Anglofuturism

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 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.


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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 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.


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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 directly to Mauritius. Once you understand that, the deal looks rather different.
It also turned Ben from a progressive Atlanticist into something closer to a Britanno-Gaullist — because the Chagos story is really a story about what happens when you are completely dependent on an ally who keeps changing its mind.
Tom, Calum, and Ben discuss:
* What Diego Garcia actually does, and why it gives you vertigo: Ben can’t tell you under the Official Secrets Act. What he can say is that in the 1960s the Americans identified these remote islands, halfway to everywhere and commanding the approaches to India and China, as the ideal location for certain supercapacities that only a true hyperpower could build. Britain got access in exchange for staying. The deal was extraordinary value. It is also not available anymore.
* Why the deal was inevitable, whoever was in government: The legal perimeter was collapsing through lawfare. Mauritius was on the verge of binding rulings. The Americans — under both parties, across multiple administrations — were telling London the same thing: do a deal or we pull the investment and move the capacities to Hawaii. “The only way Britain could hurt us is by not doing this deal.” Cameron started the negotiations. Labour finished them.
* The Chagos problem is really the America problem: Being bullied into a deal by one part of the American system, unable to rely on the other part to hold indefinitely, watching the asset be used as a tool of American domestic politics. “It’s a really sorry story, but the problem is our relationship with America.” Ben’s Damascene conversion to Anglo-Gaullism happened in the Foreign Office.
* Britain is squandering its overseas territories: A map on the UN website lists Britain as having more colonies than anyone else put together. Almost every single one is in some kind of crisis. British Virgin Islands: money laundering, corruption, Russian and Chinese influence. Turks and Caicos: Haitian gangs. Pitcairn: fifteen inhabitants, one young person left, no groundwater. St Helena: 4,000 people on one of the most strategically crucial islands in the Atlantic. “We might wake up in 80 years, a weaker Britain cornered by lawfare, no inhabitants, and how can we prove we should stay?” The French made their territories overseas départements with seats in the National Assembly. Marine Le Pen campaigns in Réunion. Nobody in the British cabinet visits Bermuda.
* The case for overseas kingdoms: Ben’s plan, developed during his time at the Foreign Office, is to incorporate the territories as overseas kingdoms of the United Kingdom, give them seats in the House of Lords, run them from a central ministry rather than the Foreign Office, and remove them from the UN’s naughty list. “There is no reason there should always be a very small population in the Falklands. If these islands belonged to the Americans or the Chinese, they would have dreams for them. Where are ours?”
* The left needs to discover futurism: AI, biotech, hydrogen, fusion — all right-coded, all ceded to the right by default. “That is f*****g stupid.” The degrowth movement is Luddite moralism that doesn’t understand what it’s talking about. “If you’re centre-left and you’ve got a friend who’s a de-growther, please pitilessly make fun of them.” What’s needed is a progressive futurism: grab the technologies of the 21st century, deploy them for better outcomes for British people. De Gaulle came to power when France had nineteen governments in ten years and a quagmire in Algeria, and threw the whole country into a quest for French modernity. There’s something in that.
Plus: what the Americans really think of British access to their supercapacities, why Malta’s bid to become an overseas kingdom was killed by Treasury mindset, the military perimeter that goes unspoken in every public discussion of the Chagos treaty, and whether the right needs to own up about Brexit’s role in the Boriswave.


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Part two of our conversation with Will Orr-Ewing gets into the harder questions: whether a genuinely meritocratic elite is more dangerous than an aristocratic one, why AI tutoring has solved the wrong problem, and what it would take to build an Odyssean education for Britain’s most talented kids.
Tom, Calum, and Will discuss:
* The internet should have produced a generation of Einsteins — it didn’t: Eric Hoel’s provocation that the most naked conclusion you can draw from the internet, and now AI, is that the constraint was never information availability. The knowledge was always there. We’ve done something bad to intrinsic motivation. “Where are all the people who used the internet to teach themselves untold knowledge?”
* Why AI tutoring has solved the wrong problem: Alpha School puts children in pods on the 35th floor of a New York skyscraper, not allowed to communicate, staring at screens. Will’s friend visited and saw four tantrums in a single school trip. The problem isn’t personalisation — it’s that children don’t need education adapted to their interests. They need their interests adapted to what’s worth learning. And AI cannot do the one thing that actually works: be someone a child wants to become.
* The meritocracy trap: A genuinely meritocratic elite is a terrifying thing. They owe nothing to anyone because they earned everything themselves. Whereas the aristocrat could never quite believe he deserved his position — it was an accident of birth — and so noblesse oblige followed naturally. “You look at the winners of the last 20 or 30 years. They just don’t seem to have a sense of obligation to their country.”
* The Odyssean curriculum — Britain as the school of the world: Cummings’ essay argued England could be what Athens was to Greece — a model for how to educate statesmen and scientists. Will wants an Odyssean version of the King’s Maths School from age 14: Thucydides, Lee Kuan Yew, applied geopolitics. Cohort effects like the Brit School at the Grammys. Currently the maths olympiads have barely 600-700 entries a year. “Our future disproportionately relies on those people. And at the moment their track leads to being a quant at a hedge fund.”
* Elite kids as asset managers of their own human capital: Daniel Markovitz on how the most ambitious families in the world — Will has offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, London — are depleting their children through constant striver credentialism. Nonverbal reasoning tests that you forget the moment you’re through them. “If it was Dostoevsky, at least it might stay with you. But most of these competitive entrance exams have no enduring value whatsoever beyond your LinkedIn trajectory.”
* What Will actually wants for his children: Walking through Parliament and knowing every statesman on the wall. Walking through the countryside and knowing every tree, every bird. “Education properly done is a vitalising force which enchants your everyday perception.” And one other thing: if they’re in a room of a thousand people and 999 say sign the document, the moral courage to say no.
Plus: Rory Stewart’s dad recreating Waterloo in Hyde Park before school, the Anglofuturist Great Hedgerow of Britain as a children’s internet firewall, Korean tutoring centres prohibited after 10pm, and whether Singapore has started workshopping “thinking outside the box” with an actual drawn box.


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Will Orr-Ewing has spent 20 years tutoring and founded Keystone Tutors, but he’s not here to tell you to hire a maths tutor for your nine-year-old. His argument is bigger: that Britain once had a culture of self-directed intellectual growth that state schooling quietly strangled, that the billion-pound tutoring industry is almost entirely pointed at the wrong goals, and that the GCSE system is simultaneously boring the top of the cognitive distribution and failing the bottom.
Tom and Calum receive him in the somewhat dusty schoolroom of the King Charles III Space Station to design an Anglofuturist curriculum—and debate whether the state can ever do what a parent, a tutor, or a good book can.
Tom, Calum, and Will discuss:
* Why tutoring is a superpower pointed at mediocre ends: “You’ve got this massive potential for intellectual expansion, but directed at very menial, mediocre ends.” The billion-pound industry is almost entirely Kumon-style drilling or GCSE cramming. The mimetic relationship between tutor and student—where the neophyte absorbs not just knowledge but how someone thinks—is almost entirely wasted on exam prep.
* The autodidactic culture that state schooling killed: Before the 1870 Education Act, elite education meant acres of childhood time for reading, with tutors as a clinic to check progress rather than the engine of learning itself. “All education is self-education,” as Charlotte Mason put it. The state provided for the bottom but quietly smothered that instinct everywhere else.
* GCSEs are failing everyone except the middling: Thirty percent fail maths and English GCSE every single year. The top of the distribution is bored stiff. “It’s only the middle runners who are really being served.” Schools are so incentivised to chase results that any choice between intellectual stretch and hammering assessment objective three goes the same way.
* The case for releasing kids at fourteen: The bottom thirty percent for whom the credentialist conveyor belt—GCSEs, university, graduate scheme—is “clearly so unenticing.” A more apprentice-based model, local relationships with employers, learning a trade. Michael Faraday was a bookbinder’s apprentice for seven years. A lot of fourteen-year-olds would rather be on an Isambard factory floor than in another PowerPoint-driven lesson—if the smartphone weren’t in their pocket.
* The state cannot replace parental culture: “The real problem is that the state cannot replace the role of a genuine parental culture.” Any attempt to enforce it through the curriculum cheapens it. The dirigiste continental model—school as nation-building—turns what was once emergent into a bureaucratic goal liable to be rewritten by a single pen. And yet: do we trust modern parents to deliver? “I’m not sure I do.”
* Schools as the last mile of the welfare state: Teaching children to use the loo. Brushing teeth. Breakfast clubs. “Whenever there’s an issue we decide as a society that we care about—the environment, AI literacy, financial literacy—it gets shoved into the curriculum, further bloating it and further undermining the chances of delivering something excellent.”
* The Anglofuturist village school prospectus: Gowns and mortarboards. Blackboards. History running from Æthelstan rather than Rosa Parks. Drone-building classes. A wall between the boys’ and girls’ houses patrolled on a mathematically complex schedule—crack the algorithm, and what awaits you is left as an exercise for the reader.
Plus: why Æthelstan would be confined to a cartoon on a Twinkl worksheet even if teachers wanted him, the left-wing case for aristocratic tuition, education savings accounts in half of American states, and whether sourdough is woke.


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