

Tom and Calum explore "dark abundance": a more muscular approach to progress that combines deregulation with decisive state action against disorder and dysfunction.
- Why Trump's state visit was peak "museum Britain" - bringing out the fine china for foreign guests while using enamelware the rest of the time,
- The taxonomy of abundance politics: from Ezra Klein's soft progressivism to "dark abundance", which posits that some people need locking up until their frontal lobes develop,
- How special interests capture reform - from civil servants empire-building through risk assessments to public sector workers voting Labour to preserve their comfortable sinecures,
- The eternal tension between Manchester Liberal free trade and the need for order: why you can't have abundance without deterring bus fare dodgers and ensuring violent criminals actually face consequences,
- Victorian-style pacification of the country through decisive punishment, inspired by Britain executing 16 times more people per capita than Prussia in the 19th century,
- Their architectural philosophy for the coming new towns boom: why Poundbury succeeds despite its mongrel-like mixing of styles, and the case for illiberal design codes that ban modernist innovation in city centres until we figure out what the hell is going on in architectural schools.
Keep listening.

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...
Listen to episode
This is how Britain wins the AI race
James Wise
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...
Listen to episode
Whitehall's war against the future
Dominic Cummings
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...
Listen to episode