Anglofuturism

Calum and Tom are back in the King Charles III Space Station bar, and this week they have a hit piece to enjoy. Prospect has run two thousand words on the online right under the headline “decline porn”, filed Anglofuturism alongside the doom-scrolling aesthetics accounts, and decided the whole project is aestheticised cope that lets the right avoid thinking seriously about Britain’s future. Best o...

Docking at the King Charles III Space Station this week is James Wise: partner at Balderton Capital, author of Startup Century , and now the chair of the government’s Sovereign AI unit — a man who has spent twelve years giving exceptional people money to build companies and has now taken a tour of duty to do something stranger, which is to make the British state behave a little more like an invest...

Dominic Cummings is the former director of Vote Leave, former chief adviser in Downing Street, and the man most likely to tell you, with no apparent pleasure, exactly which official in which committee killed the thing you wanted to build. He arrives not as a Westminster memoirist but as a diagnostician. The post-1945 order — UN, NATO, WTO, WHO, IMF, the European project — was built for a world tha...

There is no King Charles III Space Station this week. There is a flat in Saffron Walden — Saf Francisco, as Calum insists on calling it — with a half-built humanoid torso left behind in California and what its makers reckon is the world’s most dextrous robot hand sitting on the table between the beers. Into the flat come Oli and Ivor of Halcyon Robotics, two Saffron Walden schoolfriends who have k...

We are not in the King Charles III Space Station this week. We are in Harriet Green’s sister station, which is a less reliable bit of lore but a more useful studio. Into it comes Mat Dryhurst: English conceptual artist, Berlin resident, collaborator with Holly Herndon, co-founder of Spawning AI, and the rare guest willing to tell Anglofuturism that Greek statues of ourselves might be a sign of stu...

From the thatched-roofed orbital pub of the King Charles III Space Station — a structure Nicholas Boys Smith gamely declines to call a pastiche — Tom and Calum welcome the campaigner for architectural beauty, founder of Create Streets, and former co-chair, alongside Roger Scruton, of the government’s beauty commission. The opening question is whether you could ever build a city worth living in on...

The US has broken with decades of international consensus by issuing its own mining permits for the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a potato field of metallic nodules the size of Western Europe at the bottom of the Pacific. Tom, who has found his next Antarctica-level obsession, reveals that Britain has quietly sponsored two exploration licenses. The age of saying “that’s mine” appears to be back. Calum...

Part two begins, as promised, with Louis pulling down his trousers. The underpants in question — a toile de joie printed with pastoral scenes labelled Seductio, Commiditas, Protectio — turn out to be the origin story of the entire British Cræft Prize. What started as a quest to produce bespoke boxer shorts from Northern Irish linen eventually mutated into a £60,000 national prize for maverick craf...

From the King Charles III Space Station — whose thatch is in a worrying state of disrepair — Tom and Calum welcome Louis Elton, founder of the Cræft Prize, a new £60,000 national award for maverick craftsmen, makers and technologists who fuse heritage crafts with cutting-edge technology. Louis begins with the crisis: Britain’s heritage crafts are dying. The handmade cricket ball is officially exti...

From the King Charles III Space Station, Tom and Calum welcome Louise Perry — reactionary feminist, space romantic, and descendant of Second Fleet convicts — to discuss Artemis II, the furthest humans have ever travelled from Earth. Louise makes the case that enthusiasm for space exploration is an overwhelmingly Anglo phenomenon, something between an anthropological pathology and a civilisational...

Back from the break and fuelled by Diet Coke, Tom and Calum push Josh on the harder questions. If HomeDAO is selecting for a new elite — relentless, agentic, indifferent to the rules of polite society — what kind of elite is it? The aristocrat as leader, or the aristocrat as exploiter? Josh mounts a defence of Pump.fun against charges of exploitation, arguing that the real narrative distortion com...

From a hand-dug allotment in Stroud, Tom and Calum announce a fundamental change of direction for the podcast. After eighteen months of speaking to founders, technologists, and policy thinkers, they have come to an uncomfortable conclusion: it was all wrong. Growth is a trap. GDP is a fiction. The SMR under the village green was never going to save us. What Britain needs is less. The conversion ha...

From the King Charles III Space Station, Tom and Calum descend into a drone-filled kitchen in West Oxford — the home of HomeDAO, a startup programme that’s part incubator, part monastery, and part answer to a question British universities have stopped asking: what do you do with the most relentlessly ambitious young people in the country? Josh, HomeDAO’s co-founder, has been running the programme...

Katie Lam came to Westminster via Goldman Sachs, Number 10, the AI company Faculty, and the Home Office. She has seen the British state from the outside and the inside and her verdict is the same both times: it is less than the sum of its parts. Bright people, right intentions, and at the end of another week, no progress on where things stood at the end of last week. The problem is not obstructive...

Ben Judah spent time as a special adviser to David Lammy at the Foreign Office, which means he worked on the Chagos deal, knows what Diego Garcia actually does, and cannot tell you. What he can tell you is that the deal was initiated by David Cameron, pushed hard by the Biden administration, and that the Americans were genuinely considering cutting Britain out entirely and handing the islands dire...

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’...

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 si...

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...

It’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 w...

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...

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 actual...

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 Ae...

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, a...

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 he...

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, increme...