Anglofuturism

Danny Kruger is the Reform UK’s Head of Preparing for Government and serves as the Member of Parliament for East Wiltshire. He joins us on the King Charles III Space Station for the first time to discuss drone factories in Wiltshire barns, AI in Whitehall and data centres in orbit. He argues forcefully for a vision of Britain’s future rooted in Christian faith, family, community and country.
We ask whether it is too late for unity, how Reform UK plans to deal with the polycrisis facing Britain, and what people are for once work runs out.
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The episode explores:
Why Swindon was the Anglofuturist city of the 19th and 20th centuries, and how it could be again
Elite estrangement: how the civil service came to despise the country it serves
The Cabinet Office, from minute-takers to 12,000 staff, and why Reform would abolish it
Halving the civil service, curbing judicial review and filling the Lords with Reform peers
Leaving the ECHR on day one, and the slower work of unpicking its case law and Northern Ireland
Segregation, expulsion or enculturation: Danny’s three options for a divided country
On the AI bus or off it, and why cheap labour left Britain under-automated
Universal leisure needs universal virtue, and the case for the eighteenth-century gentleman
Brits on the Moon, data centres in space and the Antarctic treaties up for review in 2048
Why the tax system treats a parent of four like a single person
A frogman on every Chagos island, and whether thatch makes a decent radiation shield
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From the King Charles III Space Station, Tom and Calum receive Ed West, author of Wrong Side of History, long-suffering conservative and the man who very nearly called his son Athelstan. Ed holds that England is probably the only real country and that British values are totally fake, and he is untroubled by this, being a great believer in fake villages. His Britain is a Harry Potter theme park, in a good way: the country the rest of the world already wants to visit, and the one its cultural elites are embarrassed by.
But Hogwarts only works with a hard edge. Without money and safety it is merely twee, a nation laughing at its decline over a cup of tea while people inject heroin outside the Home Office. Disneyland, Ed points out, doesn’t have this much crime. Real decadence, in his telling, is not sex parties but a loss of will, a country that can only love itself ironically. The cure is twenty per cent more Singapore, driverless camper vans and robot servants, which leaves only the matter of what anyone will do for meaning once Britain has become lovely again. Politics can’t answer that, he concedes, and he fears the Zoomers will have answers of their own.
Sponsored by Isembard. Interested in owning and operating a factory in Britain, America, Germany or France? Contact franchise@isembard.com.
The episode explores:
Why Britain should become a Harry Potter theme park, in a good way
What separates a Harry Potter Britain from mere twee
Why England might be the only real country, and whether anyone should tell Bulgaria
Battle Abbey, where only traitors and weirdos choose to be Normans
Why the cult of 1945 does more damage than the cult of Arthur
The crime thread, suspended sentences and the case for incapacitation
Twenty per cent more Singapore, and what it does for you to leave your laptop in a café
Decadence as a loss of will, and the trouble with the 2012 Olympics ceremony
The future as a hierarchy of impulse control
France as Britain’s natural ally, largely because Ed wants a house in the Dordogne
Tom’s minimal phone, which looks as though it was drawn by a child
Why Ed chickened out of calling his son Athelstan, and the first pro-Anglo-Saxon DEI initiative

With thanks to Paritosh Purohit for research contribution.
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Rodolfo Rosini, co-founder and CEO of Vaire Computing, joins Tom and Calum to make the case that the future of computing has to run in reverse. A conventional chip gets hot because it throws information away, dumping each transistor's charge to ground. Vaire's chips store that charge and send it back, like a pendulum. That trick could keep the computing curve climbing long after Moore's law runs out of road, at the moment AI's appetite for energy is exploding.

Rodolfo explains how he found the problem, spent three years in stealth recruiting the field before anyone noticed it existed, and built the first end-to-end reversible chip at a cost of several years of life expectancy. He then turns to why making chips may be the hardest thing humanity does, and to what Britain gets wrong about founders, family wealth and Arm.

The episode explores:
Orphan problems, Mads Mikkelsen, and how Vaire started on a Wikipedia page
Three years in stealth hoovering up the people behind reversible computing at Arm, Intel, Cambridge and Sandia
Why a chip gets hot from forgetting, not from thinking
The pendulum, the LC tank and the 2025 test chip that shaved years off its founder's life
Why building chips may be the hardest thing humanity does, and what SpaceX's rockets have to do with it
The Tesla strategy: a Lotus body with an electric engine
The $225 billion inference market and the $150 million ticket to the dance
Arm, Intel, IBM and why licensing is what you do after failing
Brighton summers, a spreadsheet of cities, and why London has no number two
The First World War's cost in high-agency people, Sweden's billionaires, and what British socialism got wrong
"We didn't lose Arm. We created the conditions to push it out."
Letting Sainsbury's automate, and tackling poverty rather than inequality
Batteryless supercomputers, neural Minecraft, and robots with a chip in every finger
Tom's permanent semi-darkness, a German theory of the Industrial Revolution, and East London's phone snatchers
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The King Charles III Space Station is broadcasting almost live, with Aeron at ground control ready to cut the transmission at the first sign of blackpilling. Tom and Calum inaugurate a new format of news roundups and shorter interviews with a mixed report from the home planet: manufacturing is growing, the pubs keep disappearing, and Britain still needs to find itself an Antarctic patrol ship.

First through the airlock is Sam Hogg, better known as @discoplomacy, to make sense of an AI news cycle that now produces a week’s worth of developments before the Americans have even woken up. What does “pacing the frontier” actually mean? How worried should we be about Anthropic’s wet lab? And can Britain’s AI Security Institute turn its expertise into influence — preferably while sending Silicon Valley a substantial invoice? There is a defence of British eccentrics abroad, a discussion of the things a biologist knows that a chatbot doesn’t, and an unexpected detour into the post-Assad narcotics economy.

Then Jesse Heasman of Soapbox.vc arrives with reasons to be bullish about Britain. Venture money is flowing into chips, robotics, defence, satellites and companies that require actual factories. From DeepMind’s orbit around King’s Cross to the industrial spaces of southeast London, something appears to be happening. The questions are whether we can supply it with affordable electricity, keep the manufacturing here, and build something that survives whatever happens to the AI bubble.

Elsewhere, geothermal strawberries prompt a cautionary tale about playground equipment and the conservation of energy; the hosts discover a principled enthusiasm for protected bats; and a five-pound eBay purchase with a CIA backstory takes pride of place aboard the station.

The episode explores:
• HMS Protector, Britain’s Antarctic presence, and why we might need rather more than one replacement boat
• Lincolnshire’s geothermal greenhouses, data-centre waste heat, and the unhappy lesson of PlayPumps
• Team Bat, Team Newt, and the importance of consistent principles
• AI models that know they’re being tested, biological risk, and the limits of automating tacit knowledge
• Britain as a finishing school for Anthropic executives — and why its expertise shouldn’t come free
• OLIX, Cusp AI, Kraken and Open Cosmos: following the money into things Britain can build
• Fuse Energy, expensive electricity, and the political work behind an industrial revival
• Howard Hughes, a sunken Soviet submarine, and the station’s newest manganese nodule

Follow Sam at @discoplomacy (https://x.com/discoplomacy) and read Jesse at https://www.soapbox.vc.

Sponsored by Isembard. Interested in owning and operating a factory in Britain, America, Germany or France? Contact franchise@isembard.com.
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This episode is sponsored by Isembard, the industrial base for the West. If you want to own and operate a factory in Britain, America, Germany or France, email franchise@isembard.com and go reindustrialise the West.
No guest makes it through the airlock this week, which is fortunate because Tom has brought a better visitor: pictures of potato-sized black lumps from the bottom of the Pacific. Calum keeps finding him in the sitting room gazing at manganese nodules. Tom would prefer the real thing. Our hosts set out to explain why the metals embedded in those improbable objects matter to every magnet, battery, submarine, missile and wind turbine Britain hopes to build.
The story begins with a message from Queen Victoria that took nearly seventeen hours to crawl across the first transatlantic cable. Its failure started a quarrel between Wildman Whitehouse, who wanted to solve the problem with more voltage, and the future Lord Kelvin, who wanted to understand the ocean. That quarrel opens a path for the sickly naturalist Charles Wyville Thomson, his deep-sea dredges and a succession of Royal Navy vessels culminating in HMS Challenger: a 200-foot corvette stripped of fifteen of its seventeen guns and refitted as a floating laboratory. Four years, tens of thousands of specimens and thousands of new species later, the expedition has found the deepest known point in the ocean and hauled up strange, metal-rich nodules wrapped around teeth, bones and fragments of sponge. The Victorians went looking for a cable route and discovered a resource frontier.
A century later, Malta’s Arvid Pardo declares the seabed beyond national jurisdiction the common heritage of mankind. The principle becomes an international regime, complete with a proposed UN mining enterprise, compulsory technology transfer, Ronald Reagan’s refusal to sign and, eventually, the International Seabed Authority. While that system spends decades debating a mining code, China becomes what the hosts call an electrostate: a country whose command of critical-mineral supply chains gives it the geopolitical leverage that oil once gave petrostates. The environmental question is real. Mining machines are giant underwater Henry Hoovers, sediment plumes do not respect claim boundaries, and the nodules are habitat for sponges, corals and the ghostly “Casper” octopus. But leaving the seabed untouched does not make the mineral demand disappear. It only moves the damage out of sight.
Britain now occupies a peculiarly British position. The government supports a moratorium on commercial deep-sea exploitation while continuing to sponsor two exploration contracts in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, now held through UK Seabed Resources by Glomar Minerals. To Calum and Tom, that tension is not a reason to surrender the option. It is a reason to decide what the option is for. Should Britain remain inside the UN system and shape it, align with an American route around it, or accept that China will write the rules by being the country prepared to act? And what does it say that the government’s own 2035 ambition is to meet only 10 per cent of annual critical-mineral demand through domestic production? Recycling yesterday’s stock cannot supply an economy that intends to build several times more of everything.
The Anglofuturist answer runs from the ocean floor to the edge of the possible: rebuild the Royal School of Mines, train mining engineers, specialise in autonomous excavation robots, carry those machines from the North Sea to the Pacific and eventually to asteroids, and treat scientific data with the same seriousness as physical resources. There is, Tom observes, more stuff Britain chooses not to do than it actually does. Fifty years from now, Britain could be one of the world’s major electrostates — rich in energy, minerals, machines and the leverage to set its own course. We have business in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.
The episode explores
— Tom’s habit of gazing longingly at pictures of manganese nodules, and a special episode marked by the complete absence of a guest
— Ninety-eight royal words in seventeen hours: the failed 1858 transatlantic cable, Wildman Whitehouse’s high voltage and the future Lord Kelvin’s better answer
— Charles Wyville Thomson, the death of the azoic hypothesis and how cable security persuaded the Royal Navy to fund deep-ocean science
— HMS Challenger: seventeen guns reduced to two, laboratories below deck, thousands of new species and metallic potatoes wrapped around sharks’ teeth
— Arvid Pardo’s “common heritage of mankind”, the proposed UN mining enterprise and why Ronald Reagan refused to sign the Law of the Sea Convention
— How China became an electrostate, and why critical minerals sit inside batteries, magnets, missiles, submarines and the electrical grid
— Giant underwater Henry Hoovers, sediment plumes, ancient nodules and the “Casper” octopus: the environmental case against deep-sea mining
— Britain’s two sponsored exploration contracts, the Glomar succession and the strategic choice hiding inside an official moratorium
— Why a target of 10 per cent domestic production is not an industrial strategy, and why recycling cannot meet multiplying demand
— Mining engineers, autonomous robots and the route from the Royal School of Mines to asteroid mining
— Automated laboratories, OpenBind and the argument that proprietary scientific data can be as strategically important as ore
— A fifty-year vision of Britain as an electrostate, and why coyote time is ending


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