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.Sponsored by Isembard. Interested in owning and operating a factory in Britain, America, Germany or France? Contact [email protected] episode explores:Why Swindon was the Anglofuturist city of the 19th and 20th centuries, and how it could be againElite estrangement: how the civil service came to despise the country it servesThe Cabinet Office, from minute-takers to 12,000 staff, and why Reform would abolish itHalving the civil service, curbing judicial review and filling the Lords with Reform peersLeaving the ECHR on day one, and the slower work of unpicking its case law and Northern IrelandSegregation, expulsion or enculturation: Danny’s three options for a divided countryOn the AI bus or off it, and why cheap labour left Britain under-automatedUniversal leisure needs universal virtue, and the case for the eighteenth-century gentlemanBrits on the Moon, data centres in space and the Antarctic treaties up for review in 2048Why the tax system treats a parent of four like a single personA frogman on every Chagos island, and whether thatch makes a decent radiation shield Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 [email protected] episode explores:Why Britain should become a Harry Potter theme park, in a good wayWhat separates a Harry Potter Britain from mere tweeWhy England might be the only real country, and whether anyone should tell BulgariaBattle Abbey, where only traitors and weirdos choose to be NormansWhy the cult of 1945 does more damage than the cult of ArthurThe crime thread, suspended sentences and the case for incapacitationTwenty per cent more Singapore, and what it does for you to leave your laptop in a caféDecadence as a loss of will, and the trouble with the 2012 Olympics ceremonyThe future as a hierarchy of impulse controlFrance as Britain’s natural ally, largely because Ed wants a house in the DordogneTom’s minimal phone, which looks as though it was drawn by a childWhy Ed chickened out of calling his son Athelstan, and the first pro-Anglo-Saxon DEI initiativeWith thanks to Paritosh Purohit for research contribution. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 pageThree years in stealth hoovering up the people behind reversible computing at Arm, Intel, Cambridge and SandiaWhy a chip gets hot from forgetting, not from thinkingThe pendulum, the LC tank and the 2025 test chip that shaved years off its founder's lifeWhy building chips may be the hardest thing humanity does, and what SpaceX's rockets have to do with itThe Tesla strategy: a Lotus body with an electric engineThe $225 billion inference market and the $150 million ticket to the danceArm, Intel, IBM and why licensing is what you do after failingBrighton summers, a spreadsheet of cities, and why London has no number twoThe 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 inequalityBatteryless supercomputers, neural Minecraft, and robots with a chip in every fingerTom's permanent semi-darkness, a German theory of the Industrial Revolution, and East London's phone snatchers Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 noduleFollow 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 [email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 [email protected] 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit anglofuturism.co/subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Space is tight in the King Charles III Space Station’s dining room this week — ten million pounds a square metre, the collapse in housebuilding having consequences even in orbit — which is fitting, because coming through the airlock are two men who tried harder than most to fix it. Jamie Rumbelow and Henry Dashwood founded Tract, the venture-backed startup that set out to speed Britain’s planning system up with software. Two years later they returned the capital and wrote the postmortem everyone in British tech has read. 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 PonyJamie 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 [email protected]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit anglofuturism.co/subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

No guest at the airlock this week — no radar contact at all, in fact, because Tom is patching in from a French heatwave, leaving Calum alone in the captain’s seat. Domestic matters first: the long-foretold big score has finally materialised (34 runs, since you ask), and England are in a World Cup semi-final.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 generationThis one is a salon for our paid subscribers — thank you for keeping the station pressurised. Anglofuturism remains open to sponsors: get in touch with [email protected]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit anglofuturism.co/subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There is a knock at the airlock this week, and the King Charles III Space Station’s radar detected nothing incoming. The undetected arrival is Will Blyth: major in the Army for twelve years, infantry platoon commander in the Rifles in Afghanistan, then Palantir, then Helsing, and now founder of Arondite, the London company building Cobalt, the command-and-control layer for the robot-heavy battlefield. He has come to upgrade the station’s defences and, first, to show off: the hosts spend the opening stretch war-gaming a Donovian invasion of Wales on Cobalt’s live map — Donovia being NATO training doctrine’s standard enemy, nothing whatsoever to do with Russia — adding javelin viewsheds and enemy units to the Brecon Beacons and marvelling that government software now ships in dark mode. Behind the toys sits the serious claim: the modern battle space has hundreds of sensors, drones and robots built by manufacturers who never expected them to work together, and the question is how you orchestrate all of it, plus the humans, at machine speed.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 CamelotAre you a general with C2 problems — and not a Donovian? Arondite is at arondite.com. Anglofuturism remains open to sponsors — get in touch with [email protected]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit anglofuturism.co/subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 of all, it commissioned an illustration: five enormous, union-jack-tattooed Anglofuturists emerging from the darkness to menace the magazine’s readers.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 kimchiAnglofuturism 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 [email protected]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit anglofuturism.co/subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 investor and a little less like a grant machine. Tom and Calum want to know the obvious thing first: inside government, is anyone freaking out enough about AI? The good news, James says, is that most people are freaking out less than he is. That “British calm” is reassuring in a crisis and maddening in a transformation, and the real task is not getting one department to understand AI but getting the idea to diffuse across the whole of Whitehall the way a technology diffuses across an economy. Direction of travel is good. “But it’s a vector. We probably need to increase the speed.”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 againJames 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit anglofuturism.co/subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.