Anglofuturism

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