Latest / Thinking Class / #139 - Tom Ough & Calum Drysdale - How Britain Forgot How To Build And Why The Consequences Are Coming

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#139 - Tom Ough & Calum Drysdale - How Britain Forgot How To Build And Why The Consequences Are Coming · Thinking Class

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillum, and today I'm speaking to Tom O and Callum Drysdale from Anglo Futurism.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Tom is senior editor at Unheard and author of the Anti-Catastrophe League.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Callum is an engineer and writer.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Together they host the Anglo Futurism Podcast, which argues that Britain should be the most successful country in the galaxy if it stopped managing its decline and started building again.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: In this conversation, Tom Callum and I think out loud about what Anglo Futurism actually is and whether the Britain it imagines is one that also knows who built it and why that matters.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Whether you can be an Anglo futurist without being a cultural conservative, whether Britain can become Europe's energy powerhouse through offshore winds, small modular reactors and North Soy and North Sea oil without paving over the green and pleasant land, whether population growth is actually necessary for prosperity, or whether a high skill country can stabilize its population and still thrive, why the technocratic class that would need to deliver the Anglo-Futurist future is the same class that produced the decline, the demographic question that Anglo-Futurism cannot avoid, and what the ordinary Britain, the CEO, and the Prime Minister should each do on Monday morning.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: If you value serious long-form conversations like this, then subscribe to Thinking Class on YouTube, follow on Spotify, and support the show on Substack.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And if you haven't already, go and watch The Call of England, my documentary series retracing H.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: V.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Morton's 1927 journey to find out what is left of the old country and to see the evidence of the new England that has emerged since that time.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Episode one and two are live now on YouTube.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates, and now Tom O and Callum Drysdale.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Britain should be the most successful country in the galaxy.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's the thesis of Anglo Futurism, a podcast that asks what this country could achieve if it stopped managing decline and started building again.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Tom O and Callum Drysdale from Anglo Futurism join me today, and they've spent around 60 episodes exploring that question.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And today I would like to explore a slightly more difficult one.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Can you build a future without understanding what you have lost?
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: And does the demographic transformation underway in Britain make the Anglo-Futurist vision impossible or more urgent than ever?
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Callum, let's go to you first.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: What is Anglo-Futurism and what is the the Britain that it is building for?
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a it's a it's a question that that that everyone sort of uh wants to know.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um the answer is often that it sits really in your gut, and it's the sense that um a future that once felt promised and uh that it would inevitably arrive is now sort of slightly becoming trickier and more difficult to see how we sort of arrive at that point.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: So it's um and that future that uh that we're talking about is one of abundant energy, it's of Britons able to live in Britain and become wealthy in Britain, it's one where um British people are able to define their lives in the way that they wish to.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: But I think more importantly, and uh I think it's also one that recognises that the technologies that are being invented now and but will be invented over the next 50 years will have this sort of fundamental role in defining what the desires of Britons actually end up being.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's not really any kind of analysis of the future that doesn't recognize that the world that you're imagining will be just almost impossible to conceive of due to the technological changes that are now, you know, that will be um will emerge, I think is one that you know falls into what I've sort of called pick and mix liberalism or pick and mix nationalism, I beg your pardon, where you know, wouldn't it be nice if we had some of that and some of that and some of that, and you know, people will construct worlds that that seem very nice, but actually uh the reality is there are structural forces at work here, and when we're trying to construct a future, we want to be sort of pragmatic about what is coming down the line, but also then be bold about saying if things like Antarctica or space uh exploration or AI are going to shape the future, how can how can Britain uh seize those and make the best Britain uh possible using those technologies?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Permit me for drawing on one of our national heroes.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Now you mentioned nationalism, but grandfather of the nation, King Alfred the Great, he he began the rebuilding from the marsh and he had a moral vision behind it.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: He founded schools, he commissioned his own translations, he did the own translations, and he formed the moral character of his subjects.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose the question I've got for you, Tom, is when we talk about Britain being the most successful country in the galaxy, what's the kind of Britain that we're imagining?
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Is it is it one that builds nuclear reactors, spaceports, robot factories, but also knows why those things matter, who it is that they're for, what kind of people should be building them?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: The way that we like to distill it is that the Britain we want is or that the future we want is one that feels like home.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: So what what what we're what we hope appears is a Britain that is at the frontiers, um both physically and and technologically more broadly, um, but one that is also recognizable, one that feels familiar, right?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: So so there should be there should be much that culturally persists into that future.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: May I add something?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_02: I I I I this is always my sin in the podcast that uh you know I love love the sound of my own voice.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um and you know, you talked there about a moral question, and I think it's a very live one, and I think we have to be really realistic and honest about what types of moral revolutions have happened in the past, and what does it actually take to drive genuine societal moral sort of a coherence, as in everyone agreeing on one moral idea, and then two progression towards some some moral purpose.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um the last great one, obviously, right, is the sort of the the pacification of England and the the progress of turning from the evangelical project of turning rowdy Georgians into into sort of peaceful Victorians and and the uh like stopping of drinking, you know, the creation of tea as a national uh as a national drink over ale, um the you know getting rid of the blood sports and instead telling men that they should stay at home with their wives.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: This came through the church and it came through a huge, huge evangelizing mission by basically middle class nags.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um I I don't think we necessarily have the same infrastructure set up, unless Tom, you know, you want to put on a uh put on a penny and go and sort of uh go and sort of put bully bully people in the room.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, going going door to door, um please stop doing graffiti, please stop disrespecting ancestors.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: So I sort of think I sort of think it's a I sort of think it's a it's a we what actually we need is to allow people to be more free to act, and then maybe that that will uh create the conditions for the coherence that that might get us more of a moral uh the ability to act in a moral way.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: Is this answering your question?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: Were were you asking about like you know, nuclear power stations and all that kind of specific thing?
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I I I left the door open for you to walk down either path, and and you went down the the moral path, which is a perfectly legitimate path to go down because uh Callum, you've you've mentioned a few institutions and cultural practices that were once central to the nation.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not that there was ever a settled inheritance, right?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: There's always been a living argument amongst us on these islands, and yet we're still able to produce peace and prosperity through conflict.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: But that is actually a very important question to ask.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Is do you think that we still possess the cultural, the moral, the spiritual resources to sustain this kind of ambitious civilization that you're describing?
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and if not, are we banking on the fact that we still have enough to use a rather trite term, human capital to be able to bring us forward and then all of the moral, cultural, spiritual stuff can come after we've created the conditions for material prosperity?
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's worth noting at this point just how malleable people can be, how malleable the national psyche can be.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: I was thinking about this today with relation to Jason R.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: Day, who is of course this Cambridge academic, youngest professor ever, turns out to be um a plagiarist and a fraud, and the mind boggles at how Cambridge appointed not only appointed him, but but did but didn't see through all this BS.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: Like apparently it was widely known in some circles that he was a plagiarist and a liar.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: But the power of Pete woke was so strong that people's people's firmware was so powerfully in favour of Arde and in disfavour, I suppose, of criticizing him and implicitly wokeness that he's persisted at the top of academic life for several years before being found out.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it that all happened very quickly, right?
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: The woke was that powerful.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that suggests to me that there could be similar changes in a national psyche, perhaps more positive ones that could also arise more quickly than we think.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: Someone someone did say to me the other day though, that they thought that our day had actually just played the game and he just done it well.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_02: You know, none of us were ever Cambridge professors.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he just basically clapped his hands together and like done a bit of plagiarism of fashionable papers.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: Oh that that opportunity, that opportunity was open to us, Tom.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um but uh but I was saying I was saying today, John, like, we'll know when Anglo Futurism has won when all you have to do is like clap your hands together and say, like, we'll need you to power, and then you get appointed professor at Cambridge.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and then you have the whole university circling the wagons and accusing people of discrimination when they say that when people say that in you know, in fact there's not very original, like this person isn't very bright.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's what we're really Yeah, that's what that's what we're counting.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, we won't be in the academic safe seats when no one will challenge us and we can scream like discrimination against Anglo-futurism if they do.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_02: That actually the um the the sort of computational fluid models of the plasma and nuclear reactors is actually racist or anti-anglo-futurist to suggest that crenelations would not or would be not be an optimum shape.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we will we will hear legitimate criticisms of our work and we will say that is anti-nativist and we will report them to the police.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: I can I can feel the the germs of a counter-elite forming.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh this is this is gonna at least as the infrastructure to to withstand this kind of onslaught because you know vic victimhood is already there, so let's just change the story and for our own success.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Why why not?
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: What's stopping us?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh what what do we think the future then looks like materially?
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: We've talked about some of the morally the the moral questions.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: You cover energy policy, AI, manufacturing space, the whole thing.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: But what do you think the hard material of national renewal looks like?
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: What do we think it will look like, or what do we think it should look like?
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's go for shoulds because there's likely to be a a bit of a gap there.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean it it looks it looks like Plapham.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: It it looks like Wandsworth.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I and I say this I say this glibly, but but Wandsworth is the uh is the what is it, the council of the borough with the highest GDP per capita in Britain.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um and the what really over Yeah is that just because of the small amount of council housing there?
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's but it's also the fact that a whole load of like young professionals have all the.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: They're not the wealthiest young professionals, they they might live in West London or Islington.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, maybe.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: I think I think I think I mean I think as a as a man who all who grew up there himself, you know, um a certain select It's a real you know, real uh pressure cooker of a place.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: Uh put out diamonds.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um but but but that that is an example there of the material conditions allowing people to create the types of lives that they want to lead.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, that that is a genuine cultural phenomenon.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: Surely the future that we envisage is more exciting than like having a nice gales and like a notoriously flat and dull common.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_02: That's true, that's true.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe maybe we're not really providing the sort of bombast bombast and hyperbole that we are known for.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think you're expecting talk of um you know Burford and the cart spots, but it's a whole city and it's powered by small modular reactors.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_02: Well well, what did you do?
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, you do you make that case then, Tom.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: I've I've already said infernos is the pinnacle of human civilization.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: I I could not agree more.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think I I think that's what we want.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think um we're entranced by unfashionably traditional architecture.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: We're enthused by the reindustrialization of Britain.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: We'd love to see, well, as we say on the podcast, small mozzarella reactors under every village green.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: We'd like to see young people, we'd like to see massively expanded birth rate, we'd like to see all this excess of young men shipped off to the British Antarctic Territory to fight the RGs, sent into space, um, all this kind of thing.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: Whether that's going to happen is um perhaps a little less clear.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: Well, no, no, no, no, no.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_02: We should we should clarify here that each of these you know uh speculative and uh you know projects that are maybe a few years off yet, um all hit at what we think are actually practical points here, which is birth rates, uh the need to build houses, uh new energy, uh territorial.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: The urgent need to replace new builds with cottages of caught to old stone.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: But but but each of these but but that one is that one the case there, right?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_02: Is people feel they distrust speaks to a real need.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but it's there that they people distrust new things and they think that new things will be worse.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um and that was not always the case.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um I'm reading a book by JCD Clarke at the moment uh called Our Shadowed Present, and he has an interesting line about how both modernism and postmodernism create this feeling of presentism, which is what he calls it when that all all the world will will all the world, all the future will just continue looking pretty similar to what we live in today, and maybe the clothes will be a bit different, and maybe the music will be a bit different, but we've arrived at at a sort of point where we can correctly and objectively evaluate history and and that's just the end of it.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: I I think probably people in most areas have a sense of there being at least aesthetically the end of history.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: No, I would I would disagree.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um no, I think I I think I think that's right.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it's uh the the particular the particularly interesting feature of the present day is that we've discarded what lot of what came before.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: So this is why we had a complete blank slate architecturally.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: No, I would disagree.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: I would say that the the possibility of kind of new uh fashion clothing styles, building styles, artistic styles would suggest that there was a sense that there was a a sort of teleology and we a sort of telos of the world and that we were progressing towards some great idea and some great utopia, some you know I mean, realistically it's more perfect sort of union with God, right?
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's building a Jerusalem a Jerusalem, whether that's a secular or religious idea.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you you you have teed me up very nicely there talking about Jerusalem, Callum, because I was about to ask, in my romantically inflected way, how we save our green and pleasant land in all of this talk of of growth.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: So um uh a telegraph article just was published today actually by Evans Pritchard, who said that Britain's about to become Europe's energy powerhouse.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: We'll have offshore wind on the Dogger Bank, Rolls-Royce, small modular reactors, loads of North Sea oil, battery storage, all those things.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: And you you've just talked about let's get back to building, we can build some new things and we get the birth rates up.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose my concern coming from that reactionary romantic uh corner of the country that I live in is that this growth agenda, um, every growth agenda since the Industrial Revolution seems to come at the cost of this green and pleasant land.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: We'll have motorways cutting through the downs or housing estates consuming villages and all those things.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose I wonder if there's a version of Anglo-Futurism that doesn't pave over everything, that builds beautifully, builds in the right places, accepts an island island of this size can't grow forever, um, and without destroying the thing that makes it worth living on.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: And also, we've produced lots of good stuff with pretty small populations.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, Denmark has few people, uh, uh it's got high high living standards, Japan's got a declining population, still functions.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: So is there a way that we can stabilize the population, have high tech, high skill, high wage country, and keep the green and pleasant land?
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um or do we require population growth?
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: Of course we can.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: I I think um you know the green and pleasant land should be at the heart of anything that we try to achieve as a country.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what what's the point of it all?
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: Is that the point is to have a nice life, right?
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: But at the same time, I would say it's our cities that are tragically failing to become dense.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um I don't think London's density is very high compared to other big cities.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's easy to imagine, you know, the fabled six-story mansion blocks, um, you know, even out to zone six, right?
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think we could comfortably double London's population without intruding on the green belt.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I also think that raising the birth rate doesn't necessarily mean that the whole countryside gets tarmaced over.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: One of the great things that we did in the 19th century, as um friend of the show, Louise Perry um points out, is that we had about the highest birth rate in the world.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that that meant that we had this superfluity of young families who left the country, went out to the rest of the world, and founded the countries that form the Anglosphere today.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: And this is indeed what India is doing today, um, sending out lots of people to foreign countries um and probably probably tilting their politics as they do so.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: So so I could I could go on, but uh I I think you know, I I would argue strongly for kind of all the good things without destroying the countryside.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I would I would agree.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_02: I think actually actually quite and it's a it's a point made by uh opponents of building that actually very little of Britain is urban.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: Two percent?
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I think it's actually actually I think if we if we allowed people to be more flexible and honest about where they actually wanted to live and move around and and you know express their preferences more directly, I think it would be we would have a country that was more authentically British, even if maybe some of the uh sort of Shibboleths of uh sort of visual or organizational Shiblets were not necessarily maintained.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_02: I think we it would be we would be a more honest and authentically British place.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously that requires you know us not to be sort of demographically replaced, but I think you know, that being held to be true, that as a given, we could you know that that I think is a more honest form of Britishness than clinging on to the idea that We are Britons because we live in villages or whatever.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: I suppose we should also raise the um sorry, the overseas territories, which are places where we can offshore lots of what might happen here.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: So we can we can mine there.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um and space.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and space as well.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the direction of travel, I think, away from the homeland towards the fringes.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: I would also add, sorry, as well, that that things like remote work actually make living in villages viable for people.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that these sort of tech the technologies actually cr make these ways of living that were once not really possible possible again.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what I think is so exciting is we can we could actually have a reflourishing of our villages if we embrace this kind of this kind of growth.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I I am a beneficiary of remote work.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm here in North Northumberland.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: I was living in London when the first lockdown hit.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: Hadn't really anticipated I'd move back to this part of the world at that time in my life, and then once I got up here and thought thought, oh, I can do this now.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: Policies have changed, I can stay here, and I've been riding the remote wave since.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: So uh yeah, I I I am uh a living embodiment of that.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: And um actually, is this what you're suggesting with regards to small modular reactors having the technology for allowing regions, villages to be able to have their own power supplies, etc.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: etc.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um you you may have may well see and follow Ed West's work on the wrong side of history, but very interesting post he put out recently where he was talking about how, apart from the Industrial Revolution, the North is pretty much always like behind the south, probably always will.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think the technologies available to us that will provide regional uh at least energy security could be the building blocks to allow these places to become more prosperous and start to um get rid of the north-south divide?
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I appreciate that's too crude a way of looking at it, because I know the south-west isn't the same as the rest of the south, but we'll go with north-south for simplicity.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: I think it certainly might help.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's it seems that there's an unmet desire for the restoration at least of manufacturing jobs in the north, the kind that require the abundance of energy in terms of you know cost per unit that we don't have anymore.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I think it would help.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's obviously not the whole piece, not the friend of the show, Tom Forth, I think, will probably be queuing up his his Twitter reply even now saying, what about the tramp in Leeds?
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like there are bigger infrastructure questions as well as energy alone.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then of course London has such a kind of powerful network effect that it's quite difficult to imagine uh like a rival city for the north.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_02: But but I think you know we what we need to do is allow people to find the opportunities that they uniquely can see.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_02: And this is not going to be a top-down directed effort.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_02: No, who who could have possibly ever predicted as part of an industrial strategy that Norwich was going to be the centre of kind of small plastic figurines?
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, right.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, and is now the centre of this vast, vast intellectual property and manufacturing uh world.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_02: Same with kind of Dundee, and Dundee has become a real hub of uh uh computer game production, video game production.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_02: So I think the way that these places will uh become uh allow them to give themselves some form of new identity will be not through saying Sheffield must produce cutlery, but rather let's give Sheffield the chance to produce to define itself.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the reason a lot of the reason that the Birmingham is no longer this great manufacturing hub is because Attlee and the Attlee government tried to force factories not to set up in Birmingham to sort of spread them around the country, and then you lose these efficiencies of scale and sort of the effect of the agglomeration effects.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_02: We have to let people make their own minds up.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: I I was going to pull on another thread from your previous answer around migration, and then we'll move on because appreciate we can all do this topic to death.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: We can do it, we can all do it to death.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: But you you mentioned that provided we don't find ourselves demographically replaced, which is a a big if.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: We've we we can see live births, white British 53%.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we we know the numbers are not coming down fast enough with regards to those migrating to the country, and um there are large diasporas that don't have a lot of contact with um the host population, so to speak, uh, which isn't to say that there isn't mixing and joining anti-ethnic group going around the edges, the ethnic group that formed the kin cultures that made the home nations, but likely not to happen fast enough.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: So is Anglo-futurism, this idea of having a place that feels like home, uh also contingent on maintaining what I suppose people in Restore Britain would call demographic security, because if you have different mores uh uh amongst the majority peoples, uh they'll have different aesthetic tastes, and thus uh Anglo-Futurism might be something else futurism.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean t thanks to the hospital past, uh John, much appreciated.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think suffice to say, I think anyone but a madman would agree that the pace of demographic change has been incredibly fast, and that there's absolutely no guarantee that culture at least will remain the same under this demographic assault.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um and certainly there are strong signs that the country is changing um in lots of ways that might not be desirable as a result already.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I I don't think we should put ourselves in the position of um you know speaking on behalf of all Anglo-Futurists.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um but I think most sensible people in the country would say the same thing.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um it it something that they didn't ask for is happening very quickly.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think it's I think uh but as Tom has said, right, we've the country has already shifted a huge amount even kind of before immigration was also taking off.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think obviously the immigration is of massive concern, but that you know, a lot of the uh I mean, you know, we're we are sort of trad, but uh we have our we have our non-trad trad aspects as well.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_02: A lot a lot of the changes in what people, you know, when they look back and say return, return, also happened before immigration.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think you know there are two there are two parts to this, and you can't really deal with the sense of a place that feels like home without addressing either of some both of them.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's let's move on to how we would potentially bring this feature into being and through whom.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: So uh Callum, I I'd like to explore whether we can try to build this future without the current technocratic class that we we currently have, because your episodes cover a vast range of topics: planning reform, energy policy, industrial strategy, you talk about robotics agencies, a national space programme, and all of this, I suppose, requires a competent state not to necessarily do a top-down program, but at least be able to create the conditions for this to take route and to be planned and delivered and all the rest of it.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: And yet we've we've cancelled HS2 after spending£100 billion on 150 miles a track.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the NHS isn't able to build hospitals on time or on budget.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh who knows how else everything else takes to do.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: And you've had Dominic Cummings on your podcast who told you that the blob can't be reformed, it can only be replaced.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: So where do Callum, where do you stand?
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: Where do you Callum and Tom stand on this?
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: Is Britain's a problem of a failure of policy or is it fixable with better ministers, better ideas?
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I I would I would never dare to speak for Tom.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_02: Speak for England, though.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_02: Speak for England, yeah, exactly.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um that one, of course, is easier than speaking for Tom.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um I I think I think the the answer the answer to these things is that usually it's that the government shouldn't be the one building these things.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we've got a friend who uh who used to work in nuclear energy, and he was trying to get nuclear power plants built in Britain.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_02: He said one of the most frustrating things would be that he would talk to people and say, we should have more nuclear power plants, and they people would his sort of interlocutor would nod and say, Gosh, isn't it awful that the government isn't doing anything?
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_02: And he'd say, No, for God's sake.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_02: There are companies, there are people who want to build these things, but there are, you know, I think he said something like 15 regulators, but don't quote me on that, um, who all get to stick their oar in.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, similarly, we we had, you know, our railways were were built by private companies.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um our uh you know, what are some other good examples?
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um you know, most of our housing, our housing was historically produced not by these large uh sort of almost primes, you know, the tailor wimpies who who can uh who can afford to jump through all of the the the regulated hoops, but by people build throwing up the houses that they wanted.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um or frankly by companies building them for their workers.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: So I think a lot of this a lot of this innovation, a lot of this future will come not through government laying out some great plan, you know, f for a five-year leap forward, but instead will come through simply saying we trust the British people to act and then also frankly being willing to then punish them in a fair way when uh when things go wrong.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I think when you have those two those two principles that were you know once fundamental to the idea of what it was to be an Englishman, that you know you you were trusted to to to carry on uh in a way that you that was appropriate and you felt was was right.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: If you were a gentleman.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_02: If you're a gentleman.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um again, both of us have got our top two um buttons undone, so you know, are clearly perverts who shouldn't be trusted.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um but but but the you know the the the principle stands and uh yeah I th I think I think it's it it's a it's a position that is largely uh advocated for nowadays by um by people I don't know that you wouldn't want to introduce your daughter to.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_02: But uh I I I think I I think I think it's it's it's a sort of it's it's it's fairly it's a fairly simple set of set of uh suggestions really.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: And and Tom, anything to raise on on Callum's um vision for a future without technocrats that weren't needed anyway.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: Couldn't have put it better myself.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_02: I I don't think that they weren't needed, but I just think I think that they should that we should need to recognise that it it is a it is a very easy mistake to fall into, that that everything must come through government.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well I think that a very interesting sociological thing has occurred over the past decades, and many people, including um Curtis Yarvin, um have talked about this the creation of this new elite, this managerial class that in this country has replaced, I suppose, the aristocracy in some ways.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then this new class has proven itself to be fallible in many ways.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: So it it endlessly awards itself more power to regulate and veto at the expense of prosperity, it also gets whipped up with moral excitement at flawed new ideas.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um note the the overzealous application of net zero, for instance, or or this a similar comparable phenomenon within hiring when it comes to DEI.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I think when people express this approbrium towards the technocrat class, in my view, it's best justified on on those terms.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: This is the this is a new class, it it is it is fallible, and some of those tendencies are going to have to be swept aside if we're going to make progress.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yeah.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_02: I mean I think that there is no greater enemy, no greater class enemy than the sort of middle class driver.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this is the this is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face as the city of the world.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we are we are both to say we are both middle class drivers and thus we are betraying our class.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_02: We're what was we're class traitors.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_02: We are class traitors.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: What was who who was restore the aristocracy?
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_02: We do.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_02: What what was the who was the guy who said um I think it was it was it was Lenin and someone else, two revolutionaries, uh and it was it was Mao?
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_02: It was Mao and a former Mao and a former aristocrat, I think.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_02: And uh the Arist the punchline is that after he's uh he says we are both class traitors in that the uh communist A Parachik, who is a working class man, has betrayed his class, but the uh the communist aristocrat has betrayed his class far more and is thus a better communist.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um so that that that is my position, you know, that we are we we aim to to stop the stop the the striver class from ruining Britain.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we've got a long way to go.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean I I climbed a very long, greasy pole to find myself amongst the professional managerial class, and now myself am a class traitor, and uh I think that is the challenge.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: We somehow need to make everything that Tom has just outlined as the reason why they get in the way of prosperity through overreaches, how to make all of the current preoccupations of the PMC become incredibly low status.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I don't don't really know how that happens.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm hoping it's an organic take-up of how absurd all those ideas are, and people can actually put those middle class drivers back in their box, so to speak, um, because it definitely seems to have spread like a horrible miasma, and uh I can't really see any top-down program coming to fix it, and not too many uh instances of a bottom-up um reaction happening within those organizations yet, particularly not in the corporate world that I'm a part of.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um you mentioned something there about how that class in particular will take up some particular policy goal with a moral and ideological zeal, and you mentioned net zero.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna go back to that point that Evans Pritchard was making.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: If it does end up being true that Britain becomes a net energy exporter in the next decade, we've got a flourishing energy system in Europe across the whole technology spectrum.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: Are we still going to have a political class that are too captured to see the opportunity, too incompetent to seize it?
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because appreciate we don't want government delivering all of this stuff, but the reality is they are going to have to green light it.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: Are they going to end up just constantly creating policy papers that end up strangling the baby in its cot before it's out there?
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_00: Can can you see can can you see that this energy sovereignty could actually be grasped a hold of?
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, presumably you you rub shoulders with and have lots of conversations with people in the SW1 bubble, or do you think it will be it'll be wasted some way?
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I think the damage is already done, done.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um we've had years of having some of the most expensive energy in the world.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's put us far behind where we should be on things like data centers.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: It means that what was left of our manufacturing sector in the noughties has almost all gone, businesses shutting every week.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_01: This is a tremendous amount of damage.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: And if if AEP is right about us becoming an energy powerhouse in about ten years, that's not necessarily going to undo all the damage.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I I I think the I think the the interesting case there is if it turns out that these push to decarbonize was actually an inspired uh sort of stroke of genius, and that the loss of steel or chemicals or sort of power-intensive industries, you know, things like cement production and aggregate production um was all sort of worth it.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think the the the question we have to ask ourselves is why we had to go through such a sort of bitter fight to get there, in that part of I think what we're saying is you can actually convince people of quite a lot of things and you can get people to f to follow you and you know you can bring them along with quite a lot of stuff if you tell them what it's for.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um and whilst you know we will not turn our noses up if we are a great exporter of power through offshore wind, through solar, um it will we will still also have the scars not just of those sort of you know those industries that have been lost, but also of just a hugely bitter fight, where the publicly announced motivations for this you know great leap forward were so at odds with what the sort of eventual outcome was that we've we've spent a whole lot of time tearing into each other, which I think is almost just as damaging as those job loss and those job losses and that that industrial those that loss of industry.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: Let's turn back to aesthetics uh uh a bit here.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we uh I I and I'm going to be do something anathema to us Englishman.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna uh bring a Frenchman into the conversation.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um we've already got one.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, there you go.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_00: There you go.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Huguenot physiognomy.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_02: I'm actually I am I actually have asylum seeker.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_02: Uh yeah.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the fabled engineers we hear so much about.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um Exactly, he actually is.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm I'm I'm the captain that proves the rule.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_02: And and I'm uh I'm I'm I'm a uh a bit of a I'm uh I've written a lot about Basil Jet.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_02: So uh, you know, that's my that's my ethnic chauvinism should be through.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's ethnic lobbying.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I'm I'm just gonna get me and my fellow Huguenots positions in power so that we can uh impose our cultural tastes like uh a slightly different Catholic uh sorry, Protestant church.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that ruins my last question about whether that was your true intention all along, but you can just do it.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: At least you're at least you're open to it.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well well, this is this is the penultimate, penultimate question, actually, so I don't want to get your hopes up and think you're getting off that lightly.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_00: So the the the Frenchman uh that that created much mirth in our conversation, uh though he didn't know it, Pierre Dallangsa, so he's from Verdera.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm getting to do all these French words, and he listens to this show, so he's gonna be laughing at my pronunciations.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: He he came on and argued that the custodians of beauty became its gravediggers, and he was talking about the art institutions and how it is that we go about maintaining aesthetic standards in architecture and art and public life because of the capturing of these institutions by people who don't value beauty at all.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_00: And we've talked a lot about building and we've talked a lot about um what those aesthetic tastes might look like in the future, but I think it's fair to say that quite a lot of what Britain has built since 1945 has been overwhelmingly ugly, uh uh or or just totally unimaginative, which is why you get lots of these um identiquate cities popping up all over the world.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um is beauty a non negotiable for Anglo futurism?
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_00: And if so, what does beautiful mean when uh the institutions that that used to know the the institutions that are there to build these um new artifacts of the future have been captured?
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think we've had some I mean you say architecture's been unimaginative.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think we've had far too much imagination in architecture over the past forty-five years, when the the reality is that we had a set of perfectly good building styles that are now much neglected.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this is one of those things where I think we can pretty confidently say that most Anglo-Futurists would agree with that.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um I suppose there'd be you know variations in the in the amount of enthusiasm people have for big kind of glass and steel international style skyscrapers.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um but certainly there's a kind of um strong current of um affection for the create streets style of looking in the world visually.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but it but it I think we we can't I think I think your your diagnosis totally complete shutdown of all new opportunities.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_02: Hold on hold on hold on.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_02: I think your diagnosis here is that there are people, you know, that it was the institutions were captured, and this you know, again, by by anti-Western public.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, who who wanted who wanted to tear down everything beautiful.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um with their unbuttoned shirt.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_02: With their unbuttoned shirts, exactly, and their ancestral propensity to wear trainers at work um and other and other similar similar aberrations.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think but I think that you know let's let's not forget how innovative things like um the sort of new materials that allowed for these tall skyscrapers were, the way that it has allowed the building of these things of sort of uh structures that were once impossible and sort of cheaper than say uh a sort of gothic-styled uh skyscraper like like what a lot of the early New York skyscrapers were.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_02: This is there was a there's a reality here that the Bauhaus saw, which is in a period of mass production, ornamentation, every act of ornamentation requires additional machine operations.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_02: And when you're making a chair by hand, ornamentation is is a natural process that naturally emerges out of what you're doing.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_02: Whilst when you're making something, every machine operation costs costs, and and you know so we have this world now where everyone has an iPhone, every the you know, whether you are the wealthiest or the poorest, maybe not the poorest, but like a lot a lot of people, whether they are rich or poor, have the same device.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_02: And that's not like because these trainer wearing uh you know baseball cap uh porting uh horrors got hold of the institutions.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_02: That's because of like you know, the reality of industrial production.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I think what what Anglifuturism tries to do is say, well, actually, if you want something different here, we're going to have to celebrate as innovative and exciting these new technologies that might reverse that trend.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, we've we've uh spoken, I don't think we've had them on yet, but we've spoken to people who are using uh robots to cut uh stone statues, uh people that are doing uh mouldings so you can put them onto a building so that they have you know you sort of crown mouldings.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um you can imagine similar things for plaster mouldings internally, uh automated CNC production of kind of wood engravings.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_02: No, that that actually um there's a guy who used artificial intelligence to make delft tiles.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um the reality is that production actually is now moving into this new phase where actually alternative production styles might become you know on par with uh these these what were once absolutely futuristic styles of production, i.e.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_02: uh glass and steel and whatever.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think we'd like to see guerrilla addition of ornamentation to existing buildings.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_01: So you know, your your your civil service office goes home for the night and then come back in the morning and there's just like huge huge stone portico or like loads of statues or all that kind of thing, or like suddenly the whole building is half timbered or something.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_01: Like now we're requiring a technology to make this happen.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think that that's where the technology and the cultural work meet, is that whilst it will require people to value the ornamentation and think that it is worth doing, the it will also require the production of the technology that, for example, we know there's a guy making encaustic tiles in an automated way.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that's a type of very it was once very manual and difficult, and now he's automating this using again CNC cutting.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_02: So these technologies make the the two culture and and the material world are hand in hand and they and they will together produce a few the future.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I've I've got I've got uh a triune of people to bring up, hypothetical people that I want you to to uh give advice to, and uh you can decide amongst yourselves which ones you you take.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_00: So let's imagine three different people are listening to this conversation.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_00: We've got your uh ordinary Englishman, Scotsman, Welshman, Ulsterman, who agrees that your diagnosis uh is required, but they have no power to build any spaceports, they don't have any uh power to reform the civil service.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: What do you tell him?
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_00: Then the second is a CEO of a mid-sized British company.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_00: They want to build something ambitious, they've got regulation drowning them, high energy costs, and uh labour market that's been shaped by population policy, and what should that CEO do on Monday morning?
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the third is the incoming, now feed under the table, Prime Minister, he's just been handed the keys to number ten, and I don't know how big his window is before the system absorbs him.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_00: What are the three things that you'd tell them to do in the first 90 days?
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start with the ordinary Brit who wants to take him.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I think I think the ordinary Brit can keep doing what he or she is doing.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_02: Well, no, I would no, I would say I would say what the ordinary Brit should do is put their money into the into the stock exchange, take it out of a cash, take it out of cash ISER and cash savings or premium bonds or any of that kind of nonsense, put it into the stock exchange, uh, try and get their pension invested in the stock exchange as well, because we you know we have a very, very low level of productivity, sort of capital productivity in Britain.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the the uh the Canadian pension fund owns far more of the uh the the British British sort of uh equities than any any any British one does.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um following on from that, you should also try and take your pension, the money and your pension out of one of your smaller ones and try and get it into the biggest pension fund possible.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um and ultimately then, you know, on a more sort of practical thing, try and be ambitious.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you can now teach yourself pretty much everything in the world.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and I think it's very easy now, if you are in a job and you're doing boring things, to try and use LLMs to automate what you're doing.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_02: So, how can you use it, you know, try and explain to this LLM what you're what the repetitive task that you're doing is, and can you automate it?
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_02: Can you make yourself more productive?
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_02: Because I think that's that is the best thing that Britons can do because it will improve their lives by making them more sort of you know well remunerated from being more productive, um, and it will also make their capital more productive and so will create a better uh retirement, but also the country through better deployment of capital.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'll put a uh asterisked uh disclaimer at the bottom of this episode saying this does not constitute investment advice, but we didn't talk about specific investment funds.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm not I'm not saying where you I'm not saying where you do it, but I'm just I just think I just think like no the premium bondification of Britain is uh is a is an absolute travesty.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_00: Tom, do you have something to say to the CEO of a mid-sized British company?
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I uh part of me thinks it'd be getting up on our hind legs for us to advise CEOs, but then again, we're two-thirds of the C-suite of Anglo-Futurism podcasts.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_01: So we can speak peer-to-peer with the with the with the CEOs.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_01: No, I mean I I I think all these problems come down to governance, right?
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like we what would we would want to give lots of optionality to the CEOs so energy is cheaper, easier to hire, um, apart from foreign workers, um, all this kind of thing.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um surely investing in robots and like automation.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_01: But I think I I think it's it you know it's for CEOs to make these decisions, like all that you know, the governing class can do is is make it easier, right?
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like all CEOs have heard of robots.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: No, they haven't.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: No, they haven't.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_02: I think I actually think I actually think in the same way that uh Britain Britain fell behind in terms of productivity innovations in its manufacturing.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_02: British companies are slow to adopt labour efficiency measures.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um so things like automation, part of that's because uh low-skilled, low-cost labour has always been available.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_02: But I think that we have one of the lowest levels of is it industrial robotics in the in the in the in the G8.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_01: So Yes, but that's not because our CEOs are are all stupider and blinder than CEOs of the Obviously, not the CEOs listening to this podcast.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_01: Nor these members of C Suite.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um we haven't got any robots.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_01: Surely the culprit is incredibly high energy cost.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_01: Not always, not always.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_01: Not always.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_01: But that's the thing that marks us out from other countries.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_02: But no, it's not just that.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's also it's also the British curse, long before power was expensive, was low productivity and low industrial automation.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like we we were we were slow to electrify, we were fast to convert the navy from coal to oil, but then that was probably one of the last times that we were really sort of really fast on a cross-society energy and like innovation.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_02: Until net zero.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_02: Until net zero.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um in the other direction, um from oil to grass.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh don't don't tell Ed Milaban that.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_02: He'll ask if we can convert the aircraft carriers.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um But but no, I think I think I think we we we could I I mean Ryan Ryan Wittin says that we that government should provide subsidy for it.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, looking at ways of automating would surely be again, this is real hubris for us, but uh would surely be the best thing to do.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it makes sense in a from a national perspective.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think we have different views on like the amount of agency that that CEOs are kind of cornering at the moment.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's probably true.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think you've both put a compelling case forward to be a red team at some corporation.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you're red teaming each other right now.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is exactly the descent our governing class needs.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and and on to the governing class, Prime Minister, whether it's Andy Burnham or whoever else comes through the revolving door.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, what would you advise them to do if we're if we're on the the the uh topic of of hubris?
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_00: What should we tell the leader of the country to do if we're gonna make the most of an Anglo-futurist world?
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think there are lots of kind of uh missed opportunities for the Labour Party now, there's a massive majority five years in power.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_01: They really could have sorted out stuff like planning early, and so there's gonna you know, gonna be a lot of construction, or you know, it's gonna be a bit rough, but five years from now, um it'll be bearing fruits.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there are so many things that we would like um the PM to do, right?
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like um incorporate the overseas territories.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think one a couple of you know, there's some huge problems to do with migration, obviously, which which stand no likelihood of being addressed in the current parliament.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um similarly, um the birth rate is very low.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's not quite clear how a Western country can fix that, but I think there's lots of room for experimentation.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_01: This is the kind of thing where if as a politician you say my number one priority is to fix the birth rates, you will be pilloried by the sort of striver press to whom it sounds distasteful and weird.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_01: But in in 30 years, you will be remembered as one of the greatest statesmen of Britain in modern history.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_02: Unless you lose, of course, and then you'll be remembered as one of the greatest racists.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, or no, well, not necessarily it doesn't have to be a racist, you'll just be like that kind of natalist weirdo.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but yeah, well, you know, you're basically your options are win, win and be Churchill or lose and be Enoch Powell.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um But but no, yeah, I think I think that you know probably also get rid of all of the resolution foundation people.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_02: You know, uh the the poor are best served by uh becoming wealthier rather than wage suppression.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um and that actually, again, a a labour shortage would be a good thing because it would it would massively support working class wages.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um it seems it would support working class wages, it would make uh it would drive up productivity, and yet the political class uh run by you know the sort of class we've identified as the strivers are allergic to any kind of labour in labor shortage because it would make their benefits and their sort of you know creature comforts a little pricier, a little dearer.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um we we've got we've got data that shows that what we're talking about isn't even abstract theory when the borders were effectively closed during COVID and we saw all the service job wages start going up, and then of course there's the uh perhaps pretty well-known sound bite that Boris Johnson gave to the telegraph podcast a few months ago where he effectively said Treasury told him to let lots of people in because it will bring the wages down.
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um it is it is actually very remarkable that those who uh walk around calling themselves socialists have effectively taken on what they would have previously recognised as neoliberal values of just free movement of people no matter what, and you know, just pockets of the old left, like uh represented by people like Maurice Glassman and and Paul Embry, who actually will say Corbin.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, indeed.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah Corbyn Corbin was a Corbyn until he got bullied by the party, was a real lexiter, right?
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_02: Like a left left exit from Europe.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_02: That actually it's a it's a very respectable position to hold.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um you know, this is why we're class traitors.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we're we're both Brexiteers, but actually, you know, I would love to go to the south of France uh and not have to stand in a queue.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's let's pivot somewhat clunkily from uh holiday plans to a question I ask all of my guests in some form or another at the end, which is what you've changed your mind on.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_00: And Tom, we'll start with you.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_00: What's something that you believed perhaps when you started Anglo-Futurism?
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it was before that you no longer believe, but you thought was pretty absolute.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um and what changed your mind?
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I've changed my mind on lots of things through my adult life, and I think um Callum, I'm sure, would rightly castigate me for having been a Lib Tard in in many ways, um, when I was younger.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um certainly since starting the podcast, I've become and and this is a bit heretical, um, but I've I've become a lot more of a nimby.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think there are good reasons for this.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's easy to think as as I did that massively increasing the construction of housing in this country will alleviate lots of our ills, and I think that's true, but I also think it misses the real the the real pernicious uh cause of the housing shortage, which is of course the kind of unvoted for influx of millions and millions of people, which of course drives rents up um stratospherically.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um we're not addressing the root causes of our economic stagnation and our demographic transformation if we treat the solution as building loads of houses.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so I've become rather sympathetic to the NIMBY, who perhaps for their own selfish reason is is holding the line against crazy elite projects like mass immigration and ugly buildings, and in some cases tearing up the countryside.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I suppose my my heretical change of opinion is that I I've come to love the NIMBY.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: I have heard Tom Jones of the of the critic uh say uh on this show and likely elsewhere, no construction without reduction, referring to immigration numbers.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I suspect a fair few people would would get behind that, uh particularly when they see whole areas changing before their eyes.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Callum, what about you?
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_00: What have you changed your mind on during the course of your life or during the course of Anglo-Futurism that you you weren't anticipating, and what was it that changed your mind?
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I uh I I'm still still for the building of houses for that.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um I am for the building of some houses.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_02: Some houses.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_02: Uh wearing all those Q canot in, isn't it?
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean here's you know, here's one example.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_01: So there was this um there's this this brewery, the Truman Brewery in East London, and there's a big kind of controversy online recently um because Angela Rain has rubber stamped a new development, a mixed-use development, there'll be a danger centre, but it's gonna it it's in it's under the purview of Tower Hamlets Council, and Tower Hamlets Council tried to quash this development, and you can see the document Max Tempers um has just he did like a control F on this document from the council uh Bangladeshi culture.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_01: So so Tower Hamlets Council is trying to like sweep aside the data center so that it can build more social housing for Bangladeshis who who want bigger houses, bigger social.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but this is like that is not the kind of But my argument my argument on this would be that actually all building is good because it leads to just churn and turnover.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_02: Like the you know, the the building by by by Angela Rainer allows you to sort of you know get this stuff through.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_02: The the enemy the enemy is sort of stagnation and things staying stuck, I suppose.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's that I'm I'm taking the opportunity here to not talk about my own.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's just getting 10 men attacking total until until the end of modern liberalism, and then we can start building again.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but also I don't think you can I don't think you can necessarily unless it's your real strategy, and I think and everyone signs up for it on the you know, no construction without redemption.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_02: I I think it will be ultimately ineffective because you're not gonna get you're like you know, my godmother is opposed to building in her sort of Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire village because you know there's not enough water, and you know, it's it's a sort of it's a fairly it's a fairly amorphous If only there were more water, we'd love to have this new development.
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_02: You know, she basically just doesn't want more houses, she doesn't want her village to change.
• 1:04:37
  SPEAKER_02: Like I I think you're not gonna get a whole load of people who in their heads are doing this for principled uh No, no, no, of course not.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_02: Principled positions.
• 1:04:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um my my answer my answer would probably be uh I I I've had I've had various views about some feelings about the British people.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um and you know, for a man who calls himself an Anglo-futurist and supposedly loves Britain, I have I have at various points hated every single class.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um you know um cycling through, I would say, uh you know, disliking disliking the working class and then the upper class and then the middle class.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um you know, for their various foibles and uh ways that they have uh blocked and hindered and obstructed.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_02: And maybe actually, Tom, this is our rec this is our great reconciliation uh here, because ultimately I think I have come round to the attitude that this sort of hatred of you know the sort of ugliness and pettiness of the poor and uh you know self-righteousness of the of the middle class and the sort of arrogance and the priggishness of the upper class and the sort of you know stupidity um has ultimately melted into a yes, but there are, and you know, it's it is a dangerous attitude to find yourself in despising your own people, and I think a little bit of it is probably good, um, but get too far and you start wanting to change them, and I think it's a uh that's probably where I've found myself.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_00: Top marks for probably the most original answer.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_00: I've not heard anyone rage against any classes uh at this juncture of the show, let alone all of them.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_00: So consistent and also just shows that you could run a neutral, a neutral institution.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_00: Just start off with hating everyone in it, and you're likely to treat them fairly in some way.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I've still got my favorites, don't worry.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um chaps, it's been an absolute pleasure.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very glad we got to do this, and I hope we get to do it again.
• 1:06:56
  SPEAKER_00: Before I let you go, where can people find you in the dark corners of the internet?
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_00: Where where's Anglofuturism and what are your own profiles?
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_00: And is there anything that we can expect from you both beyond the show?
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you can find our little corner of Anglofuturism at anglofuturism.co and we you know we're producing more of the same, I hope.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_01: Over the next few months, we're gonna talk about critical minerals, we've got something on um reversible computing.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_01: What else?
• 1:07:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh tempered rainforests, Tom and I Tom and I strip naked and do a pagan ritual.
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh most of the above is true.
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_02: We leave as an exercise for the reader uh to work out where where I exaggerate in life.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then we're all all on you know Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and and everywhere else.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um and we are we've got some exciting stuff coming up, so we're looking to expand our sort of our output in a number of exciting ways.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_02: So that'll that'll be coming up soon.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, good luck with it, and I do uh exhort everyone to check you out.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_00: It is uh a very eclectic show.
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_00: You have a wide range of people on, and you two are an absolute hoot.
• 1:08:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm very glad that you've been able to bring your your fun approach to this topic uh to my little corner of the internet.
• 1:08:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Callum, Tom, it's been an absolute pleasure.
• 1:08:19
  SPEAKER_00: Keep fighting the good fight, and we'll speak again.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you, John.
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_02: Same to you.
• 1:08:23
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you very much for having us.
• 1:08:25
  SPEAKER_02: My pleasure.