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 businesses

Further reading

Isembard - Faster, Cheaper, Greener Manufacturing

The Manufacturing Manifesto

Careers at Isembard

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