Contributors include three sitting or former MPs: Katie Lam, who has found the definitive guide to the British state in a Terry Pratchett novel, Alex Burghart, who is preparing for the Bayeux Tapestry’s arrival by reading up on King Harold, and Douglas Carswell, who recommends a Polish science-fiction classic on the question of what intelligence actually is. From industry, Isembard founder Alex Fitzgerald makes the case that as the cost of intelligence collapses, the real rate limiter on human progress becomes moving atoms in the physical world. Elsewhere you’ll find the writer Nina Power on hermits and English eccentricity, the political scientist Philip Cunliffe on the coming neo-feudalism, Civic Future’s Pamela Dow on Buchan and Milner’s Kindergarten, and our own Tom Ough on why the silence of deep space (like the calm of the post-war order) should not be mistaken for safety.

The recommendations range from Anglo-Norman chronicles to Chinese industrial policy, from Sheffield steel foundries to the dark forest of interstellar space, with a detour through post-Napoleonic social climbing for those exhausted by statistics on car production. We’ve sorted them into sections, though the theme running through the whole list is hard to miss: the world is less forgiving than the good years had us believe, the hour is later than we think, and sharp minds are needed for the hard yards ahead.

Isembard is hiring for factory owner-operators. Find out more here.

The Inner Workings of the British State

1. Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

A brilliant, and very funny, study in the absurdity of bureaucratic institutions. I can think of no better guide to the inner workings of the British state!

Katie Lam, Member of Parliament for Weald of Kent and Opposition Assistant Whip. Also posts on @Katie_Lam_MP.

2. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688-1783

For an understanding of the British state, I would recommend The Sinews of Power by John Brewer. Much like the declinist and conservative historian Corelli Barnett, Brewer issues a powerful counter to what might be described as the Whiggish history of British power, built around law, liberty and commerce. Brewer comprehensively shows that Britain’s early success rests largely on the establishment of a fiscal-military state that could collect and borrow money at unprecedented rates to fund unprecedented military and naval adventures. From the Glorious Revolution to the onset of the French Revolutionary Wars, British tax receipts greatly exceeded commercial growth, with the fiscal bureaucracy growing more than threefold throughout the century.

, analyst and researcher at Bismarck Analysis. Also posts on @RianCFFWhitton.

3. David Held, Models of Democracy

China’s different development model — the deeper history of which can be understood through John King Fairbank’s The Great Chinese revolution [see below], 1800-1985 made me think about the necessary radical changes to our political system, for which I recommend David Held’s Models of Democracy as a reader. It helps clarify the fact that no system can be treated as static. Democracy is not defined by its mechanisms — Parliament, first-past-the-post etc — but by it’s purpose, which is collective self-mastery. Its essence lies in the abductive process of discovering the best means by which a society can act effectively in a complex world.

, Deputy Online Editor of the Critic and Councillor for Scotton & Lower Wensleydale. Also posts on @93vintagejones.

Atoms and Artisans

1. Ed Conway, Material World

Everyone is talking about the rise of AI. No one is talking about the rise of the physical world. As intelligence cost collapses the real rate limiter for human progresses becomes moving atoms in the real world. Ed’s book is great. Charting the history, economics and geopolitics of salt, sand, oil, lithium, copper and steel. A must-read.

Alexander Fitzgerald, Isembard founder & CEO. Also posts on @AFitzgerald1992.

2. James Fox, Craft Land: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Arts & Vanishing Trades

For all ye budding cræftsmun, James Fox’s Craftland: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Arts and Vanishing Trades (2025) is a beautifully written portrait of craft across modern Britain. From the hedgerow layers and withy pot makers to the steel foundries of Sheffield and the watchmakers of the Isle of Man, Fox brings the wonder of craft into focus offering a sliver of hope for those who fear our best craft days are behind us. Most importantly for those keen to reindustrialise Britain, Fox shows how just as the great industries of today were once crafts, so too can craft serve as a blueprint for the the cutting-edge of tomorrow.

, Founder of Nation of Artisans. Also posts on @LouisElton96.

3. Alexander Langland, Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts

For those seeking more than history but a way of thinking about craft as a uniquely valuable way of working, I also highly recommend Alexander Langland’s Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts (2017). Langlands’ revival of King Alfred’s “cræft” as a category that connotes the virtuous application power, skill, and knowledge in deep harmony of hand, eye, brain, heart, culture, and tools to forge excellence is the inspiration for Nation of Artisans’ British Cræft Prize!

, Founder of Nation of Artisans. Also posts on @LouisElton96.

4. Geoffrey Owen, From Empire to Europe: The Decline and Revival of British Industry Since the Second World War

For a thorough understanding of Britain’s turbulent industrial history, I would recommend From Empire to Europe: The Decline and Revival of British Industry Since the Second World War by the Financial Times journalist Geoffrey Owen. Chronicling Britain’s manufacturing base from the mid-20th century to the dawn of the new millennium, Owen goes through the travails of different industries in rich detail. Owen’s analysis diverges from others on the matter of British industry as it ends on a broadly positive note. First published in 1999, the book argues persuasively that British industry, after many failures and painful adjustments, entered the 21st century in relatively fine fettle. He captures a view held at the time that, while Britain’s future would be characterised by services, manufacturing would continue to grow. It is particularly interesting to read the final chapter outlining potential future challenges, which does not mention China once. The book, therefore, serves not just as a repository of statistics and facts, but as a reminder that national success is extremely hard to maintain.

, analyst and researcher at Bismarck Analysis. Also posts on @RianCFFWhitton.

The Bedrock of Our Culture

1. Tom Licence, Harold: Warrior King

I am reading Tom Licence’s new Harold: Warrior King, as well as an assortment of Anglo-Norman texts in preparation for the opening of the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition

Alex Burghart, Member of Parliament for Brentwood and Ongar, Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Also posts on @alexburghart.

2. Malcolm Guite, Galahad and the Grail: Merlin’s Isle, Volume 1

A new work from one of our most masterful living poets. Restoring the power to a myth that lives in the bedrock of our culture; the Arthurian legend. Rich and epic, but read with ease. It is something to hear the man himself recite it, pipe in one hand, whiskey in the other.

, Founder and Managing Partner at Lightridge. Also posts at @HenryJPalmer and on Substack.

3. Quentin S. Crisp, The Hermitage (Verdurin, forthcoming, December 2026).

England is nothing without eccentricity. Our strange, thoughtful, and determined men have built churches in the wilds of Africa, tunnels through mountains, engines, rockets, cars, computers and civilisation itself. Consummate Englishman, Quentin S. Crisp (his real name, unlike the flamboyant chap who assumed it!), tells the story of two hermits, one pastoral, the other entirely modern. The spirit of our country runs through both, dreaming, singular, visionary. It is only by rebuilding and remembering our past that we can see a way to our future: long may the hermit be protected against the deadening forces that seek to crush us!

, writer and philosopher. Also posts on @Nina_Power_.

The Silence is Not Benign

1. Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest

To modern humanity, the vast silence of space connotes emptiness rather than danger. In Cixin Liu’s “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy, though, that complacency is shattered. I’m currently reading the trilogy’s second instalment, The Dark Forest, which invites us to think of the cosmos as a forest stalked by nameless terrors. In such environments, it is foolish to assume that silence is benign.

I’m not giving too much away by saying that, in The Dark Forest, humanity finds itself in trouble. As such, this grand novel has Anglofuturist resonance for those who wish to find it. For decades, Britain has assumed that the law of the jungle has been suspended and that we can be complacent about our security, our energy, our demographics and all the rest. Yet the world beyond our borders is more hostile than the good years had us believe.

, co-host of Anglofuturism, senior editor at UnHerd, and author of The Anti-Catastrophe League, newly published in paperback.

2. Stanisław Lem, Solaris

It is a novel – and one ought to read more novels. It examines fundamental questions as to what constitutes intelligence. An apt topic at this time.

, president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

The Hour Is Later Than We Think

1. Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism

Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism. It’s immensely stimulating and thought-provoking even when you disagree wth it, which makes it a very worthwhile read. The core argument is that a new social structure is emerging in the wake of deindustrialisation in the West in which the growth of Californian oligarchy and erosion of social mobility is the result of the fragmentation of the middle classes, rents are substituting for competitive profit-seeking as the dominant mode of wealth extraction, and a new clerisy has formed the universities; green ideology provides a secular apocalypse in place of medieval theology - the result is a new, rigid and hierarchical social order more akin to feudalism than modern capitalism. The argument probably applies more to post-industrial Europe than the US, as Kotkin sees hope for America in the sun-belt rather than the coastal strips.

Philip Cunliffe, Associate Professor of International Relations at the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London. Also posts on @thephilippics.

2. Dan Wang, Breakneck and John King Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800-1985

Doubtless someone else will Recommend Dang Wang’s Breakneck, and they’re right to.

China’s different development model — the deeper history of which can be understood through John King Fairbank’s The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800-1985 made me think about the necessary radical changes to our political system, for which I recommend David Held’s Models of Democracy [see above] as a reader. It helps clarify the fact that no system can be treated as static. Democracy is not defined by its mechanisms — Parliament, first-past-the-post etc — but by it’s purpose, which is collective self-mastery. Its essence lies in the abductive process of discovering the best means by which a society can act effectively in a complex world.

, Deputy Online Editor of the Critic and Councillor for Scotton & Lower Wensleydale. Also posts on @93vintagejones.

3. Émile Zola, La Débâcle

There’s always a propensity to recommend serious, weighty non-fiction, but recently I’ve begun to enjoy more fiction. I enjoyed in particular Zola’s La Débâcle, the story of sclerotic France’s national humiliation and during the Franco-Prussian War, “a series of disasters greater than any nation had ever undergone: continual defeats, provinces lost, milliards to pay, the blood-bath of the most dreadful of civil wars, whole districts full of ruins and dead, no money left, no honour left, a whole world to build up again.” One can only hope Britain never needs to learn quite so painfully that renewal need not wait upon catastrophe.

, Deputy Online Editor of the Critic and Councillor for Scotton & Lower Wensleydale. Also posts on @93vintagejones.

4. William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

I recommend this not to endorse it, but to suggest it as remedial literature for those still entertaining a naive idea of remedying Britain’s cultural malaise simply by changing the government. Here in writing at the close of the 20th century, we see two ideologues eagerly awaiting the dissolution of nation-states into economic zones and identity into preference for lower taxation. It is all the more disturbing to read, only a few decades later, now that many of their predictions have come to pass. I find it useful as a reminder that the world has changed a great deal in our lifetimes and will continue to do so, but the direction of travel remains largely predictable. For those who care about the preservation of culture and identity, it serves well as a corrective: to change anything, we must first have a clear-sighted view on how things actually are. What we can retain of ourselves in this ever more fluid system of network states is, I feel, one of the most urgent questions of politics today. (A note—the opening chapter on the Y2K bug is infamously dated, although it is perhaps gaining new relevance as we face a new technological doomsday in our own time.)

, Anglofuturism producer. Also posts on @aeronlaffere.

The Perils of Personal Ambition

1. John Buchan, Greenmantle

I’m reading John Buchan’s Greenmantle at the moment: a rollicking good end of Ottoman romp about a plot to create a holy war and take resources from Western Front. In parallel, I’m reading about the early formation of “Milner’s Kindergarten”, and how this group of brilliant thinkers and doers, forged in adversity, went on to shape a nation.

Pamela Dow, Chief Operating Officer of Civic Future.

2. Stendhal, The Red and the Black

My final recommendation, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, should be a tonic for those exhausted by statistics on car production and customs duties. The novel, set in post-Napoleonic France, follows the travails of the ambitious young upstart Julien Sorel, a commoner with a revolutionary spirit and a penchant for high-status women. The book is already popular with the aspiring little Jacobins attending various Anglofuturist meetups.

, analyst and researcher at Bismarck Analysis. Also posts on @RianCFFWhitton.

Georgian Townhouses on the Moon

1. Gerard O’Neill, The High Frontier

There are many books about space colonisation, some good and some bad, but anybody interested in the topic must go back to this foundational text. Gerard O’Neill started the serious scientific study of space colonisation in the 1970s at Princeton and showed the engineering was possible; and his work is key to understanding what Elon Musk means when he talks about “Mass drivers” and why Jeff Bezos thinks we should live in giant tubes. Read it and you too will understand the immense opportunities available beyond our planet.

, astrophysicist writing Planetocracy. Also posts on @peterrhague.

England Is Nothing Without Eccentricity

1. Georges Bataille, Eroticism

Georges Bataille’s Eroticism can be read as a criticism of modern utilitarianism which refuses to engage it on its own terms, making it pretty different from the alternative criticisms that feel more intuitive and familiar today -- what if Abundance is actually bad not because it fails to deliver, but regardless of whether it does? This approach and the broader tradition are probably unconvincing, but still worthwhile and interesting. Bataille does an especially good job of making the case aesthetically compelling.

Yung Macro, @apralky.

2. Peter Watson, The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century

The 19th century sits awkwardly in many people’s historical understanding. After the Stuarts and before the First World War, this was the period when the modern world as we know it came into being. This book covers the intellectual history of Germany between 1750 and 1933, a period and region of feverish innovation where modern science, the university, history, research, the individual and many other concepts were first laid down.

, co-host of Anglofuturism.

We’re always glad to hear from listeners, prospective sponsors, potential collaborators, Antarctic mining enthusiasts etc. Get in touch here, via X, or by email (firstname@anglofuturism.co)

But this episode isn’t about that postmortem. It is about what Jamie and Henry learned when they pulled back the curtain on the people who are meant to be building Britain’s homes.

With sincere apologies from production, this interview has sat in our backlog since last autumn. Nevertheless it is, perhaps unsurprisingly given the subject, utterly timeless. Our thanks to Henry and Jamie for being so patient.

The episode explores

• How Jamie was radicalised by The Housing Theory of Everything

• Why £1,600 a month makes housing a moral issue

• What a land promoter actually does: title deeds, unanswered letters to farmers, and a month of knocking before anyone will talk

• Twenty thousand pounds a hectare until planning permission touches it

• Forty types of document for a small builder, versus the 1990s red-line sketch that got you an agreement

• The land-banking myth: housebuilders aren’t hoarding, they’re terrified of paying subcontractors to do nothing

• NIMBYs have a legitimate point: traffic, GP waiting times, and Section 106 as a feudal tribute system

• Abolish stamp duty first — the quickest win in housing, and the one that sorts everyone into the right house

• Why not Birmingham?

• Reading every single Paul Graham essay, making all the same mistakes anyway, and the unglamorous responsibility to build a very big company very quickly

• Victorian railways approved by committees of six MPs forbidden from owning land on the route

• Thirty million Londoners at the density of Paris, “we could be Taiwan”, and the ten-storey Sloaney Pony

Jamie and Henry’s postmortem of Tract is at buildwithtract.com. Henry writes at henrydashwood.com and Jamie is at jamierumbelow.net. Anglofuturism remains open to sponsors — get in touch with aeron@anglofuturism.co.

Which turns out to be geopolitically relevant, because Britain’s principal adversary this century could well be Argentina. The last country to declare war on us has a standing claim on the Antarctic Peninsula and a date circled for 2048, when the treaty system parking everyone’s claims comes up for review.

Elsewhere: Tom, broadcasting from a continental-sized armpit at nearly forty degrees, discovers France is having a full culture war about air conditioning while Britain quietly makes cooling near-impossible to permit and calls the heat character-building. And a new Acemoglu paper hands the show a victory lap on a long-running thesis: labour scarcity forces innovation.

The episode explores:

• Why Britain’s principal adversary this century might be Argentina, with 2048 circled in the diary

• “The Antarctic Peninsula is British and it shall remain British. I am sending a task force to Port Lockroy” — the duelling Thatcher impressions

• The dream of an episode entitled simply Gotcha

• Why there is still no British city on the Falklands despite ten trillion pounds of oil in the neighbourhood

• Harry Kane, the Chagos Islands, and the Diego Garcia tattoo

• How England should handle Messi (flood the midfield; he doesn’t run very much)

• France’s aircon culture war: Le Pen promising cooling for all, Mélenchon scandalised

• Air conditioning as civilisational technology — the most important thing Lee Kuan Yew did for Singapore’s civil service

• Barocal, the Cambridge spinout doing solid-state barocaloric cooling with no refrigerant and 2-3x the efficiency of commercial HVAC

• The Acemoglu natural experiment: wartime labour loss, 9.1 per cent higher GDP per capita fifty years on

• The automated car wash you never build while labour stays artificially cheap

• The Motor Car Act, the Isle of Man TT, and what the CAA could accidentally do for drones

• Politics as downstream of TFR: pensions eating the state and Luttwak’s end of the heroic generation

This one is a salon for our paid subscribers — thank you for keeping the station pressurised. Anglofuturism remains open to sponsors: get in touch with aeron@anglofuturism.co.

Will’s answer starts in Helmand in 2009, where his patrol base sat a kilometre or three from the next one and, if that base was on a different VHF net, “you really never spoke to them, ever” — an information black hole courtesy not of Taliban electronic warfare but of British procurement. Fifteen years on, the reconnaissance patrol of six plucky infantrymen is three robots from three different companies, the drone you bought six months ago is already the wrong drone, and Ukraine has proved you can own ten thousand airframes and still not know where to send them. Cobalt is the answer to the common data fabric that was, in Will’s words, literally laughable in 2009 — and he wants Britain to garden its way there, with the centre setting data standards and the edges buying fast.

Britain built its entire post-war security apparatus on the belief that America would be there when it mattered, and Will — emphatic that betting against the United States is historically a losing trade — argues that recent behaviour means things can never be the same again. It is not a cheerful conversation — the ghosts of 1915 and 1937 both make appearances — but it is, in the end, a romantic one: Arondite is Lancelot's sword, unsheathed in the name of Arthurian Anglofuturism.

The episode explores

• War-gaming a Donovian invasion of Wales, live, from the Brecon Beacons down

• How British procurement, not the Taliban, made a kilometre of Helmand an information black hole

• Why the six-man reconnaissance patrol is now three robots from three companies — and why Will remains long on plucky chaps

• A weapons programme as HS2 with an active adversary, and whether Arondite has a drone for NIMBYs

• Drones as ammunition: Britain’s wartime ramp-up maths for 5.56mm and its total absence for the munition that defines Ukraine

• The 1915 shell crisis as political dynamite waiting to be re-detonated

• Procurement as gardening: data standards at the centre, fast buying at the edges

• Why a country whose infrastructure is struck day after day changes its politics very quickly — and the national conversation about sacrifice Will wants started now

• 1939, minus the rearmament programme

• The one thing that hasn’t gone wrong with Ajax

• Fifty years out: keep NATO strong, reassure the Americans, move one notch — just one — towards the French model

• Muddy boots at VC events, Lancelot’s sword, and the ideals of Camelot

Are you a general with C2 problems — and not a Donovian? Arondite is at arondite.com. Anglofuturism remains open to sponsors — get in touch with aeron@anglofuturism.co.

Meanwhile, Anthropic’s Mythos, said to be the best hacker in the world several times over, has been held back, and the US government has now banned roughly all non-citizens from its other model, Fable — a ban that reaches even the AI Safety Institute, the British body that built a world-famous testing capability and can no longer run evals on the leading models. Calum’s gloss is the line of the episode: if it is not your national model, you are going to be a vassal. From there it is a tour of what sovereign capability actually looks like — Cosine, the British startup fine-tuning air-gapped coding models for banks still running on COBOL no one dares replace, and Lumen Sovereign, the mixture-of-experts model it is building with government money on the Isambard supercomputer in Bristol so that British firms can use frontier coding without shipping proprietary code overseas. There is a clear-eyed detour through the new national labs, BOLD and FAIR, through continual learning and the transformer’s attention mechanism, and through the uncomfortable fact that the straight lines on the graphs are still holding up — that something like 65 per cent of Anthropic’s own code is now written by Anthropic’s own models.

And in politics, Shabana Mahmood’s asylum reforms are about to enter Parliament, and behind the asylum headlines sits the Boriswave and indefinite leave to remain — a settlement the hosts price at something like £292,000 a person across perhaps two million people, done thoughtlessly to hold inflation down and now a permanent liability. Immigration is a futurist issue, Tom argues, because the decisions governments make about migration have effects that run not for years but for generations, and Calum puts it more bluntly: it is the thing most likely to prevent the future they want. Hence the title. If Britain wants high-productivity, high-GDP-per-capita, spaceport-building wealth, it has to decide what it can afford, and prioritise spaceports or pensions. Nothing we talk about on this podcast is impossible, a great deal of it has been done elsewhere, and all it takes is will. Other countries, after all, have massive spaceports. Be the Anglofuturist Prospect Magazine thinks you are.

The episode explores

— Prospect’s illustration of five muscle-bound, union-jack-tattooed Anglofuturists emerging from the darkness to menace its readers, and why the hosts take it as a compliment
— The US government bans non-citizens from Anthropic’s Fable, the AI Safety Institute is locked out of the leading models, and the line that follows: “if it’s not your national model, you are going to be a vassal”
— Cosine’s air-gapped, fine-tuned coding models, the Lumen mixture-of-experts on the Isambard supercomputer, and why Britain’s banks are still maintained in COBOL by people who refuse to retire
— The BOLD and FAIR national labs, continual learning, and the claim that 65 per cent of Anthropic’s code is now written by Claude
— Why “many on the right have abandoned conservatism with a small c” — and why the real status-quo party is now Labour
— The left-wing case against the Boriswave: a few million arrivals unused to first-world wages suppress the bargaining power of workers
— Japanese private railways, natural monopolies, and a country with “no state capacity and yet huge state liabilities”
— Shabana Mahmood’s asylum reforms, indefinite leave to remain, and settlement priced at £292,000 a head
— Why immigration is a futurist issue rather than a distraction from one — “a thing that might prevent the future we want”
— Rivals as Anglofuturist Valhalla: a world of post-AGI abundance where the only meaningful competition is for status, not wealth
— The striving middle class as “the destroyers of all that is England”, and the correct etiquette for stealing your co-host’s kimchi

Anglofuturism is looking for sponsors and is at an exciting point in its growth — it has just hit number six in the UK tech charts. Get in touch with producer Aeron at aeron@anglofuturism.co.

Sovereignty, James argues, is not autarky — it is leverage, and it comes in three levels. There is resilience, the floor, which simply means nobody can turn off your chips overnight: you don’t need British-only silicon, you need three or four suppliers. There is economic sovereignty, where Britain and ordinary Britons actually capture some of the upside — which is why he pushes back on DeepMind as a simple tale of loss, given the income taxes, the retained team, and the billions of Alphabet’s money that built it here. And there is the full-stack version, the flag on the building, legal and regulatory alignment with the British state. The naive dream — every electron and every wafer made between Somerset, Swindon and Glasgow — collapses on contact with the facts: a single token generated by a GPT model draws on something like 35 countries, ASML’s lithography machines are atom-level miracles the Americans and Chinese are pouring unlimited money into merely replicating, and the quartz comes from one mine in North Carolina. Doing the whole stack ourselves would be “beyond a Manhattan project” — it “would make Bletchley Park look like a weekend crossword.” ARM is the lesson: best in the world, and still unable to make a single chip alone. Sovereignty “is not end to end. It is having enough power to mean no one can turn you off.”

SovAI runs like a venture fund — taxpayer takes the loss, taxpayer keeps the upside — and the criticisms come from both sides at once: that the state should stay out entirely, and that £500m is far too small to matter. James thinks both are partly fair. But the deeper problem he keeps returning to is capital. Anthropic just raised $65bn in a single round; no institution in Britain, and barely any in Europe, could write that cheque. A faltering London Stock Exchange means our best companies IPO abroad, and because UK pension funds have been driven out of equities, Britain’s venture scene quietly “feeds promising companies to the US.” The culprit, on his telling, is a well-meaning fee cap that treated a decade of patient, board-level company-building exactly like a hedge fund pressing a button to buy a share. The human cost is concrete: a coal-miners’ pension fund and a supermarket-workers’ pension fund put one or two percent into his early fund as a last hurrah before winding down, rode Revolut, GoCardless and Depop, and left their members thousands — maybe tens of thousands — of pounds better off. Since then, Canadians and Danes and Americans have shared in Britain’s winners. Very few Brits have. “And it’s really sad that that’s happened.”

James is an avowed Schumpeterian who thinks the model-builders themselves are catastrophically bad at describing a good future, too “obsessed with the dystopian.” When Calum raises the spectre of Schumpeter’s tornado — what if all cognitive and manual work is automated? — James calls it an extremist argument: the tractor once did the work of fifty men, a calculator already beats you at maths, and the countries that navigated those shifts well saw gains never before seen in human history. The most tangible place Britain will feel the upside, he insists, is healthcare. Most of medicine has been “getting better at guessing”; now we have the best predictive model of human health ever built, able to target the drug to the cancer killing your loved one — and serious parties polling in double digits want to keep it out of the NHS, which is like throwing out the calculators and the blood tests. He reaches for Florence Nightingale, who brought data visualisation to the Crimea and had her own dissenters, as the British template: the scientific entrepreneur. The NHS, the largest single-goal workforce on Earth, is the asset. Forget that we have no NVIDIA — “what happens if we had AstraZeneca 2.0, or next-generation Nightingale?” And Jensen Huang, getting treated here for his cough, “is not going to turn the chips off.”

Most things, James believes, are downstream of culture, and Britain’s culture got caught in a post-war “pincer movement” that offered two respectable lives — big state or big corporate, a job for life and a predictable mortgage, the Volvo moving slowly up the cul-de-sac. That settlement is over: automation thins the big employers, “the maths doesn’t math anymore on a massive state,” and the way out is entrepreneurship — except the whole system, from university debt to mortgage underwriting, is rigged toward the salaried path. He wants a Britain where more people are willing “to build, to ship, to fail, to rebuild,” with risk capital available to anyone. He is genuinely heartened by the fourteen-year-olds running Depop stores and disheartened by a youth politics that sees opportunity only in taking from others — “not a very British” solution. And he ends on an idea from Startup Century: since half of all student loans are never fully repaid, the state is already in the high-risk-capital business, so offer the same money as a no-recourse loan to start a company — “which is venture capital, by the way.” Want to do an English degree? Great. Want to explore a new use of radar for cricket? Here’s £50k. Have a go.

The episode explores

— What the Sovereign AI unit actually is: a state venture fund that takes the loss and keeps the upside, not a grant-and-forget machine

— Why getting AI right means diffusing the idea across all of Whitehall, not briefing one department — “it’s a vector; we need to increase the speed”

— The three levels of sovereignty: resilience, economic benefit, and full-stack legal alignment — and why “we can’t have someone turn off our chips overnight”

— Why DeepMind is not a simple story of loss when you count the taxes, the retained team, and Alphabet’s billions

— The single GPT token that needs 35 countries, ASML’s near-impossible machines, and the one North Carolina quartz mine

— Why doing the whole stack ourselves “would make Bletchley Park look like a weekend crossword,” and why ARM proves sovereignty is leverage, not end-to-end control

— The capital bottleneck: a $65bn Anthropic round, a faltering LSE, and pension rules that make Britain feed its best companies to America

— The fee cap that treated a decade of company-building like a hedge fund pressing a button — and the coal-miners’ pension fund that rode Revolut and Depop

— Why the people building AI are the worst at describing a good future, and what Schumpeter does and doesn’t tell us

— Most of medicine has been guessing — and why keeping AI out of the NHS is like throwing out the calculators

— “Most things are downstream of culture”: the post-war pincer, and how to make Britain entrepreneurial again

James Wise is the author of Startup Century (available from Amazon, Waterstones and others; the audiobook, he notes ruefully, was read by an American) and a partner at Balderton Capital. Read about the government’s work at the Sovereign AI website.

He starts with the technology because that is where the gap is widest. The people who predicted the most success for machine learning have turned out to be the most accurate predictors of the future, the straight lines on the graphs have stubbornly kept being true, and the political world is doing what it always does, which is practise deliberate blindness to the whole thing. Stack the exponentials together — frontier AI, democratised biological engineering, models improving month on month, and what he calls completely crackers agencies regulating all of it — and you get a state of the world that Westminster treats as a fourth-order junior-minister hobby. Technologically it is increasingly China and California that dominate, and Europe, he says flatly, is not in the game: a mix of stagnation and anti-growth bureaucracy dedicated to Leninist centralism in Brussels. Britain’s one accidental piece of luck is that, through sheer inertia, it has not yet adopted every EU regulation and so has not quite shot itself in both feet the way Brussels has.

Through Little Dorrit and the Circumlocution Office, through Northcote-Trevelyan, through the room in summer 1914, Cummings builds the case that the rot is structural and old: by Cummings’s reckoning, 1795 Whitehall was better at procurement than 2025 Whitehall by a massive, massive factor. The Cabinet Office is now the centrepiece. The two things everybody at its founding agreed would be a disaster if it ever happened are now, he says, literally its official functions. Cabinet itself has become a Potemkin process; the real decisions are taken by some director-general or task force, and everyone on the other side of the Number 10 door knows the old system is fake.

The mechanism is everywhere. Officials write memos saying legal advice forbids the sensible thing; ask to see the legal advice and there is no document. Very few MPs have ever hired or fired anyone or built anything, so they cannot grip the machine even when they want to. And the machine has a worldview: in the Cabinet Office, Cummings claims, it is explicit that you cannot talk about personal responsibility, because that is bullying, or fascism. The whole apparatus is designed to programme the prime minister psychologically so that he does not even know what his own powers are — a huge amount of theatre, the Friday box of appointments, a steady drip of “you just can’t do that.” Calum presses on whether this is simply what modern democracies are, and gets the counterintuitive optimism in return: in practical terms it is far easier to do real regime change in Britain than in America or anywhere in Europe, if anyone wanted to.

The prescription is that science and technology must become a fundamental aspect of the prime minister’s job — a top-three priority embedded in economy, security and institutional reform, not a fourth-order issue handed to a junior minister. Britain’s aerospace past demonstrates why. Britain genuinely had frontier aerospace ideas, the Barnes Wallis lineage, the engineers, the possibility — and from the sixties Whitehall shut down the entire way of thinking that says Britain might produce frontier things itself. Tom names the law of the whole episode here: when technology comes up against an ideological commitment from the governance class, technology loses. The idea of Britain building something genuinely futuristic, Cummings says, brings out an allergic reaction in Whitehall, and the fact that it works only makes them more determined to stop it. There is a great deal of talent here and a great many things that could actually be done. The people responsible for budgets and power are actively hostile to doing them.

The episode explores

— Why the post-1945 order drifted out of alignment with reality, and what happens in the gap before the crisis arrives

— The straight lines on the AI graphs that kept being true, and why the people who predicted the most success have been the most accurate

— Democratised biological engineering, exponentially improving models, and the completely crackers agencies meant to be regulating all of it

— Why China and California dominate the frontier, Europe is not in the game, and Britain’s only luck is the EU regulations it was too inert to copy

— Little Dorrit, the room in summer 1914, and the claim that 1795 Whitehall beat 2025 Whitehall at procurement by a massive factor

— How the Cabinet Office became the exact two things everyone agreed at its founding would be a disaster

— Why “I take full responsibility” in Parliament now means “I take zero responsibility”

— The memos that cite legal advice forbidding the sensible thing — and the legal advice that turns out not to exist as a document

— Why talking about personal responsibility inside the Cabinet Office gets reclassified as bullying, or fascism

— The Friday box and the theatre that programmes a prime minister not to know what his own powers are

— Why science and technology has to be a top-three prime-ministerial priority rather than a junior-minister hobby

— Barnes Wallis, the British space plane, and Whitehall’s standing view since the seventies that very big, very futuristic projects are Britain’s out

— A state so broken it has failed four separate times to restart sewage monitoring

Dominic Cummings writes on AI, science, procurement and state capacity at his Substack.

The thesis is simple and the engineering is not. Robotics solved walking — Spot the dog, the old Toyota machines that could just about manage the stairs, the endless parade of humanoids doing backflips — but avoided the thing that would actually make a robot useful, which is the hand. Oli’s framing is that you see a great many robots doing backflips and very few doing anything useful. Put a motor in every finger joint and it overheats. Move the motors back to the palm, as Figure does, and the robot can only lift light packages. Do it properly and you end up running forty-odd tendons over the wrist with near-zero friction for a million cycles, which Oli cheerfully calls a mechanical engineering nightmare and the exact place where everyone, Tesla included, is stuck. Elon Musk reckons half the engineering in Optimus is the hands. Halcyon thinks that is an underestimate. The human hand, by contrast, took billions of years, learned to throw a spear, and used that to take over the planet — and surgeons still tend to fuse the bones in a broken wrist rather than repair them, because the biomechanics are so poorly understood. The proudest achievement of Halcyon’s hand, the one Oli says nobody gets, is turning a dial.

What makes a two-person company plausible is the same thing that made Ivor nervous. AI is eating software, so the convert’s logic is to run at the one thing software cannot yet touch — the physical world — and the irony is that AI is exactly what lets two people attempt it. Between Claude and a 3D printer, Oli and Ivor span CAD, circuit boards, firmware and operating-system-level control that used to need a building full of specialists. When their toilet broke they printed the part. And the moment Oli decided Ivor was co-founder material was a fortnight in Greece, where Ivor built an endoscope-and-tape contraption rigged to a laptop to fish a dropped phone out of a wall void, lost it to a marauding snake, and got it back several days later. This is a robot, Oli told him. You’ve built a robot. This is the guy.

From there the conversation climbs. The case for a human-shaped robot is that the world is already built around human hands — every object was designed around the average finger — even though, as the founders happily concede, you would never march a humanoid with a scythe into a wheat field when a combine harvester exists. Calum, who builds specialised robots himself, presses the point, and the reply is that the clothes everyone is wearing were fed through the sewing machine by a human hand while towels are fully automated. The deeper bet is that dextrous hands turn all manual labour into the next thing to automate, the cost of labour falls towards zero, almost everything becomes nearly free, and you are left wondering whether capitalism still works. Oli, who is at pains to point out he would like to keep capitalism for as long as possible, reaches for Alfred North Whitehead on civilisation advancing by the number of operations it can perform without thinking about them.

But Halcyon is leaving Saffron Walden for San Francisco, and the reason is less tax than psychology: in SF everyone you bump into is building something and is unembarrassed about optimism. Americans, Ivor says, believe they are making history every day, while Europeans believe history has already happened — and Calum reaches for the word hypermnesiac, a country with so much history it can no longer move. The British specifics are familiar to this audience and no less damning for it: the Town and Country Planning Act, Victorian infrastructure still doing all the work, energy priced for failure, a neighbour who believes he has a right to your land. They call it losing the mandate of heaven. The close is a clean split — either abundance and a space-faring civilisation of ringworlds and Dyson spheres where everyone owns their own means of production, or a hyper-centralised future where whoever controls the most GPUs and humanoid robots controls everyone at no cost to themselves.

The episode explores

— Why locomotion was the easy part and the hand is where humanoid robotics actually breaks
— Motors in the fingers overheat and motors in the palm cannot lift, so the answer is forty tendons threaded over the wrist a million times without friction
— Elon Musk thinks half the engineering in Optimus is the hands, and Halcyon thinks that is an underestimate
— The proudest achievement of the world’s most dextrous robot hand: turning the dial on an oven
— “Claude, make me a billion dollar company, make no mistakes” — how two people now span CAD, circuit boards, firmware and operating systems
— Ivor spends two weeks in Greece building a robot out of wood, string, tape and an endoscope to fish his phone out of a wall, a snake sabotages it, and Oli decides this is the man to start a company with
— Why the clothes you are wearing were sewn by a human hand and your towels were not
— What happens to capitalism when the cost of labour falls to zero, and whether “work gives life meaning” is just a very Protestant cope
— Why software people forget that physics matters, and the robot olympics where the best gripper is still seventeen times slower than a hand
— Britain as a nation of hypermnesiacs, too freighted with history to act, versus Americans who think they are making history every day
— The Town and Country Planning Act, Victorian infrastructure, and the neighbour who believes he has a right to your land
— A Second Amendment for humanoid robots, ringworlds and Dyson spheres, and the case for owning your own means of production before someone owns all of them

Halcyon Robotics is building the dextrous hand the humanoid industry needs. Find Oli and Ivor at halcyonrobotics.io.

The episode explores

• Why Greek statues in the space station might be a symptom of Anglofuturist stuckness

• Strange Rules in Venice and the end of art as a separate autonomous category

• Michael Levin, two-headed worms, and why everything starts to look like a communication protocol

• Ken Stanley, PickBreeder, and why greatness cannot be planned

• Aston Villa, the Europa League, and why old forms stop meaning what they once meant

• Instagram and the infinite feed as the actual cultural event of the past 20 years

• Oman banning advertising and the politics of cognitive security

• The Call, choirs, consent, and participatory AI

• Why Bauhaus was not a look, and why commissioning “a future aesthetic” misses the point

• Progressive elitism, Channel 4, Chris Morris, and institutions taking punts before the public asks for them

• The new weirdos who look normal until they start talking about prediction markets

• Spawning AI, machine-readable permissions, and why copyright is too small for model culture

• The 30-year question: which low-status interaction now becomes the future’s obvious value layer?

Boys Smith’s case is that human settlements take remarkably similar shapes wherever you go — Stockholm, Marrakesh, Malta, a town in the north of Norway — and only the proportions change. Hot climates produce narrow streets and high walls to dodge a murderous sun, a logic later codified in the Quran; cold ones spread their streets out to chase the light. Once you have breathable air on the Moon, he argues, you would end up with something startlingly close to how we already live, only built from moon rock, rendered and quite possibly painted in pastel pinks and yellows, like a Cornish village in orbit. The same goes for the British Antarctic Territory, which Tom is delighted to point out is mostly exposed rock rather than ice.

On the Moon as in a Cornish village, his instinct is to build from what is to hand. Granite, he notes, was the original sustainable material — cheap, durable and loved — until canals and railways made it viable to drag stone and brick across the country, the same shift that once made coal in London cost several times what it did in Newcastle. And building well is not a luxury. Across visual preference surveys in Britain, America, Holland and Norway, large majorities, often 70 to 90 percent, prefer the same things — texture, gentle symmetry, a coherent complexity that rewards a second look — and people who live somewhere they find attractive turn out to be measurably healthier in body and mind, across party, region and race. The striking exception is architects: Boys Smith revives a near-forgotten study by David Halpern showing that while everyone agrees on which faces are beautiful, architecture students’ favourite building tends to be precisely everyone else’s least favourite, and the longer the training, the wider the gulf.

How did a civilisation that once built like this forget how? He points to the mid-century caesura, when architecture schools across the West binned several hundred years of accumulated craft, in some cases literally throwing the plaster casts students used to draw from into the skip. But recovering that inheritance is not pastiche: you can always tell a Victorian Gothic church from Salisbury Cathedral, and Selfridges is a steel-framed modern building wearing classical dress. The Victorians, he suggests, were the original Anglofuturists — Joseph Paxton, a self-trained gardener, throwing up Crystal Palace; military engineers raising the Royal Albert Hall on a steel dome they were genuinely afraid would collapse. All of which makes the proposed £39 billion restoration of the Palace of Westminster, not a typo, the more dispiriting, complete with a scheme to scoop out the interior and refit it in what he calls Ikea-pastiche modernism. His counter-proposal, aired in The Critic, is to demolish the Queen Elizabeth II Centre, raise a fifteen-storey Gothic tower in its place, and let the luxury flats inside pay for Parliament’s visitor centre.

The back half ranges gloriously: a Star Wars taxonomy worked out with his son over the summer holidays, in which the Death Star is the apotheosis of functionalist modernism and Naboo is conspicuously on the side of good; a brisk dismissal of the charge that a fondness for columns makes you a neo-Nazi, on the grounds that he doesn’t believe in dressing up and invading other countries; and a genuinely moving account of co-chairing the beauty commission with a dying Roger Scruton — funny, kind, disarming, and armed with a lethal bureaucratic trick of asking anyone with an unhelpful idea to go away and write a two-page memo on it.

The episode explores:

• Why human settlements take the same shapes from Stockholm to Marrakesh, and what that means for building on the Moon

• Lunar Cornwall: pastel-rendered moon rock and the case for local stone everywhere

• Beauty as a public health measure rather than a luxury, and why the data holds across party, region and race

• The Halpern study, or why architecture students are the only people on Earth who prefer ugly buildings

• The mid-century caesura, when architecture schools binned centuries of craft along with the actual plaster casts

• Why copying the past doesn’t make a pastiche, with Selfridges as a steel-framed building in classical dress

• The Victorians as the original Anglofuturists, from Paxton’s Crystal Palace to the Albert Hall dome nobody was sure would stay up

• Build a Gothic tower, don’t spend £39 billion turning Parliament into a 21st-century building

• Whether rebuilding the burned-down Clandon Park is genuinely “dishonest,” as the National Trust insists

• Why “neo-Nazi” gets hurled at anyone who likes a column, and why stripped classicism was mostly an American state project

• The Star Wars theory of architecture: the Death Star is pure modernism, and Naboo is on the side of good

• Roger Scruton’s trick for killing an unhelpful meeting

Last January, as the White House demanded that Denmark hand over Greenland, The Times reported that it was Britain that might have first dibs on the vast, frozen island.

“The United Kingdom,” said Tom Høyem, formerly the representative of Copenhagen in Greenland, “demanded in 1917 that if Greenland were to be sold then the UK should have the first right to buy it.”

Whether Denmark acceded to the request has been disputed. Whether Britain in its current form would push its way to the front of the queue, shoving President Trump aside, is even more doubtful. Still, the episode says something about the nature of being a former colony-maxxer: always finding coins down the back of one’s sofa.

On last week’s state visit to the US, the King gently joshed Trump about Britain’s profusion of historic claims. “I know you have big plans for the Moon, Mr President,” said Charles, “but I’ve checked the papers, and I rather suspect it is already part of the Commonwealth!”

Much as we would like to hear, in Charles’ speech, a Straussian statement of intent, it is hard to imagine that he views colonisation as anything other than “ghastly”. Yet the world is changing around him; and Trump, as ever, is one of the protagonists.

Colonisation, of a sort, is back. Most obviously, Trump has chivvied NASA into accelerating its efforts towards a permanent Moon base. Trump himself, in his first term as president, commissioned the Artemis programme. By the end of the decade, Artemis astronauts will be harvesting lunar resources.

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The US won’t necessarily proclaim ownership of the parts of the Moon they’ll be using, but it won’t need to. Progressives gasping at “neo-colonialism” will be correct in their diagnosis, if not in their implied disapproval.

Lunar colonialism differs from traditional colonialism in many respects, but one of them is that there is no need to worry about indigenous Moon dwellers. The same, Greenland aside, is true of what we can call America’s other neo-neo-colonial interests.

One of those interests is the ocean floor. I’ve been looking into this for an UnHerd essay, so I’ll hold back further discussion until the piece is published. Another is lower-Earth orbit: the US government, via NASA, is supporting the creation of new, commercial space stations, even as space becomes militarised.

Scholars of the Anglofuturism podcast will now be asking: what of Antarctica? The US seems to be refocusing its interest towards the High North, choosing not to renew its lease on its Antarctic icebreaker. “This has placed the US in the unusual position,” say the Friends of the British Overseas Territories, “of leasing Ukraine’s research vessel Noosfera to support essential marine research in the Southern Ocean.”

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Noosfera, which was constructed in Wallsend and was once known as RRS James Clark Ross, is formerly British; inshallah, the Antarctic peninsula, and its mineral riches, shall remain British. As the Anglofuturism podcast has repeatedly warned its vast range of senior government contacts, though, we must use the peninsula or lose it. I make the argument in more detail here, but the tl;dr is that there is a vast booty of natural resources to be prospected for and, ultimately, harvested. If we don’t do it, someone else will.

At the Poles, in the heavens, and under the sea, then, the age of neo-neo-colonialism is afoot. Calum and I discuss this new era in our latest release, which also features Aeron’s Pink Pantheress-style remix of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Listen to the full episode →

Calum reports from Singapore. The city-state is remarkable — a nation summoned into being in 60 years through ethnic quotas, mandatory housing integration, and the relentless repetition of founding mantras. But it is now haunted by the ghost of Lee Kuan Yew, whose historically contingent decisions are being ossified into dogma. The TFR has fallen to 0.87. Entrepreneurialism is lacking. And the ethnic ratios that once stabilised the state are now preventing the emergence of a true Singaporean people.

The lesson Calum draws is not about policy but about method: if Britain wants cultural renewal, it needs hyperculture — the willing use of state formation tools to remake national identity. Charles Wesley did this for Anglicanism among the newly urbanised working class. Singapore did it with light shows and peanut shells on the floor at the Raffles Hotel. The question is whether Britain is willing to do the same.

The episode explores:

• King Charles’s US visit and why the special relationship is a wasting asset

• The Koh-i-Noor diamond and the rise of third worldism in American politics

• Deep sea mining in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone and Britain’s quiet play for it

• The return of the frontier: space, Antarctica, the ocean floor

• Calum’s Singapore dispatch: what LKY built and what is now ossifying

• Why Singapore’s TFR of 0.87 is a failure of Lee Kuan Yew’s own eugenics programme

• The most photographed barn in America as a model for state formation

• Charles Wesley as the Pink Pantheress of his time

• Hyperculture: the case for a full spectrum British cultural renewal

• Bismarck, repeatedly and without apology

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

“The word cræft keeps appearing in Old English, but almost always in a compound — wordcræft, someone who’s very good with words; leechcræft, being good with medicine. In the rare instances where it’s used in isolation, it translates the Latin virtus. Virtue.

The true meaning of cræft is not ‘I work with my hands and that’s nice.’ It is absolutely not that. What cræft truly is, is a deep entanglement between hand, eye, mind, body, historical, cultural, geographical, material intelligence — all coming together in one potent, skilful means to will excellence into being.

If that’s what cræft is about — forging excellence rather than mere handiwork — there is no reason tools and technology are in tension with it.”

— Louis Elton, on the new £60,000 Cræft Prize for makers fusing heritage skill with frontier technology.

Listen to the full episode →

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 technology

King Alfred's translation of Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae

Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution

Not Quite Past — AI Delftware in Stoke-on-Trent

Monumental Labs / Gondor Industries

Aki Union — Shanghai parametric brick gallery

Atelier Missor

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 Mars

Thank you for supporting Anglofuturism.

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 like

This conversation took place in November 2025 and was delayed in publication due to triggering an Environmental Impact Assessment from Oxfordshire County Council.

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.

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 scale

This conversation took place in November 2025 and was delayed in publication due to triggering an Environmental Impact Assessment from Oxfordshire County Council.

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.