Boyes Smith’s case is that human settlements take remarkably similar shapes wherever you go — Stockholm, Marrakesh, Malta, a town in the north of Norway — and only the proportions change. Hot climates produce narrow streets and high walls to dodge a murderous sun, a logic later codified in the Quran; cold ones spread their streets out to chase the light. Once you have breathable air on the Moon, he argues, you would end up with something startlingly close to how we already live, only built from moon rock, rendered and quite possibly painted in pastel pinks and yellows, like a Cornish village in orbit. The same goes for the British Antarctic Territory, which Tom is delighted to point out is mostly exposed rock rather than ice.

On the Moon as in a Cornish village, his instinct is to build from what is to hand. Granite, he notes, was the original sustainable material — cheap, durable and loved — until canals and railways made it viable to drag stone and brick across the country, the same shift that once made coal in London cost several times what it did in Newcastle. And building well is not a luxury. Across visual preference surveys in Britain, America, Holland and Norway, large majorities, often 70 to 90 percent, prefer the same things — texture, gentle symmetry, a coherent complexity that rewards a second look — and people who live somewhere they find attractive turn out to be measurably healthier in body and mind, across party, region and race. The striking exception is architects: Boys Smith revives a near-forgotten study by David Halpern showing that while everyone agrees on which faces are beautiful, architecture students’ favourite building tends to be precisely everyone else’s least favourite, and the longer the training, the wider the gulf.

How did a civilisation that once built like this forget how? He points to the mid-century caesura, when architecture schools across the West binned several hundred years of accumulated craft, in some cases literally throwing the plaster casts students used to draw from into the skip. But recovering that inheritance is not pastiche: you can always tell a Victorian Gothic church from Salisbury Cathedral, and Selfridges is a steel-framed modern building wearing classical dress. The Victorians, he suggests, were the original Anglofuturists — Joseph Paxton, a self-trained gardener, throwing up Crystal Palace; military engineers raising the Royal Albert Hall on a steel dome they were genuinely afraid would collapse. All of which makes the proposed £39 billion restoration of the Palace of Westminster, not a typo, the more dispiriting, complete with a scheme to scoop out the interior and refit it in what he calls Ikea-pastiche modernism. His counter-proposal, aired in The Critic, is to demolish the Queen Elizabeth II Centre, raise a fifteen-storey Gothic tower in its place, and let the luxury flats inside pay for Parliament’s visitor centre.

The back half ranges gloriously: a Star Wars taxonomy worked out with his son over the summer holidays, in which the Death Star is the apotheosis of functionalist modernism and Naboo is conspicuously on the side of good; a brisk dismissal of the charge that a fondness for columns makes you a neo-Nazi, on the grounds that he doesn’t believe in dressing up and invading other countries; and a genuinely moving account of co-chairing the beauty commission with a dying Roger Scruton — funny, kind, disarming, and armed with a lethal bureaucratic trick of asking anyone with an unhelpful idea to go away and write a two-page memo on it.

The episode explores:

• Why human settlements take the same shapes from Stockholm to Marrakesh, and what that means for building on the Moon

• Lunar Cornwall: pastel-rendered moon rock and the case for local stone everywhere

• Beauty as a public health measure rather than a luxury, and why the data holds across party, region and race

• The Halpern study, or why architecture students are the only people on Earth who prefer ugly buildings

• The mid-century caesura, when architecture schools binned centuries of craft along with the actual plaster casts

• Why copying the past doesn’t make a pastiche, with Selfridges as a steel-framed building in classical dress

• The Victorians as the original Anglofuturists, from Paxton’s Crystal Palace to the Albert Hall dome nobody was sure would stay up

• Build a Gothic tower, don’t spend £39 billion turning Parliament into a 21st-century building

• Whether rebuilding the burned-down Clandon Park is genuinely “dishonest,” as the National Trust insists

• Why “neo-Nazi” gets hurled at anyone who likes a column, and why stripped classicism was mostly an American state project

• The Star Wars theory of architecture: the Death Star is pure modernism, and Naboo is on the side of good

• Roger Scruton’s trick for killing an unhelpful meeting

Last January, as the White House demanded that Denmark hand over Greenland, The Times reported that it was Britain that might have first dibs on the vast, frozen island.

“The United Kingdom,” said Tom Høyem, formerly the representative of Copenhagen in Greenland, “demanded in 1917 that if Greenland were to be sold then the UK should have the first right to buy it.”

Whether Denmark acceded to the request has been disputed. Whether Britain in its current form would push its way to the front of the queue, shoving President Trump aside, is even more doubtful. Still, the episode says something about the nature of being a former colony-maxxer: always finding coins down the back of one’s sofa.

On last week’s state visit to the US, the King gently joshed Trump about Britain’s profusion of historic claims. “I know you have big plans for the Moon, Mr President,” said Charles, “but I’ve checked the papers, and I rather suspect it is already part of the Commonwealth!”

Much as we would like to hear, in Charles’ speech, a Straussian statement of intent, it is hard to imagine that he views colonisation as anything other than “ghastly”. Yet the world is changing around him; and Trump, as ever, is one of the protagonists.

Colonisation, of a sort, is back. Most obviously, Trump has chivvied NASA into accelerating its efforts towards a permanent Moon base. Trump himself, in his first term as president, commissioned the Artemis programme. By the end of the decade, Artemis astronauts will be harvesting lunar resources.

Subscribe now

The US won’t necessarily proclaim ownership of the parts of the Moon they’ll be using, but it won’t need to. Progressives gasping at “neo-colonialism” will be correct in their diagnosis, if not in their implied disapproval.

Lunar colonialism differs from traditional colonialism in many respects, but one of them is that there is no need to worry about indigenous Moon dwellers. The same, Greenland aside, is true of what we can call America’s other neo-neo-colonial interests.

One of those interests is the ocean floor. I’ve been looking into this for an UnHerd essay, so I’ll hold back further discussion until the piece is published. Another is lower-Earth orbit: the US government, via NASA, is supporting the creation of new, commercial space stations, even as space becomes militarised.

Scholars of the Anglofuturism podcast will now be asking: what of Antarctica? The US seems to be refocusing its interest towards the High North, choosing not to renew its lease on its Antarctic icebreaker. “This has placed the US in the unusual position,” say the Friends of the British Overseas Territories, “of leasing Ukraine’s research vessel Noosfera to support essential marine research in the Southern Ocean.”

Share

Noosfera, which was constructed in Wallsend and was once known as RRS James Clark Ross, is formerly British; inshallah, the Antarctic peninsula, and its mineral riches, shall remain British. As the Anglofuturism podcast has repeatedly warned its vast range of senior government contacts, though, we must use the peninsula or lose it. I make the argument in more detail here, but the tl;dr is that there is a vast booty of natural resources to be prospected for and, ultimately, harvested. If we don’t do it, someone else will.

At the Poles, in the heavens, and under the sea, then, the age of neo-neo-colonialism is afoot. Calum and I discuss this new era in our latest release, which also features Aeron’s Pink Pantheress-style remix of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Listen to the full episode →

Calum reports from Singapore. The city-state is remarkable — a nation summoned into being in 60 years through ethnic quotas, mandatory housing integration, and the relentless repetition of founding mantras. But it is now haunted by the ghost of Lee Kuan Yew, whose historically contingent decisions are being ossified into dogma. The TFR has fallen to 0.87. Entrepreneurialism is lacking. And the ethnic ratios that once stabilised the state are now preventing the emergence of a true Singaporean people.

The lesson Calum draws is not about policy but about method: if Britain wants cultural renewal, it needs hyperculture — the willing use of state formation tools to remake national identity. Charles Wesley did this for Anglicanism among the newly urbanised working class. Singapore did it with light shows and peanut shells on the floor at the Raffles Hotel. The question is whether Britain is willing to do the same.

The episode explores:

• King Charles’s US visit and why the special relationship is a wasting asset

• The Koh-i-Noor diamond and the rise of third worldism in American politics

• Deep sea mining in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone and Britain’s quiet play for it

• The return of the frontier: space, Antarctica, the ocean floor

• Calum’s Singapore dispatch: what LKY built and what is now ossifying

• Why Singapore’s TFR of 0.87 is a failure of Lee Kuan Yew’s own eugenics programme

• The most photographed barn in America as a model for state formation

• Charles Wesley as the Pink Pantheress of his time

• Hyperculture: the case for a full spectrum British cultural renewal

• Bismarck, repeatedly and without apology

The conversation then turns to whether cræft can serve as a binding agent for a country that no longer shares an informational commons. Louis presents his framework of 16 Dreams of Britain — from Royal Britain and Workshop Britain through to Silly Britain (Mr Blobby, cheese rolling, Paddington Bear as psychopomp) and New Britain (Stormzy’s stab vest, Oswald Boateng’s BA uniforms). His claim is that excellence in making — the deep hand-eye-mind entanglement of cræft — cuts across all of them. Calum pushes back hard: these are competing aesthetic and moral universes, not fragments of a whole.

Submit to the British Cræft Prize. £60,000. Deadline: 31 August 2026. [link]

The episode explores:

• The boxer shorts to national prize pipeline, via Saint Pantalone

• Why Irish linen is grown in Flanders

• The 16 Dreams of Britain and whether they can coexist

• Calum’s objection: competing aesthetic universes cannot be synthesised by goodwill

• Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism and Paul Ricœur’s defining question

• Hiroki Azuma’s database animals and the collapse of the grand narrative

• The Magdalen College library debate: homage or imposition?

• Why the Anglofuturist typeface has borrowed from five traditions and still doesn’t have a full alphabet

• The Peter Thiel two-by-two and why definite pessimism has no joy

• Sprezzatura as the missing ingredient in British national renewal

“The word cræft keeps appearing in Old English, but almost always in a compound — wordcræft, someone who’s very good with words; leechcræft, being good with medicine. In the rare instances where it’s used in isolation, it translates the Latin virtus. Virtue.

The true meaning of cræft is not ‘I work with my hands and that’s nice.’ It is absolutely not that. What cræft truly is, is a deep entanglement between hand, eye, mind, body, historical, cultural, geographical, material intelligence — all coming together in one potent, skilful means to will excellence into being.

If that’s what cræft is about — forging excellence rather than mere handiwork — there is no reason tools and technology are in tension with it.”

— Louis Elton, on the new £60,000 Cræft Prize for makers fusing heritage skill with frontier technology.

Listen to the full episode →

Louis begins with the crisis: Britain’s heritage crafts are dying. The handmade cricket ball is officially extinct in the UK. Thatchers, stained glass makers and stonemasons are retiring without apprentices. The economic model is broken and the younger generation all went to university. But the answer isn’t pure revival. Louis traces the word cræft back to King Alfred’s translations of Boethius, where it meant something closer to virtue — a deep entanglement of hand, eye, mind, body and material intelligence, all forged into excellence.

The conversation then turns to whether new technologies can produce genuinely new aesthetics rather than endless pastiche. Louis points to Carmelite monks in Montana building a monastery with CNC-milled stone, a Chinese studio using robotic bricklaying to create patterns no human could construct, and a children’s clothing brand applying origami principles to make garments that grow with the child. The enemy throughout is slop — content without form, without virtue, produced to satisfy a single metric. The default setting of modernity is the slop machine. Cræft is the antidote.

The episode explores:

• The Anglo-Saxon meaning of cræft and why it matters more than craft

• Why the handmade cricket ball is dead and what that tells us about British manufacturing

• AI slop versus cræft as opposing forces in modern culture

• CNC monks, robotic bricklaying, and 3D-printed Cornish lobster pots

• Whether Silicon Valley’s obsession with taste is just pattern recognition

• The trad wife aesthetic as craft pornography

• Iranian AI Lego propaganda as an unlikely signal of the future

• What humans are actually for in a post-AGI world

• The Cræft Prize: £60,000 for inventions that fuse heritage wisdom with frontier technology

King Alfred's translation of Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae

Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution

Not Quite Past — AI Delftware in Stoke-on-Trent

Monumental Labs / Gondor Industries

Aki Union — Shanghai parametric brick gallery

Atelier Missor

Louise makes the case that enthusiasm for space exploration is an overwhelmingly Anglo phenomenon, something between an anthropological pathology and a civilisational birthright. But the last great age of exploration coincided with an incredible cheapness of life, a tolerance for suffering and death that modern societies have entirely lost. Can you be expansionist with a 0.7 birth rate and no appetite for risk?

This leads into Louise’s theory of the century: that birth rate collapse is not a policy failure but an evolutionary bottleneck. The people who make it through — more religious, more conservative, more willing to bear the costs — will inherit the Earth. Democracy probably can’t survive the gerontocracy that’s coming. The state pension certainly won’t. Your best hedge, she argues, is several children.

The episode explores:

• Why space exploration is an Anglo pathology — and why that’s glorious

• The Moral Maze’s case against Artemis II, including the claim that astronauts are defiling Navajo ancestors on the moon

• Whether modernity has made us too comfortable to be expansionist

• Louise’s infant mortality theory of everything: low death rates cause low birth rates

• The evolutionary bottleneck and why wokeness is demographically doomed

• The techno-theocracy: orienting innovation towards the Christian good

• Why your pension won’t exist and children are a better investment

• The overview effect as a threat to chauvinistic adventure

• Mars as tax haven, Noah’s Ark selection criteria, and the Bishop of Mars

Thank you for supporting Anglofuturism.

Josh mounts a defence of Pump.fun against charges of exploitation, arguing that the real narrative distortion comes from Silicon Valley incumbents who control both capital and media. Google is an advertising company. Revolut’s revenue is almost entirely from crypto trading. The difference is that Pump.fun never needed to take venture capital from the people who set the terms of respectability.

The conversation then turns to what good companies actually do. Josh’s framework: they automate layers of the civilisational stack, freeing people to focus on higher-leverage work — the same logic that runs from the Black Death through the Industrial Revolution to self-driving cars. Britain’s declining birth rate, he argues, could be a blessing in disguise if it forces investment in automation rather than cheap labour. But the automated cavalry isn’t coming on its own. Someone has to build it.

The episode closes on aesthetics: why Anglofuturism’s AI-generated thatched cottages on the moon are a cry for something better, why the answer might be neo-neo-Gothic, and how Tom once stole a brick from Keble College.

In this episode

• The aristocrat as leader versus the aristocrat as exploiter — and where startup founders fit

• Why Pump.fun is more honest than most of Silicon Valley

• Josh’s framework for social value: automate the civilisational stack

• The Black Death as the bullish case for declining birth rates

• Grammar schools, nuclear energy, and the policies that might actually matter

• Why Anglofuturism needs a coherent aesthetic — and what neo-neo-Gothic triple-glazed stained glass might look like

This conversation took place in November 2025 and was delayed in publication due to triggering an Environmental Impact Assessment from Oxfordshire County Council.

The conversion happened gradually, then all at once. Calum attended a silent retreat in Totnes where a man named Giles explained that fusion energy would simply allow humans to destroy the biosphere more efficiently. Tom read a pamphlet about doughnut economics on the FlixBus from London to Oxford and wept. They have since decommissioned the King Charles III Space Station and replaced it with a community pottery studio.

The episode explores:

• Why GDP is a meaningless number and Britain should stop chasing it: Every guest on this podcast has said something like “Britain needs to grow.” But what is growth? More cars? More data centres? More Georgian townhouses? Tom and Calum now believe that true prosperity is measured in leisure time, hedgerow density, and the number of independently owned bookshops per capita. “We looked at the data and realised we’d been measuring the wrong things. The happiest people we’ve ever met were on Pitcairn Island.”

• The case for shutting down Britain’s tech sector and replacing it with cooperatively owned farms: Technology has given humanity targeted advertising, algorithmic anxiety, and a website where you can bet on meme coins named after dogs. Britain’s attempt to replicate this is not a national strategy — it is a cry for help. What if, instead of incubators, we had more allotments? What if, instead of AI, we had more canal boats? Calum explains why the Coase theorem actually supports a return to subsistence agriculture if you think about it hard enough.

• Deindustrialisation was actually good and we should finish the job: The listeners of this podcast have spent two years complaining about deindustrialisation. Tom and Calum now believe it didn’t go far enough. Why does Britain still manufacture anything at all? Every factory is a moral injury to the landscape. The Lake District doesn’t need a semiconductor fab. It needs to be left alone.

• Immigration, but for trees: Britain’s real population crisis is botanical. There are fewer mature oaks in England than at any point since the Domesday Book. Tom proposes a radical visa programme for ancient woodland — expedited planning approval, no environmental impact assessment, immediate indefinite leave to remain. “If we treated trees the way we treat care workers, the New Forest would have a unicorn by now. But it wouldn’t need one, because it’s a forest.”

• Why this podcast will now be released quarterly, on handmade paper, delivered by bicycle courier: The subscription model is itself a form of growth ideology. Anglofuturism will henceforth be an Anglopastoralism zine, printed on recycled copies of The Economist, available at selected zero-waste shops in Frome and Hebden Bridge. Calum will illustrate each edition with potato prints.

Plus: why notice periods are actually too short, why the overseas territories should be returned to the seabirds, the case for replacing the House of Lords with a citizens’ assembly selected exclusively from people who have never read a Substack, and whether Georgian townhouses on the moon were, in retrospect, a warning sign.

Tom and Calum recorded this episode by speaking into a hollowed-out gourd connected to a length of twine. The audio quality reflects this. They will not be taking questions. Aeron has been fired.

This episode was recorded on 1 April. Normal service will resume once we get the biodiesel engines back up and running.

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.

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.

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 fucking 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.

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.

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.

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 months for people to work out their notice—during which they’re not exactly doing their best work. “It’s incredibly ineffective. It acts as a transfer from the most productive companies to the less productive companies people are resigning from.” Meanwhile, US contracts have no notice period or a couple of weeks max.

But notice periods are just the start. The real bottleneck is that Britain produces excellent early-stage research but can’t capture the value because we’ve made ourselves an unattractive market for drug sales. NICE’s role has become “get the lowest price possible, even if that means greatly delaying when the drug is distributed in the UK.” We’ll spend five years negotiating a thousand pounds off a course of treatment while people literally die. The solution? Turn the NHS into a pharma company—have it fund and run trials like the RECOVERY trial that discovered dexamethasone, then earn royalties by selling the drugs to America.

From ethics committees run by religious volunteers who delay STI trials to promote abstinence, to why Brexit was actually good for medical devices (FDA approval now automatically carries over to UK), to the limits of in-silico trials and why randomised control trials are “literally magic,” Meri lays out a vision for fully automated luxury NHS—and explains why everything comes down to clinical trials, even in the age of AI.

Tom, Calum, and Meri discuss:

• Why Meri’s company had to go transatlantic: “We haven’t moved to the US—we’re transatlantic. About 150 people, half still in UK. But look, I’m not going to deny there are strong forces pulling us to the US.” Not capital availability—European investors funded them to Series B. It’s the market. “Markets aren’t big enough in Europe to sustain global category dominant companies. If you want to build category defining companies in the UK, you need to grow the economy.”,

• Three-month notice periods are killing British startups: “The single hardest thing about building the company so far in the UK has been notice periods. We’ve won new trials, need to staff up, hire good people—takes time. Then they have three months between resigning and joining us. It’s incredibly ineffective because once you’ve resigned, you’re not doing your best work.” US contracts: no notice period or couple weeks. “Even a couple weeks is enough to fully hand over even a senior productive person’s work.”,

• What Lindus Health actually does: Design overall study, find sites, train them, oversee operations through software that integrates with health records and labs. Monitor for errors and patient safety risks in real time. For home-based trials like ME/CFS: “We employ nurses directly to visit patients in their home or have video calls. We do pretty much everything.”,

• Adaptive trials that analyze data in real time: “Clinical trials today are very waterfall. Design, run, analyze months after it’s wrapped up. Our software runs every trial adaptively. We don’t know how many patients we’ll enroll or what ratio between control and treatment. Software automatically randomises patients in a way that boosts statistical power and stops enrolling as soon as we’ve enrolled enough to show statistical effect.” Not p-hacking—stays blinded,

• Testing multiple variations in parallel: “Should be testing multiple in parallel. One control arm of 100 people, indeterminate number of arms with slight variation of dose or patient population. For the same time and massive cost saving, get way richer data.” Already doing this today,

• Why in-silico trials are limited: “RCTs are literally magic. By randomizing participants fairly, you control for all possible variables without needing to know what they are. To run effective in-silico experiments, you need to know what all possible variables are, which is essentially impossible because humans are incredibly complex.” Where they work: late-phase cancer (unethical to give placebo) and psychedelics (you immediately know if you got ketamine),

• Brexit was actually good for medical devices: “If you get FDA approval for a medical device, you automatically get approval in UK—been a big triumph post-Brexit. What would be amazing is to have it both ways.” For drugs, you still need slightly varying requirements for each country but one expensive phase three gets approval in Europe, Japan, US, South Korea,

• Ethics committees run by unhinged volunteers: “Someone delayed phase two oncology trial—so people were going to die—because they felt the font was too small in documents. Delays by at least four weeks because the committee only meets every four weeks.” One person delayed STI test trial because of religious conviction, insisted on promoting abstinence,

• Just pay for private ethics committees: “In US you can pay private regulated company to convene ethics committee. Costs five or ten grand but we get quick good feedback and can start in a week. That’s a no-brainer—same centralised system but pay the people, implement rigorous standards, make it self-funding.”,

• The COVID trials that worked: Recovery trial—Martin Landray ran very fast pragmatic trial testing different COVID treatments. Discovered dexamethasone was effective at reducing mortality. “Extremely cheap in drug trial terms.” Their VP of clinical operations was key person behind panoramic and principle trials, both fully remote. “By really tight integration with health system, you can run trials so much faster and cheaper in a way that’s not possible unless you are the health system.”,

• Turn the NHS into a pharma company: “Have NHS run trials for free or very low cost like RECOVERY. In return they own a share of the drug. We’ve run phases 1-3 on NHS very quickly—now we’re the distributor or we sell license to pharma and earn significant royalty. British patients get access sooner and it would be incredibly profitable because you run these trials so much cheaper than on US healthcare systems.” Would require fundamentally re-architecting NHS around for-profit model,

• Why speed matters more than people think: “Because of how patents work in life sciences, every day that ticks by is literally on average worth hundreds of thousands for the average drug. That’s less revenue you could be earning before the patent cliff when drug goes off patent and becomes generic.” Speed should be incredibly important—and they reinvest that revenue into fundamental R&D,

• The vision for 50 years from now: “If we can crack opening this bottleneck—safely test 10x, 100x as many iterations of potential drugs at scale—you inevitably get healthcare bioabundance. This has to happen to cure cancer, cure Alzheimer’s, live to 200. Everything comes down to clinical trials. Until AGI can completely simulate the human body, you literally cannot objectively claim you’ve cured cancer until you’ve tested it in enough humans.”,

Plus: Why lipids massaged into mouse hair could cure Tom’s Norwood 2, the meeting rooms named after James Lind’s original trial arms (cider, seawater, oranges, lemons, barley water, garlic paste), and why they randomised people onto different drinks at their early parties.

Your clinical trial success depends on notice periods—who knew?

What follows is a sprawling argument about whether Britain should mourn or celebrate, why the government won’t fund proper space ambitions, and the deeper aesthetic war underlying every political debate in this country. From Jim Ratcliffe’s “colonisation” comments triggering the PM to demand an apology, to the question of whether HCBGs or keffiyeh-wearing Oxfam shoppers represent the real Britain, Tom and Calum diagnose why we can’t have nice things—and what it would take to build an O’Neill cylinder with cricket fields anyway.

Tom and Calum discuss:

• The Orbex collapse as Britain’s space 9/11: The vertical launch company went into administration after a Franco-German takeover fell through. Tom mourns the loss of Union Jack rockets. Calum says “they were building the wrong rockets”—small satellites when SpaceX’s super heavy lift has made that model obsolete. “We’re doing this weird combination of all space in industry, very little government funding, but we want the totemic sexy capabilities. We’re not providing a market for them.”,

• Britain’s actually brilliant space sector: Space Forge with their 1,000°C furnace and Pridwen heat shield named after Arthur’s shield. Surrey Satellite Technology Limited pioneering shoebox-sized satellites. Astroscale doing “space MOTs”—fixing and removing orbital debris. “We do have a pretty cool space sector in terms of the small stuff, the space engineering frontier.”,

• The milestone payment model SpaceX used: “You offer fixed amounts of money as milestones. If you hit the milestones you release more.” Tom Kalil’s Renaissance Philanthropy approach. “If you put up money for competitions you only have to pay out if you get the capability.” Far better than cost-plus contracts that create infinite money pumps and overruns,

• The regulatory sandbox is actually good: Companies working on new space tech can “send someone to sit in a room with someone from DSIT and come up with regulation in real time.” If you want to test nuclear propulsion in space, “the cold hand of DSIT reaches out even that far. It will gently tickle you instead of totally throttling you.”,

• The mythic quality Britain’s missing: Lord Kempsell asked what the plan was to get an Englishman on Mars. No answer. “I think it’s the mark of a healthy country to have that kind of ambition. I think it’s good to foster the ambition of young men who might wish to die defending the British settlement on Olympus Mons.”,

• The real aesthetic war in Britain: Not HCBGs vs reformers. It’s “Green Party style—privilege is bad, keffiyeh as your style statement, women with quite short-cropped hair, big boots, Doc Martens with Superman socks. A kind of lower-middle-class earnest, very morally fierce Britain of suburban middle towns.” In Cornwall: coastal towns are “Joules, Jack Wills, Helly Hansen, HCBG Central.” Inland towns: “two vegan restaurants and an occult bookshop.”,

• Jim Ratcliffe and elite defection: Said Britain has been “colonised by immigrants.” PM demanded apology, Number 10 welcomed it when he gave soft apology. Tom’s friend on football group chat: “plainly racist.” Tom: “I don’t think it is. Strong meat linguistically, but not plain racism.” Government wasting time on words instead of integration issues,

• Why the PM shut it down so fast: Not strictly semantically accurate but “there is something in it—whole areas have changed, people staying, sending remittances home, organized crime. You could say there’s some truth to the word colonisation. The fact there’s some truth to it is why the PM has been so quick to shut it down.”,

• The progressive theory of speech codes: “If you punish people hard enough for breaking the speech code, the problem will go away. Because there was no problem anyway. The problem was the working class getting false consciousness because of elites like Ratcliffe.” So you punish Ratcliffe at the source—despite him being a tax exile which doesn’t help his public image,

Plus: Tom’s 10pm tatty scone gammon eggs Benedict, why Calum thought he’d be grooming talent at Civic Future, the milkman arriving at KC3, fake smoke allegations at British rocket companies, and whether frame-mogging Chinese astronauts requires large bums like skeleton bobsledders.

Thank you for supporting Anglofuturism.

Lindus Health was founded to fix this crisis. Named after James Lind, the Royal Navy surgeon who ran the first randomized controlled trial in 1747 (discovering that citrus prevents scurvy and accidentally creating the Sicilian Mafia in the process), the London-based company is slashing clinical trial costs and timelines through better software, smarter processes, and a willingness to actually keep up with FDA guidance—which, remarkably, the industry ignores.

In this first part of our conversation, we explore why pharmaceutical shelves are lined with miracle drugs gathering dust, how the NHS simultaneously possesses world-class health data while being catastrophically bad at purchasing new treatments, and what Britain could gain by becoming the world’s biotech testing ground.

Tom, Calum, and Meri discuss:

• Why drug development costs are doubling every decade: Eroom’s Law means $2 billion and 10-12 years per drug on average. “A tech bro would say ‘it one shot me’ right? How have we got this incredibly important industry getting exponentially less efficient when all the inputs—genome sequencing, compute—are getting exponentially more efficient?” The vast majority of costs are in phase 1-3 clinical trials,

• The COVID vaccine trials were archaic: Meri volunteered and “it was like stepping back 30 years.” He had to download Microsoft Edge because the signup website didn’t have an SSL certificate. “That sounds trivial and silly, but that probably puts off at least half of potential volunteers, which makes it twice as long to enroll and potentially twice as expensive.”,

• Pharma shelves are lined with miracle drugs gathering dust: “You would be shocked. There are just umpteen compounds sitting on shelves gathering dust.” Often shelved for ridiculous reasons: “This was a pet project of this guy who got fired and no one else wants to touch it.” Or outdated NPV thresholds. Because trials are so expensive, it’s not worth their time,

• The regulations are surprisingly permissive: “This will sound controversial but I think the regulations have an appropriate level of risk modulation. You can literally go on the FDA’s website and see briefing documents where they are admonishing pharma for not being innovative enough. What other industry is the regulator trying to force private companies to be more innovative?” Most barriers are self-imposed,

• James Lind and the Sicilian Mafia: In 1747, Lind ran the first RCT to cure scurvy—up to 50% of sailors on long voyages just died. Six treatment arms, oranges and lemons won. “One of the key innovations that powered the British Empire.” The demand for citrus was so great the Royal Navy went to Sicily, and “the Sicilian Mafia formed as a collective bargaining organization to help producers get a fair price.”,

• The low-hanging fruit argument is cope: “Most people would say ‘oh well maybe we’ve discovered all the early targets and all that’s left is really hard to drug.’ That just seemed like terrible cope. 30-40 years ago we discovered medicines by zapping them into mice randomly. Now we’ve sequenced the human genome.”,

• Britain has incredible advantages it’s squandering: The NHS has “probably the best health data set in the world. Completely longitudinal cradle to grave, all one system, records coded the same way.” UK Biobank is world-class. “There’s a lot of early phase research that originates in the UK. But when you’re running later trials, you want a good early adopter market. That unfortunately is not the UK.”,

• The NHS purchasing problem: NICE has decided its role is to get the lowest price possible “even at the expense of waiting five years to acquire a drug that could be life-saving. We’ll spend five years negotiating a thousand pounds off a course of treatment and you think, is that worth it? People are literally dying who could have not died.”,

• The dream scenario for Britain: “The NHS will fund the entire clinical trial and in return the drug will be free on the NHS. Maybe the NHS earns money off royalties of sales in other markets. That would be incredibly powerful, incredibly accretive to the British economy, but it would require political will.” If everyone’s going to worship the NHS like a deity, at least make it productive,

• GPs are secretly based: They’re “basically private companies and thus much more flexible and fast and easy to work with” than NHS hospitals. Lind runs many trials through GP surgeries and patients’ homes to avoid hospital bureaucracy,

• The ME/CFS trial: Running a trial for chronic fatigue syndrome with a German pharma company entirely remotely because “the sickest patients are literally bed-bound.” Using a drug already approved elsewhere. “I don’t care how the disease mechanistically works. I just care that we can run a proper experiment. If it works, I kind of don’t care how it has an effect as long as it works.” Testing beats theory,

• Why the industry won’t innovate: “Incredible inertia driven ultimately by pharma having huge regulatory barriers to entry and thus very little competition and thus little pressure to innovate.” COVID vaccines succeeded because there was “for once, intense competition.” The problem isn’t that regulations are too strict—it’s that nobody bothers to follow guidance that would make things faster,

• What Lindus Health actually does: Makes clinical trials faster and cheaper through better tech and processes. Uses AI to generate higher quality trial documents, quality control protocols, find patients more efficiently. $80 million raised, majority of trials now in US because “healthcare market is dominated by the US.” Over half of clients’ trials are American,

Plus: The hellish anti-snoring device, why thalidomide broke our risk tolerance, how decentralized trials work, the bitter lesson of machine learning applied to pharma, and why Meri thinks Britain could create the next Novo Nordisk if we just got our act together.

Part two coming soon.

Dear listeners

Tuesday 3rd March: Applied Anglofuturism

• An event for those who wish to reify Anglofuturism and are looking for a means by which to do so. Bring an idea for a project; share ideas; come away with a plan. Details here.

Wednesday 11th March: Pints

• An event for those who wish to drink room-temperature ale in the presence of fellow Anglofuturists. Details here.

See you next month!

Tom, Calum & Aeron

Tom, Calum, and Aeron discuss:

• Dinner party theory of politics and why it causes decline: Our legislators aren’t very intellectual, so they’re strongly affected by what other elites think. They don’t want legislation that embarrasses them at dinner parties. This creates consensus-seeking that produces median outcomes. When power is diffuse, people stay strictly in line. But give them confidence and they’ll act outside the distribution,

• The LFG question: Can you change Britain through charismatic campaigning and elite support? Or do you need deeper institutional power? Lawrence Newport had success with the bully campaign, but what’s next?

• The Green Belt debate: Tom argues for preserving culture. Calum argues culture and market efficiency are at odds—prioritizing abstract goals while people suffer is like hammering screws into washing machines. The synthesis: build on it, but make it beautiful. “Culture will happen anyway. People want to talk, innovate, meet. The fruits will follow.”,

• Would we fight for Britain?: Tom: “If it was existential, of course.” But what counts as existential? Do they have to be in France? We’ve become shielded from risk. In the Falklands, HMS Sheffield caused huge outcry. Russia’s tolerance vastly exceeds ours. “It’s difficult to fight a war if you can’t lose any troops.”,

• The HCBG (Home Counties Baby Girl) problem: Silicon Valley has ABGs. We need HCBGs to fill this role in Britain. Core features: Whispering Angel, Barbour with cartridge pockets, drives the will to power in British founders,

• The space vision: There’s a clear tech tree: cheap energy → compute + manufacturing → space. “Britain should be doing everything it can to get to space as the new frontier.” As more mass becomes accessible in space vs Earth, your country’s starting size becomes irrelevant—it’s purely about timing. “I really believe Britain should be the wealthiest country in the galaxy.”,

• Why Britain’s irrelevance is our advantage: US and China are locked into war. Like European land wars during our Industrial Revolution, they’re tied up while “we can focus on ourselves. Self-care.” We’re passing into irrelevance and that’s a blessing—we can build while they fight,

• Aeron’s child prodigy plan: A forecasting outfit put 80% on emergence of a child with “heretofore unforeseen powers” in 20 years. Aeron has the criteria: speaks 4-5 languages, Grandmaster chess by 18, Math Olympiad medal. “He won’t be able to tie a shoelace. Very aristocratic.”,

• Tom’s dating Calendly: The plan for HCBGs to book dates with Tom. An AI evaluates your Pinterest—how many Bath stone houses? What’s your Emma Bridgewater pattern? “Show me your Aga abundance, your Barbour jacket abundance.”,

Plus: Muscular Anglofuturism returns (six kilos of muscle minimum), sending a space Aga into orbit, teaching humanities bluffers to build drones, chicken wine discourse, and why reading is literally elitist now.

Full 2026 kickoff out now. Go forth, conquer, multiply.

Benedict reveals his plan to build five new Crossrail lines (one more than Paris) that can pay for themselves through housing development. Aeron explains palendr, his project to reduce coordination costs and help people form communities beyond just shagging and drinking. And we learn that the optimal amount of Christmas cracker explosions is greater than zero—perhaps significantly greater if you’re allowed to fire Roman candles at annoying relatives.

Tom and Calum discuss with Benedict and Aeron:

• Six Crossrail lines to beat Paris: Benedict’s working on giving London a total of six cross-city rail tunnels (five more than we have). The Old Castle Line would be just 5km of tunnel to join north and south of the river, relieving the Northern Line. Crossrail 2 would connect Clapham Junction to King’s Cross/Euston, serving both with one 250m train,

• Britain’s secret railway blessing: We inherited 12 separate railway termini because 19th century companies refused to cooperate and just grabbed territory from each other through “cutthroat capitalism at its most ruthless.” Now we can join them up with relatively short tunnels,

• The F1 supply chain is a national treasure: Germany doesn’t have it. When German customers ask Isambard about lead times for exotic materials, they’re confused that the answer is “hours not weeks.” The F1 industry created material stockholders who can deliver overnight because Grand Prix engineers need new parts immediately,

• The pewter tankard with a glass bottom: Benedict’s Christmas gift—historically used to check if you’re being press-ganged into the Royal Navy by spotting a coin in your drink. Calum plans to use it to avoid doing the washing up,

• Coasean Christmas: The problem of pollution is reciprocal. A noisy pub imposes costs on neighbors, but if neighbors stop the pub being noisy, they impose costs on the pub. Either way, somebody pays. The solution: bargaining. The pub could buy out the High Court judge who got the beer garden shut at 7pm,

• Aunt Margaret’s Mariah Carey problem: Should Gerald compensate Margaret for loss of festive atmosphere when he demands she stop playing “All I Want for Christmas” on repeat? Or vice versa? Benedict suggests putting a baby in the room—won’t mind the music, Margaret doesn’t feel lonely, Gerald escapes,

• The optimal amount of fire is greater than zero: Benedict argues we shouldn’t worry about Christmas cracker externalities. We have far fewer fires than we used to (because no more open fireplaces). Calum wants Roman candles he can fire across the table at annoying relatives,

• Why palendr exists: Aeron and a friend met through Anglofuturism built a machine for eliciting preferences using embeddings and vector maths. It’s like “Hinge meets Palantir”—you answer prompts, the system extracts meaning, puts you in a space where similar people and events are “a short hop mathematically”,

• The coordination tax: Groups in this space keep independently building dashboards, duplicating work. The British progress community formed partly through high-agency people and big Schelling points, but “those constraints don’t scale.” Lower coordination costs = more communities = more people organizing toward something better,

• Why in-person matters: “It’s hard to really grok how another person thinks until you spend quite a bit of time with them, probably over a couple of pints.” Once you have a mental model for how someone sees the world, you can predict their thinking—”that just oils the wheels so much more easily”,

• Britain’s club tradition is our secret weapon: Medieval European rulers required permission from the king to form associations. England didn’t, which is why we could easily create the London Stock Exchange, cooperative movement, working men’s clubs, private members clubs. “The spirit is still there even though people do it quite a lot less”,

• Blackballing is good actually: Open invite policies risk “one person comes along and ends up causing a lot of drama.” Having members proposed and seconded, with ability to blackball, keeps things open while maintaining quality. Getting people to pay also forces commitment,

• Why England has no great composers: The center of gravity was continental for centuries. By the time British royalty could be patrons, fashion was for French and German things. Victorian composers like Vaughan Williams and Elgar? “Not one of them wrote a symphony to the steam engine.” They’re guilty men of history for pastoral fantasies during the Industrial Revolution,

• Brian Eno is Britain’s greatest modern composer: Progenitor of ambient music, understanding that music would become “like wallpaper” long before streaming. But critically: he composed the Windows 95 startup sound. “To compose a three second piano ditty that plays every time you turn on your computer, I think is wonderful”,

• Thomas Tallis gets the other vote: “The basis for all music should come from vocal music” and “the early English choral tradition is just stunning. There is absolutely nothing in the world which holds a candle to it.” Unfortunately Spem in Alium is now associated with Fifty Shades of Grey,

• The great work is dead (except in cinema): No one does the big impressive novel anymore. Cinema retains the auteur because it has scarcity—you must sit down to enjoy it. But books and music? Too much supply, not enough consumption. “We’re in a post-literate society.” Sally Rooney explicitly retreats from the concept of the great work,

• The text auteur is the great tweeter: If text has become background noise, then the person who’s mastered the medium where text is most engaged is the Twitter poster. “There are great tweets that sit and reminisce.” Calum is “struck by reading someone’s jpeg of a dril tweet”,

• Benedict’s 60-second triumph: “I’m on a train heading from London up to Glasgow. It’s a maglev.” Proceeds to describe immaculate connections, restored Beeching lines, freight trains carrying British Antarctic Territory ores to Northwest factories, punctuality matching Switzerland and Japan. “Nobody complains about them. They’re no longer a national laughing stock.” Massive applause.

Plus: Aeron can identify Tom’s “um” by sight (it’s “a lovely ovaloid”), Calum wants a pre-Columbian Christmas with peacock and pottages shaped like animals filled with the wrong meat, the TOPJAW comparison and who’s more photogenic, and why we need a Tudor-themed restaurant where you eat off bread trenchers and watch a cockfight.

If you missed it, go back and listen to Part 1.