And it's roughly the first few decades of the 19th century. And at this point, people in lots of the sort of advanced countries at that time were getting interested in this continent which, as I say, was seen first by a Briton.And so people were scrambling expeditions and it was a very exciting time.Calum DrysdaleI think what's notable as well, I mean, I have to say I was struck when I was reading your notes of this, is this is happening at the beginning of the 20th century. So there have been ships rounding the Cape to India for centuries at this point, and yet that barrier of these cold and windy seas south of the Cape was so, so great that even the sort of great tea clippers of the time... when you go and see the Cutty Sark, which is this astonishingly beautiful and seemingly very high-tech ship, that even those were not enough to brave these terrifying seas.Tom OughYeah, well let me give you an example of this. There was a Belgian ship, the imaginatively named Belgica, which was sent forth in 1897 or so and it accidentally became the first vessel to winter in Antarctic waters just because it got trapped in pack ice.Calum DrysdaleWhich won't be the last to do so.Tom OughNo, the first in a long line of vessels to be trapped in pack ice. There's a new body set up in Britain, the British National Antarctic Expedition, and there's this guy called Robert Falcon Scott, friend of the show, who on board the Discovery sets a new record for reaching the farthest point south. People are now exploring the landmass, which is very exciting.Calum DrysdaleSo this is further south than the Belgica gets?Tom OughWell, they didn't land, they didn't land.Calum DrysdaleOh, but he does, but he does actually?Calum DrysdaleYeah. They didn't land, Scott and others are now actually on the landmass.Calum DrysdaleAnd he's the first…Tom OughWell, in fact, he wasn't only on the landmass, he also hovered above it in a tethered balloon for air reconnaissance, which is tragically missing from the accounts of Scott’s derring-do.Calum DrysdaleA predecessor of our own then as we too hover above the Antarctic.Tom OughYeah, we're not tethered but it was a view not unlike ours.Calum DrysdaleSo he was the first man or his crew were the first people to land on the Antarctic?Tom OughThey were early, there were other expeditions coming from places like France, Germany, and Sweden and the race at this point is not so much to get on the continent as to get to the South Pole itself.Calum DrysdaleI fear I know the answer to this Tom but was it a Brit, was it a Briton who reached the South Pole first?Tom OughWell it seemed well it seemed like it might be for a while. Robert Falcon Scott led this expedition with a five-man party, and they were racing for the South Pole, they were racing the Norwegian crew led by Roald Amundsen.And after this incredibly arduous journey, the Englishmen thought they'd got there or they thought they'd won. And the South Pole itself was hoving into view and then they saw the fluttering flag of Norway and a tent and that had been left by Amundsen's crew and he'd left a letter for Scott saying, well done, better like next time basically and please pass on this letter to the King of Norway — which I think Scott found quite patronising.And so they had their little squares of chocolate they'd apportioned for what they hoped would be this momentous point, and they had to set off, they had to start setting off home and this was an 800 mile journey and it was torturous and very sadly all five of Scott's party died from cold and hunger.Calum DrysdaleThis is the famous Captain Oates, ‘I'm stepping out and I may be sometime.’Tom OughSacrificing himself for the sake of the other men, knowing there was not enough food to sustain them all. There were three men left and they continued for another 20 miles in what must have been horrible conditions and unfortunately they didn't make it either and the really sad thing is that they were just 11 miles from the next food and fuel depot.There was a search party sent out and they found the bodies of Scott and two other men on the expedition, Dr. Wilson and Birdie Bowers, and they were just in their sleeping bags inside a tent covered with snow. Journals and papers were recovered, but the bodies were left in Antarctica.Captain Oates’ body is still there, I suppose, because it was never found. And because of that recovery mission, as I say, we have the journals left by Scott and his men, and that means we have Scott's final diary entry. He knows that the depot is 11 miles away. He says, 'But outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. R. Scott. For God's sake, look after our people.'Calum DrysdaleBoth awful but heroic as well.Tom OughYeah, awful and heroic. And so the torch of great British Antarctic exploration passes on to a man called Ernest Shackleton, and Ernest Shackleton is an enormous personal hero of Calum’s.Calum DrysdaleYes, Shackleton is often accused because, of course, his mission was a failure, but they managed to get back alive. And I think his combination of derring-do and, frankly, horrendous and even dangerous amateurism, appeals to me.Tom OughWe can fill this out a bit. Tell the listeners about the Weddell Sea.Calum DrysdaleWell, Shackleton, after the victory of Amundsen, Shackleton goes forward and tries to carry the torch of British Antarctic exploration. And so he sets out in the Endurance in early 1915. And his aim is to not only reach the South Pole but then go across it, and this is obviously more difficult because you can't retreat to the caches and the storage depots that you've left along the way.Instead, you're always crossing unknown terrain. And I think if you imagine Antarctica as one of the horseshoe crabs whose blood is harvested en masse for pharmaceutical products, with a tail. And it is into this tail that he comes in, the Weddell Sea. And in 1915, they arrive and wend their way inbetween floes and icebergs.But in January 1915, the ship is stuck and is stuck fast. First, spirits seem high and they attempt to, after a month, manually cut their way out. So they're cutting holes in the ice with big saws and picks, trying to create a space. And they move the ship back and then try to effectively ram their way back out to open water so they can continue their journey.They get within 400 feet of open water before they realise that some of this ice is 18 feet thick. And there is no way that they can reach water. So they have to settle in and accept that this is going to be their winter station. And they are going to, like the Belgica before them, winter in the pack ice.And I think that when people talk about this, it's difficult to grasp the sheer scale of the time periods that we're talking about here. That first, these men are just in the ship. They’re bored, there’s nothing to do, they have to just survive over the winter. And they play football, they put on cabarets and variety shows, they name the lower berth the Ritz and put on variety shows and dressing up. Scott actually wins an award for worst singer.Tom OughIt sounds a lot like lockdown. My housemates and I were in a 5 bedroom house at that point and we did a bar crawl. All the guys turned their room into a themed bar and it was fantastic.Calum DrysdaleAnd I think doing things like this is really important because the men are bored. But he's an absolutely ferocious disciplinarian, so he maintains the spirits of the crew by keeping to a really rigorous routine of scrubbing the ships. They have more than 50 dogs on board which are meant to act as pack dogs. The mess and the smell must have been awful.Calum DrysdaleAnd what’s astonishing as well is they had a photographer with them, they had Frank Hurley, who is capturing video and photographs of these early games of football on the ice, of variety shows, of singing that are astonishing watching given how distant these people are and actually yet how close they become through the footage.Tom OughYeah, I really recommend looking up this footage. This is incredible that they captured it at that early stage.Calum DrysdaleAnd then, so we're three months in, they've been stuck in the ice for three months, and now the ice starts buckling. So the pressure starts building up and starts buckling around them. So the hull of the ship is three feet thick, but the fears start to mount that even this powerful ship is not going to be able to manage. And their original idea at this point is that they're going to sit in the ice, and the pack ice is always moving, it's floating, and they want to get to a supply depot that was being left from a previous expedition on Paulet Island. And they've originally made an effort to get there with dogs on sleds moving through the ice.But it's just impossible. The ice is forming mountains and ridges that are impassable. And so they just have to wait. Six months in, the hull starts really giving way and the rudder is broken. So there's no way now that the ship will work. And they take their supplies off the ship. Nine months in, the ship keels over 30 degrees. And the ship is now tilting. There's a fear that it's going to give way. Nine and a half months in, the order is given to abandon ship.Shackleton tells his men, ships and stores are gone, we will go home. So the mission is now impossible, there's no attempt going to be made. And now they're hoping that, as I said, that they will drift close enough to Paulet Island to be able to find these stores and survive and then an attempt to rescue. But unfortunately the ice floe is unpredictable and they move too far to the northeast and they watch Paulet Island pass in front of them. Inaccessible but the opportunity of survival is there. And so now we're 14 months in and Shackleton abandons the Paulet Island.And he says to the men the only thing we can do now is go for this different place, Elephant Island. There are no supplies on Elephant Island but at least it's out of the ice. You'd be out and you could actually attempt to connect to South Georgia which is the closest human and occupied territory. And the conditions at this point are awful. We're 14 months in and the men have been eating largely meat, so anything they can scavenge. So they're down to a biscuit for lunch and three sugar cubes a day and they're eating seal steaks.Tom OughKeto.Calum DrysdaleI mean their breath must have stunk, just disgusting. Although, although the men talk very highly apparently of penguin livers as a real delicacy.Tom OughI can see that becoming very popular on Instagram.Calum DrysdaleAnd at this point they have to kill the dogs. So these dogs who have become like pets and really close companions are killed 14 and a half months in. And then soon after the ice floe breaks apart and suddenly their camp is splitting in two.And the crew, all 27 of them, take to the sea in these three tiny lifeboats. These are 23 foot long open boats. And after six days at sea, I mean, storms the whole way through, as you said, these are not hospitable waters, they land on Elephant Island. And this is the first time in 15 months, since, well, 15 months they got stuck, that they have been on solid land. And now the question is, how can they reconnect with humanity.And so Shackleton and five men set off in one of these lifeboats, leaving behind the rest of his crew. And they have a journey of 800 miles to cross. They set out and immediately gales start up again. The navigator Frank Worsley has a single opportunity to take a reading off the sun, because the rest of the time it's so overcast. And by some miracle, he is able to guide the crew to South Georgia.And as they come into the bay on the wrong side, the opposite side of the island to the whaling station, the main pin holding the rudder in falls out, rendering the boat useless. They wouldn't be able to use it. Had they been at sea, they wouldn't have been able to direct themselves. And now they've got the problem that three of the men are too sick to travel any further. So Shackleton in, again, what is an astonishing act of amateurism, he's not a mountaineer, attempts to cross these glaciers and mountains to the whaling station.Tom OughHe's a gentleman mountaineer.Calum DrysdaleHe is from the finest tradition of enthusiastic amateurism.So the men, they twist screws into the bottom of their shoes, they have a bit of rope, a carpenter's adze, and they set off on this journey. And there's one particularly notable story where they're up at the top of a mountain and night is closing in. They know that if they don't get down this mountain, they will die of exposure. And what they do is they coil the rope up into a rudimentary toboggan, wrap their arms around each other, and just launch themselves off into the void.Tom OughIt must have been very dark.Calum DrysdaleRight, they can't see any sign. And if there is a cliff, they're dead. And yet, Shackleton has the most astonishing luck.There's a very good line written by a man who wasn't actually on the expedition with them, but writes afterwards about these three characters, Scott, Amundsen, and Shackleton. And he says, ‘for scientific discovery, give me Scott. For speed and efficiency of travel, give me Armisen. But when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.’Tom OughI like it.Calum DrysdaleAnd in this vein, he walks into the whaling station.Tom OughStrides into the whaling station.Calum DrysdaleStrides into the whaling station. It’s 16 months after they've got stuck. And there's a man there to whom he says, “I'm Shackleton, don't you know me?” And the man replies, “I know your voice, but I don't recognise you.” He's so changed by these experiences.And after that, it is then three more months before they're able to return on a ship of the Chilean navy’s to go down to Elephant Island and rescue their crew. And when Elephant Island hoves into view they see a weak signal fire. And there is a question, how many of these men have survived? And the answer is all of them. All 22 men left behind have survived this wait, and they are all rescued from Elephant Island.And in that way, it is a disaster. The expedition is a disaster. But I think for me, it is the most astonishing example of pluck and courage.Tom OughIt is. And the International Court of Justice has a few criteria it looks at when it's apportioning sovereignty. And unfortunately, pluck isn't on that list. But the contention of the Anglofuturism Podcast is that it should be taken into account. And we're going to return to this issue of sovereignty. But all this is to say that there is a magnificent history of British adventuring and pioneering in Antarctica.And so Shackleton's death in 1922, when he's, by kind of popular account, a broken man, does mark the end of the heroic age, but it does not mark the end of the exploration of Antartica. From the 20s and 30s, you've got American explorers in early planes flying over parts of Antarctica. You've got a race to name different parts of the continent because that's kind of the equivalent of putting your flag in the ground. It's the next best thing.Note that there's a bit of it now called Queen Elizabeth Land for similar reasons. So there's a German Antarctic expedition of 1939 and that drops, I'm sorry to say, metal swastikas over what is now Queen Maud Land [to claim it] for Nazi Germany, though listeners will be reassured to know that the area is now claimed by Norway.00:31:19 - Sovereignty IssuesCalum DrysdaleThat I have to say is not an example of pluck.Tom OughNo. I think it's kind of cheeky if you're just dropping swastikas on it from above. Anyway, there's not much economic utility on Antarctica itself at this point [in the early 20th century].Calum DrysdaleWhat's the skiing like?Tom OughI think it was Shackleton who climbed Mount Erebus, which is a live volcano. I don't think it was like throwing out magma at that point. But theoretically, theoretically, there could be very, very nippy skiing. But at that point, people don't care about skiing. They're more interested in whaling and the sovereignty issue is a little more of an abstract thing because there's no real reason for it.Nevertheless, the US, which is becoming the most powerful country in the world, wants to retain the right to a slice and in 1924 the Secretary of State says, ‘It is the opinion of this department that the discovery of lands unknown to civilisation even when coupled with a formal taking of possession does not support a valid claim of sovereignty unless the discovery is followed by an actual settlement of the discovered country.’Calum DrysdaleSounds like something someone late to the party would say.Tom OughIt does, it does, someone late to the party and without a national history of pluck.Calum DrysdaleAnd what they then attempt to impose a settlement on Antarctica?Tom OughWell not quite yet, there's still this chaotic state of proto-colonialism. In World War II for instance, oh but by the way like very minor historical footnote which is that this country called Argentina has been founded and so the Argentinians and the Chileans also want a slice of Antarctica and Argentina is allied with the Germans in World War II. And so Deception Island, which is this volcanic island just to the north of the peninsula…Calum DrysdaleThat's the end of the horseshoe crab's tail for those still keeping to our vertebrate-based metaphor.Tom OughAnd it's this incredible sort of black, grey, very dark island with basically no life on it at all.Nevertheless in World War 2 it is the subject of a game of capture the flag basically between the Brits and the Argentinians and so nobody wants to actually leave troops stationed on it, but they both want it as guarding Drake's passage, which is between the Antarctic and South America.And so the Argentinians turn up and they put their flag in it, the Brits turn up and they remove the flag and place it their own. This happens, I think this happens a few times over. The war eventually ends and still nobody really owns the Antarctic but everyone kind of wants at least a right to own some of it and things hot up a little bit in 1952 and that's the point where there's a British meteorological party that lands at Hope Bay which is on the northern end of this peninsula and then the Argentine navy turns up and they use small arms fire to chase this meteorological party back to its ship.Calum DrysdaleNot the last time that the Argentinains would intrude on peaceful British activity in this part of the world. Fortunately, the Argentinian government agreed not to interfere with the British scientists but nevertheless there is a growing international sense that order must be brought to the Antarctic at some point. The Soviets are interested, the Americans are interested, I think there's more of a sense at this point that there might be oil, gas, coal, good mining, all that kind of thing.And so a program of geophysical research is set up jointly by various countries in the late 50s and then when that ends in 1958 that leaves a bit of a legislative vacancy and President Eisenhower fills that vacancy by brokering a treaty and this is a very important treaty in the history of the Antarctic.00:34:58 - Antarctic TreatyCalum DrysdaleThis is the Antarctic Treaty that still binds us today isn't it?Tom OughYeah it was an agreement between all the countries that were active on Antarctica at the time so that's the Argentinians, Australia, Belgium who we've mentioned.Calum DrysdaleBelgium is still relevant in this?Tom OughYeah, I mean preposterously yes they are one of the 12 parties to this treaty. There's also Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the Soviet Union and then of course us and the US.It was signed on December 1st 1959 and enacted in 1961 and its objectives are to keep Antarctica demilitarised, to prevent these countries from using it as a place to test nukes and to ensure that it is used for peaceful and scientific purposes only.And a few countries have been added so if you have a long-term scientific commitment to Antarctica you can be a consultant party and so we've got China and Iran involved, I think, for instance. But that's where we are now, we still have this treaty which prevents countries from militarising Antarctica to doing anything really economic with it. But what's interesting, Calum, is that this treaty can be revised from 2048 onwards.Calum DrysdaleRight, so we're now staring down the end of what is potentially the sort of halcyon period of Antarctic quietude and peace, and now people are waking up to actually the resources and what this area has to offer.00:36:49 - Resource PotentialTom OughWell, I think it's certainly fair to say that people are waking up to the potential wealth of the other polar region. I'm thinking of course of Greenland which the Trump administration has shown a lot of interest in buying. Trump wants to drill in Greenland, he wants to use it for strategic purposes, he sent his son Donald Trump Jr to Greenland recently and he's trying to get them to vote for independence from Denmark.And so the Trump team sees a landmass rich in gas, oil, gold and rare earth minerals and as ice begins to melt this stuff becomes more accessible.Calum DrysdaleWell and it's not just the Americans who are looking, right? The Russians as well are searching under the Arctic for oil. I think there was a finding of these vast oil fields up in sort of underneath the ice and the Chinese as well, I think are excited by the opening of trade routes that emerge as the Arctic ice opens up, that you can start moving containers across the world without necessarily having to go through Suez or around the Cape.Tom OughYeah. And I think Donald Trump has said that he wants to order 40 icebreakers and the US Navy doesn't have any. We have one.Calum DrysdaleThat's almost the two power standard.But I think yeah, I think you're right that we are now emerging back into a time of territorial expansion of where these the borders and the assumptions that what was once fixed on a map is now open to reevaluation. And it might be time to act on our own behalf.Tom OughI spoke to a professor of geopolitics about this, a guy called Klaus Dodds. And I'll tell you what he said to me, which is that ‘the Greenland saga is just a reminder that both the Arctic and Antarctic are no longer protected by what was until quite recently termed exceptionalism’ and he said of Trump that ‘he has not discovered Antarctica yet but he might do so in his second term, and if he does he will be briefed on the arrival of several more countries to Antarctica.’So it's not just the Brits and all those other countries like the Norwegians who maintain bases there, there's also an Indian base, a Turkish base, Chinese bases, even Iran has said that it wants an Antarctic base. And like I say in 2048, any of the original 12 signatories to the treaty may request a conference to review the existing terms.So given the changing attitudes towards the polar regions, given this point at which the treaty can be re-evaluated and given some quite exciting evidence of mineral wealth which we'll get to, this could be a very important era for the Antarctic and we might find ourselves in a situation where we are looking back through history at the basis of our claim, and looking at stories like Scott’s and Shackleton’s and thanking our lucky stars that they actually did do this exploration because everyone's going to want a slice of the Antarctic.Calum DrysdaleYou mention the mineral wealth. Our claim, and you should talk more about it, is particularly vulnerable, because the Chileans and the Argentinians claims overlap our own, in that our claim, which is this end of this peninsula, the rocky and exposed bits are actually in many ways, quite an advantageous area to claim, because you don't have to dig through thick, thick ice sheets. But it also is the area, unfortunately, that is closest to Argentina and Chile. And being willing to forcefully push our claim might be quite critical.Tom OughListeners, we're going to leave you with that bombshell, but we'll be back after a break.[Message from sponsor]Hi, I'm Dr. Lawrence Spaceport. You might have heard of the Looking for Growth campaign, sometimes known as LFG. Well, I'm doing something even better. I present to you the LFT bill. That's right, I'm looking for terraforming. Because in space, nobody can hear the NIMBYs scream.We will carpet Mars in power lines and Victorian mansion blocks, turning that rusty wilderness into a proper cosmic Kensington, complete with gas-lit craters and Butler-operated elevators to Olympus Mons. It's already a planet free of XL bullies and excess zoning laws, but with your support, we can make it even better. Red planet today, red tape never.Calum DrysdaleWelcome back, listeners. Tom is polishing off his third pint of gin and has spotted through the porthole a collection of three buildings that have got him rather excited. What are those Tom?Tom OughYeah, so what we've got below us Calum, come have a look. It's Port Lockroy and listeners, Port Lockroy is the main British outpost at the moment in Antarctica and it's three buildings, the largest of which is Bransfield House, and that houses a post office among other thing. This is the UK’s most southerly public post office, and it is also known as the Penguin Post Office.Calum DrysdaleDo you think it also stocks sort of crass birthday cards that you can send to your stepdad?Tom OughYeah, I'm sure you can get your holiday travel insurance. Probably a bit expensive down there. Port Lockroy is largely occupied by the British Antarctic Survey and this is the organisation that conducts scientific work on behalf of the country in conjunction with other countries' polar operations.And I have an exciting update for listeners to the Anglofuturism Podcast, which is that the British Antarctic Survey is hiring.Calum DrysdaleExactly. So if you have always thought of yourself as a doer of derring-do, and think that actually what Shackleton did sounds quite exciting, this is your chance.Tom OughWell, you can be an agricultural plant operator, or an agricultural plant mechanic, a glacier geophysicist, or more excitingly, unfortunately, this is a remote position, but you can currently apply to be an Antarctic Place Names Committee ad hoc member.Calum DrysdaleAnd what would this involve?Tom OughWell, you join a committee and then you just make up names for bits of the Antarctic. So we have a few suggestions. We propose the Duchy of Antarctica Mining Territory for forbidden reasons that we'll refer to shortly, Snow-on-the-Wold, New New South Wales, and perhaps HMP Shackleton.Calum DrysdaleWhere we send everyone who plays TikToks on the bus.Tom OughThey're all getting rounded up and they're all getting sent HMP Shackleton. They will regret every decibel of tube music they inflict on us.Calum DrysdaleSo Tom, other than the ability to send postcards home to your loved ones, what else is there in Antarctica? And what are these people actually doing other than looking at plants?Tom OughWell a lot of their work is to do with the climate. But as regards your first question, not only can you send a smutty postcard from the Antarctic, you might also be able to get filthy rich.Calum DrysdaleAnd what would this involve?Tom OughBecause this is a geologically very interesting part of the world. And so as listeners will remember, this is a peninsula. And it's a peninsula that is rocky. It's got exposed rock. So it's not covered by like a kilometre of ice as most of the continent is. And because you're not allowed to mine there we don't know a ton about what's going on geologically in Antarctica but there are some clues. And one of the clues comes from the geological composition of other continents which used to be part of this huge continental landmass called Gondwana that Antarctica was once a part of as well.Calum DrysdaleGondwana? I hardly know her.Tom OughBrilliant, thank you Calum. The peninsula seems to have some shared history with South America and the kind of rock it is suggests that there might be quite significant gold deposits which is very exciting. There's copper, there's visible copper staining on these rocks that's definitely not worth going all the way to the Antarctic to mine for but the gold might be.Right so we've got copper which is not very exciting, gold which could definitely be exciting and incidentally in New Zealand's part of Antarctica there is a volcano that spews gold. I'm not making this up. It's just obviously very expensive to get to but it spews gold dust.Calum DrysdaleI like the idea I like the idea of an Antarctic-based or localised gold rush, in which you swing open the saloon doors and you walk in with your 900...Tom OughSHUT THE DOOR! SHUT THE DOOR!Calum DrysdaleThe wind whistling underneath the salons doors. Actually, you can't have any decent gunfights because you can't find your ammunition tucked in one of your pockets.Tom OughBut there'll be more than a gold rush. There could be a uranium rush. There could be a diamond-bearing rock rush. Because both of those have been found in Antarctica. So you've got potentially this colossal mineral wealth. Bear in mind that our slice is a as I said, and so your odds are pretty good of finding some good stuff, quite apart from these clues which we already have. One final clue is the presence of active volcanoes in the British Antarctica Territory. And they're exciting because they bring metals to the surface that are often very valuable. I remember a geologist at Oxford once telling me every volcano has underneath it tens of millions of pounds of precious metals and if they're active then so much the better. And crucially, the British territory has several of these.Calum DrysdaleSo like I say, it could make a diamonds are only the tip of the iceberg are they not?Tom OughThey are only the tip of the iceberg, thank you Calum. They are the tip of the iceberg because there's also a lot of fuel there and this Russian crew found huge reserves of oil and gas in I think the Weddell Sea just off the peninsula. Specifically what that crew found was apparently reserves of oil and gas that in total are ten times larger than our entire North Sea output over the past half-century.Calum DrysdaleAnd I think Tom many a Green voting pensioner might at this point pop up and say ruin one of the last undamaged environments or habitats in the world, and would be frankly appalled by our glee at the thought of nodding donkeys studding the landscape. Is this a problem? Is there a risk of us damaging the environment by doing this?Tom OughWell I think there's a lot you can say in response to that question and I think frankly some people are misguided in their views of the Antarctic. As we know, British energy is four times more expensive than American energy, for instance. We're still using gas.Calum DrysdaleIt forms the base of our power. And as we bring online more and more intermittent renewables, the vital necessity of having these oil and gas, and sometimes even coal, baseload power supplies is ever more clear.Tom OughWell, I think it's important to make a distinction between coal, which is very dirty, and natural gas, which is less dirty. It's also important to remember that we really should be using nuclear as our baseload, but for various avoidable reasons, we're in a position where we just need a stopgap and we're buying this stopgap from other people anyway. So while I'm more excited about the mining, I think the oil and gas is potentially a pretty valuable resource as well.And when people talk about the pristineness of the Antarctic, I think that's true. But you've got to bear in mind that although there's lots of marine life at the bottom of the ocean, there is almost nothing that can live on Antarctica itself. And my view is that if we're going to be mining and extracting resources, this is the best place in the world. It's not the worst. It’s the best.The reason is that there's so little ecology to interfere with. Bear in mind that it's a totally inhospitable part of the world. It's dark for about six months and so you get very limited opportunity to photosynthesize. So there are hardly any plants. There are only about 800 species of Antarctic plants of which 350 are lichens. You're certainly not getting rid of all the lichens by doing a bit of mining in one part of this massive continent.And then maybe people are wondering about animals. Well it's mites, lites, midges, fleas, tardigrades.Calum DrysdaleA species known for their ability to survive in outer space, so probably won't be bothered by a mine being built next to them.Tom OughYeah, I think they'll muddle through. And we've got the penguins, of course, and we should look after these penguins. But these are not the penguins of yore. In the good old days, 30 million years ago, the Antarctic penguins were two metres tall. They were two metres tall and they were not even the biggest animal on the Antarctic. This is a tangent now, but I think it's worth it because there was this flightless carnivorous bird that stood three and a half metres tall that could run through the forest on the hunt. And bear in mind it would have been dark for six months per year.Calum DrysdaleSo yeah, so probably had quite a strong forehead that able to resist bashing into things as it ran.Tom OughOr like infrared vision or something, we don't know. Um so this stuff would have been like charging through these forests that would eventually become like British oil. It's just totally fantastic, but those days are long gone and none of it is left.Calum DrysdaleSo Tom, what you're saying is the degradation of the penguin species means they're deserving of extinction.Tom OughThat is not what I'm saying. I think in a nutshell my claim is that this is the least bad place in the world for certain forms industrial activity.So as we've explained, this part of the world could be this bonanza of resources. And it's worth recalling something that Cook wrote which is that, ‘should anyone possess the resolution and fortitude to elucidate this point by pushing yet further south than I have done, I shall not envy him the fame of his discovery but I make bold to declare that the world will derive no benefit from it.’He could not have been more wrong and that's proven by the number of pairs of covetous eyes that are now falling on our British slice of Antarctica.And so you can put a research station wherever you like on the Antarctic. And that means that on the peninsula, there are several other bases. And these come from places like Argentina, of course, but also Brazil, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, blah, blah, blah, all these countries, even Peru, Poland, Spain.Calum DrysdaleSpain. Not natural cold weather people.Tom OughNo, no, no. With none of this fantastic history of exploration. And as we were saying, times are changing. Countries are waking up to the potential of the polar regions.And again, I was speaking to Bob Seeley, who was formerly a member of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, about the British Antarctic Territory when I was writing about it for the Telegraph, and he told me ‘the weaker we look, the more we become a target. I think we are entering a period of world history whereby liberal internationalism is going to come under a lot of pressure from hard realist power.’Calum DrysdaleAnd I think this is why we drew the parallel to Czechoslovakia in that countries that are willing to pull whatever levers they can, be that anti-colonialism the Argentinians have done with regards to the Falkland Islands, nations that are willing to push will reap the rewards of their efforts. And it will require us being forceful in the defence of our possessions to maintain sort of the control, but also maintain the benefits of this land.Tom OughYeah, I think it might well be a use it or lose it situation, and it will almost certainly be a situation where those who benefit are those who are most entrepreneurial and assertive about it.00:54:25 - Future ProspectsTom OughListeners might remember that we had Samo Burja on the podcast, and he's the geopolitical analyst from Bismarck, and he said that Antarctica is one of many unique opportunities left in the world, and a country like Britain should not be playing it safe. We should be taking advantage of amazing possessions like this.Calum DrysdaleI think this brings us on quite nicely to the threats and the countries who might be willing to push their claims or a claim at the expense of Britain. You mentioned these other countries who maintain research stations. At the moment, the territories look a bit like a pie sliced up, right, with slices cut out reaching towards the South Pole. What would an effort to solidify and support our claim look like?Tom OughIt's very hard to predict what will become of the Antarctic. It might just be that the US and China carve it up somehow. There's this trans-Antarctic line of mountains that could package it. I think if we’re actually serious about making the most of it then we might need to be doing a little bit more.And in the course of this journalism I did on the BAT, for the Telegraph, I spoke to a guy called Dryden Brown, and he's an American who has 20 million dollars worth of Silicon Valley funding to build an independent libertarian city called Praxis. And he proposed that the government, the British government, work with him to develop Antarctica, and he wants to build geodesic domes, which are hemispherical structures that can house humans in harsh environments, on the British Antarctic territory.And what's cool about that it will be piloting technology that we would need to settle on the Moon and Mars. So it's a great scientific endeavour. And because it's scientific rather than militaristic or extractive, it could in theory be within the rules of the treaty.And I think if you start putting domes down and making a serious fist of settling it, then your claim becomes stronger. Your claim becomes stronger and you learn about the environment as well. You could start just finding out what resources there are such that you're in pole position to claim them when it becomes legal.And, perhaps more fundamentally than that, we could be continuing this noble history of exploring Antarctica and pushing the frontier as far as we can.Calum DrysdaleThe point there is people are already planning. There are already entrepreneurial efforts in mind, and as with Columbus, who was initially turned away by the King of Portugal and then went to Spain and then went and found the new world, there are enthusiastic, motivated, and driven individuals who are going to go and take advantage of this. And the question is, are we going to be the ones backing them, or are we going to be in 50 years’ time looking back and thinking, oh gosh, what a missed opportunity?Tom OughAbsolutely. And if you think that China hasn't got a plan for the Antarctic when they put all these bases down on it, you're a moron. Like, of course they have a plan.Other countries are thinking what they're going to do with the Antarctic. We should be thinking about it too. And the potential is immense.Calum DrysdaleSo Tom, as a man who has spent the last few weeks with his head in a freezer, trying to simulate the conditions or the experiences of a future British Antarctic territory colonist, what sort of things might a futuristic and patriotic British colony look like?Tom OughOkay, let me paint you a picture, Calum. Close your eyes and imagine the gently nodding pumpjack of the Royal Antarctic oilfields. To their north, a busy new harbour straddled by the mighty granite figure of the Scott Colossus populated by humanoid mining robots. And finally, the King inspecting the first gold coin to emerge from the Antarctic mint, just before he visits a vast data centre that is cooled by the snow and supported against the Antarctic gales by cathedral-style flying buttresses.Calum DrysdaleIt would be quite a notable event because the gold, the gold in the royal jewellery has always come from Wales right? What a declaration of intent to take gold from Antarctica.Tom OughOh hugely and then as well as taking things to the Antarctic and bringing them home we could send some things there from here, so to make it truly British we would have the Port Lockroy Greggs, we could have like a Casper's Ice Cream in Port Lockroy as well, we could have Deliveroo dark kitchens and riders on skidoos and a statue of course of Edward Bransfield.Calum DrysdaleEdward Bransfield with some face…Tom OughThe faceless statue.Calum Drysdale…reconstructed from his descendants as a sort of an e-fit. However, it seems to me that the FCDO is not thinking about this. As you say, China has a plan. We don't have a plan.Tom OughYeah, well, I think it's difficult for us to know what is going on inside the FCDO. It certainly seems that there's a relaxed attitude towards our continued possession of things we picked up in the 19th century and beyond. I did ask the FCDO and I’ll read you the statement, they said ‘the Antarctic Treaty which has been in place since 1959 strictly reserved the use of Antarctic territories for scientific use only. The UK remains staunchly committed to this and to the sovereignty of the British Antarctic Territory.’And that statement is all very well but you've got to take it in context with the size of the Navy at the moment which seems no longer adequate to protect that passage between Scotland and Iceland into the Atlantic, which might be partly why Trump wants to buy Greenland. So unfortunately I don't think we're particularly well placed right now to defend our claim.Calum DrysdaleAnd I think this is a particularly critical moment, right? Because we are moving now from a world where we could peacefully expect a US-backed Pax Americana and an American hegemon who would not use their power to extract, sort of, well, maybe not extract, but not extract too many concessions from its vassal powers. And we are now moving into a time when America wants to start throwing its weight around.And the question is, are we going to wait for things to happen to us and accept that America is no longer following the rules that it set up in the middle of the 20th century, and that China is growing ever more muscular in its attitudes? Are we going to accept the world coming to us? Or are we going to take active steps to make the world one that is favourable and friendly to the British people?Tom OughOn that note, Aris Roussinous who is an UnHerd writer who has been talking about Anglofuturism longer than we have, wrote recently about all these other possessions that Britain has scattered across the globe. So Chagos, but also Falklands, South Georgia. Roussinos compares Britain to this bedridden aunt who is sitting on this incredible property portfolio, also including these Caribbean islands as well, and not quite knowing what to do with it.The problem with being a vulnerable bedridden old aunt who doesn't know what to do with her property portfolio is that someone else might take it off you.Calum DrysdaleA Chinese wolf in sheep's clothing.Tom OughA Chinese wolf in sheep's clothing. We have the situation now where the Falklands government, which is somewhat autonomous from His Majesty's government, is authorising oil and gas drilling which we won't benefit from because Labour doesn't allow it.There's another world in which we're making the most of these resources rather than giving them away to someone. I mean, there's another world where instead of simply giving away this oil and gas, we use it productively, we encourage young Brits, as Roussinos suggests, to settle the Falklands, we make holiday resorts out of the Chagos Islands…Calum DrysdaleAnd allow the Chagossians to benefit as a result.Tom OughYeah, yeah. And crucially, if we make the most of Antarctica, then we are giving ourselves the tools of the prosperity that we'll need to defend ourselves from these covetous other countries and to hold on to what we've got.Calum DrysdaleWell, and also to push for net zero, right? That, I think, is an undervalued point that at the moment we cannot power the country purely on solar and wind power. At the moment, we are still using fossil fuels. We would like to move to a world of fusion, or more nuclear. At the moment, we can't do it because we're not rich enough. At the moment, we have the two most expensive nuclear power plants. If we want to keep building nuclear power plants at this extortionate cost and extortionate markup compared to the rest of the world, the money for it is going to have to come from somewhere. This seems as good a place as any to drive us forward into a new century of growth. Powered as the boom years after Thatcher, many would claim, were driven by the discovery of North Sea oil, we too could have this kind of economic growth.Tom OughWe started this episode by talking about Scott and Shackleton. And I think what's really noble about them is how they were pushing the frontier, pushing into the unknown. And that's something that we don't really do as a country anymore. But if we start settling the Antarctic and prospecting it, and finding incredible resources there, and developing technology that humans might one day use on the moon and Mars, then I think that will be a fitting tribute to them, rather than just letting someone else take all this land off us.Calum DrysdaleAnd on that note, Tom, I suggest we return to sunnier climes as the portholes are starting to get a bit icy. Tom, where can listeners who are interested in this find out more information?Tom OughWell, we'll put a link or two in the show notes.One final thing before we let you all go…Calum DrysdaleFor our solid salt of the earth yeoman listeners, we encourage you please to like, subscribe, and share the podcast with their friends. For our patrician listeners, on the other hand, we invite you to consider supporting us to help us produce these episodes at an even greater clip in order to bring about the next British century a little faster.With that, we'll sign off. Thank you very much for listening. Goodbye.Tom OughWe hope to see you at the Port Lockroy Greggs. Goodbye.---Further readingThe Antarctic oil bonanza that could save Britain – but we need to get there before ArgentinaLabour should look to the relics of empire for growthChina-Russia cooperation blocks Antarctic conservation proposalsChina opens Antarctic station south of Australia, New ZealandAntarctic Monitoring Tools in ActionEconomic resources — Antarctica This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Today we welcome Lawrence Newport, darling of the British progress movement and bane of vicious dogs.Lawrence discusses:- His successful campaign to ban XL Bully dogs after identifying their disproportionate role in fatal attacks and overcoming resistance from animal welfare organisations,- His Looking For Growth initiative to streamline infrastructure development through legislation that bypasses regulatory hurdles for nuclear power, electricity cables, and data centres,- His Crush Crime campaign focusing on career criminals, highlighting the need for longer sentences for repeat offenders and addressing the breakdown in policing that has made certain crimes effectively legal,Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.Timestamps(00:00:00) - Introduction(00:01:30) - ‘XL Bully’ Campaign(00:06:31) - Government Inertia(00:22:26) - Infrastructure Challenges(00:41:09) - Crime and Policing(00:52:26) - Crime Wave Causes(01:02:29) - Future Vision This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Samo Burja is the founder and president of Bismarck Analysis, an industrial analysis and consulting firm studying failing organizations, and the author of "Great Founder Theory" which explores how exceptional individuals shape history by creating innovative institutions rather than merely steering events. He also chairs the editorial board of Palladium Magazine.Samo discusses:- How organisations decline when they shift goals to match diminished capabilities instead of pursuing bold visions, illustrated by NASA's evolution from space exploration to Earth observation- Why social technologies (like trust networks) are as crucial as material technologies in driving innovation and economic growth, with religious communities like Protestant merchants historically enabling trade through shared values- Britain's potential to regain global prominence through ambitious projects like nuclear energy, Antarctic resource development, and AI compute infrastructure, but only with live players who break from institutional scriptsListen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.Timestamps(00:00:00) - Introduction(00:02:23) - Organisational Decline(00:07:29) - Energy Challenges(00:19:04) - NASA's Evolution(00:28:26) - AI and Society(00:37:29) - Social Technologies(00:56:19) - Britain's Status(01:05:45) - Political Opportunities(01:16:16) - Future Prospects This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Rian Chad Whitton is a research analyst specialising in automation, industrial policy, and energy markets at Bismarck Analysis who writes on Substack under the name Doctor Syn and won the TXP Progress Prize for his essay on British energy policy.Rian discusses:How British industry declined from being the first Promethean nation to losing competitiveness due to loss of empire, high wages, and poor policy decisions like industrial deglomerationWhy manufacturing remains crucial for national security, productivity growth, and regional equality despite the push toward servicesHow Britain could revitalise industry through lower electricity costs, nuclear power expansion, and promoting large industrial conglomerates similar to South Korean chaebolsListen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Read the transcript.Timestamps(00:00:00) - Introduction(00:01:44) - British Industry History(00:06:50) - Current Industry Status(00:12:47) - R&D and Innovation(00:19:35) - Service Economy Debate(00:25:18) - Military and Manufacturing(00:32:23) - Industrial Policy Models(00:45:30) - Automation and Jobs(00:55:33) - Education and Skills(00:59:23) - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

You are currently directly above an energy source that is clean, available all day long, and – at least at our current Kardashev level – all but limitless. Naturally, the British government has approximately zero interest in it. But they will soon, because transformational geothermal energy is getting closer.The main obstacle, currently, is the difficulty of harnessing the extreme heat that one finds several miles below the Earth's surface. It melts electronics and resists the creation of pipework, meaning that it's very difficult to sustainably pump fluid in and out.Our latest guest is John Clegg, a technologist and geothermal expert who is making progress in developing high-heat electronics. John joins us in our orbital space pub to tell us about the new frontiers in geothermal, the best way of making it work for Britain, and the most mind-boggling engineering feat in the history of Dorset.Learn more about Hephae Energy Technology, of which John is CTO, via their website, or subscribe to their monthly newsletter here.https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/hephae-energy-technology-7076836521588207616/https://www.hephaeet.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

Aria Babu is a researcher who has turned her attention to falling birth rates and pronatalism, offering fresh perspectives on how technological innovations like artificial wombs might address demographic challenges facing developed nations. She is @Aria_Babu on X.Aria discusses:- Why falling birth rates threaten many developed nations (especially South Korea at 0.7 TFR) and how this creates demographic challenges with an aging population and diminishing workforce,- Cultural and economic factors behind declining birth rates, including intensive parenting norms, high childcare costs, changing gender roles, and the delay in family formation,- Potential solutions including artificial wombs (which could bypass pregnancy complications and help various groups have children), policy changes to support families, and shifts in cultural attitudes toward parenthood,Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Read the transcript.Timestamps(00:00:00) - Introduction(00:01:23) - Pronatalism Debate(00:04:28) - Global Birth Rates(00:09:31) - Cultural Influences(00:17:12) - Causes of Decline(00:32:04) - Solutions Discussion(00:53:21) - Artificial Wombs(01:06:29) - Future Speculations This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

The Victorians carpeted Britain in rail, went on majestic sprees of housebuilding, pioneered underground rail and coal power stations, and built magnificent subterranean sewerage. Their ancestors cancelled most of HS2, haven't built a reservoir for thirty years, lets Nimbyism run amok, and can't even electrify all our trains, let alone swap them for maglev.How can we redress this generational embarrassment? Sam Dumitriu, of the think-tank Britain Remade, believes it's possible to revive the Victorian spirit and turn Britain back into a nation of doers. He joins us in the King Charles III Space Station to discuss his ideas.Grab your trowels – we're going building. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

It's widely felt that the British buildings and townscapes have, since the Second World War, become uglier and of lower quality.From their tasteful half-timbered space station, Tom and Calum ask Samuel Hughes, an academic and aestheticist, about the causes of those complaints. We discuss the inherent characteristics of architectural beauty, the divergence of taste between architecture students and the rest of us, and the future of the British built environment. Are natural materials making a comeback? What about robotically-crafted ornament? And with what level of ferocity should we crush the Nimbys?We also prevail on Samuel to tell us what Britain can learn from arresting built enviroments of fiction. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe

The cost of getting mass into space is tumbling. The economic opportunities of being in space are multiplying. Where does this leave Britain?Alas, our country holds the ignominious record of being the only country to get rid of a vertical-launch space programme. But we're turning the situation around – and could take advantage of the changing circumstance by embarking on an exciting megaproject.Our second guest, Peter Hague, is a leading space blogger. His idea? Building a super spaceport – one that's big enough to accommodate Starship, which is SpaceX's gamechanging flagship. We discuss the practicalities of the super spaceport, and what its construction could do for Britain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anglofuturism.co/subscribe