From the King Charles III Space Station, Tom and Calum welcome Alex Fitzgerald, founder of Isembard - a micro-factory startup that's building Britain's manufacturing future one CNC machine at a time.

Alex explains how Britain's manufacturing crisis isn't just about big factories closing - it's about the hidden supply chain of small family-owned machine shops that actually make the parts for everything from F-35 jets to AirPods. With 95% of CNC machines owned by small businesses, and those business owners now retiring en masse, the West faces a manufacturing capacity cliff just as geopolitical tensions increase demand.

“Fundamentally, how you build great product is having engineers ingest pain and then output product.”

The episode explores:

* Whether distributed manufacturing is more resilient than centralized factories

* How Britain's hidden aerospace and defense supply chains actually work

* Why small machine shops are the real manufacturing base, not big assembly plants

* The role of risk capital in building trillion-dollar manufacturing businesses

* How software and AI are transforming traditional machining and production

* What young engineers can do to build world-changing manufacturing businesses

Further reading

Isembard - Faster, Cheaper, Greener Manufacturing

The Manufacturing Manifesto

Careers at Isembard

In this solo episode recorded from the King Charles III Space Station, Tom and Calum eat humble pie after their confident predictions about the Chagos Islands deal being shelved proved spectacularly wrong. Within days of the last Britannia dispatch, Keir Starmer confirmed the handover to Mauritius would proceed, decisively answering the question "Is Keir Starmer an Anglofuturist?" with a resounding no.

This giveaway fits into a broader pattern of Britain's political elite prioritizing abstract internationalist ideals over their inheritance from previous generations. Tom and Calum draw parallels between the Chagos surrender and the potential handover of the Elgin Marbles, arguing that Britain's custodians are conducting a "national fire sale" that makes the country look weak to international observers.

The episode explores:

* Whether Britain's political class has lost the Burkean sense of obligation to past and future

* How the country has become "brittle" with single points of failure in central government

* The need for local organization and civic engagement when the state fails

* Why planning reform is essential but constantly undermined by the "vegetable lobby"

* The demographic realities that make military mobilization increasingly difficult

Santi Ruiz is a policy researcher at the Institute for Progress and host of the Statecraft newsletter and podcast. He's one of the editors of the Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook, a comprehensive strategy document produced by three American think tanks to help the US compete with China's manufacturing dominance. The playbook outlines concrete policy proposals across frontier science, energy abundance, and national security—from creating special compute zones to reforming naval shipbuilding and accelerating geothermal development.

The Society for Technological Advancement (SoTA) is organising a hackathon on 31st May and 1st June focused on geoengineering and weather control. Click here to find out more.

Episode outline

* How China's 230x shipbuilding advantage over America represents an existential threat to Western naval power

* The X-Labs proposal to fund cutting-edge research institutions outside traditional universities using flexible block grants

* Special compute zones that would fast-track energy infrastructure for AI development in exchange for security commitments

* Why America's Loans Programs Office has funded every nuclear plant built this century and shouldn't be dismantled by DOGE

* How regulatory carve-outs for geothermal energy could unlock abundant clean power using proven oil and gas drilling techniques

* The critical minerals challenge where China could crash markets to destroy American mining operations

* Why American naval shipbuilding fails because design is outsourced instead of done in-house like it used to be

* Whether Britain should be America's lapdog or develop independent techno-industrial capacity focused on European threats

* How elite consensus matters more than popular mobilisation for implementing transformative policy changes

* The difference between financialisation that enables productive investment versus financialisation that replaces it

Mentioned in this episode:

The Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook: How to Kickstart America's Techno‑Industrial Renaissance

Statecraft on Substack

Why FORGE Works by Tom Ough for IFP