Show Notes
James W. Phillips and Laura Ryan are former neuroscientists who’ve written a proposal to save British science by basically blowing up the university system. Or at least building an alternative to it. Their diagnosis? The best scientists they know have all quit academia—not because they failed, but because they succeeded and realised the game is rigged. The incentive structure rewards safe, incremental research that gets published quickly rather than ambitious, years-long projects that might actually change the world. Frederick Sanger won two Nobel Prizes while publishing three papers in 20 years. Today he’d never get tenure. Their solution is Lovelace Labs—a network of institutions modelled on Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and the Cambridge LMB, where scientists would be core-funded for 15 years, assessed internally by colleagues who understand their work, and freed from the tyranny of grant applications and citation metrics. Where engineers work alongside theorists, where 30-year-olds run labs instead of spending a decade as research assistants, and where the founding director gets told by Number 10: “Here’s your money, we’re not going to mess around.” Tom and Calum discuss with James and Laura: * Why the smartest scientists quit: Laura’s smartest friend from her Cambridge PhD—someone who always wanted to be a scientist—left because the system is fundamentally unfair. James’s entire cohort of rising stars, the people doing work featured in the New York Times, have all left academic research except one, * The replication crisis stems from broken incentives: Foundational Alzheimer’s research papers were fraudulent for 25 years because everyone benefits from piggybacking on existing results rather than exposing problems. Brain imaging studies lacked statistical power but it took 20 years for that to become common knowledge, * Leo Szilard’s 1948 prophecy: He wrote a satirical story about a wealthy man who wanted to slow down science, so he invented peer review—pulling scientists out of labs into administration and forcing everyone to work on ideas that three peers would approve, killing all unusual fresh shoots, * Peter Higgs couldn’t survive today: He published sparingly over 20 years, doing deep work that eventually won a Nobel Prize. Today’s system demands papers every six months with positive results—negative data is considered “time wasted” even if it’s exemplary science, * China has overtaken us on neuroscience: Nine of the top 10 institutions in leading journals are now Chinese (it was two five years ago). Their packages to recruit talent: “Come over, we’ll give you your own lab, strong core facilities, hire whoever you want.” The UK’s pitch: “But we have Oxford!”, * The Number 10 science establishment blocked honors: During the pandemic, two researchers (Bonner and Kataraman) created the rapid testing program with modeling that proved crucial. The science establishment blocked their honors and gave them instead to senior people who’d been blocking the rapid testing program, * Alan Kay was 30 at Xerox PARC: When James asked him about top-down direction, Kay revealed he was the oldest person there at 30. In the UK, these people would still be postdocs working as research assistants. Demis, Dario, Sam Altman—all in their 30s when founding DeepMind, Anthropic, OpenAI, * Max Perutz’s recipe for great science: “No politics, no committees, no reports, no referees, no interviews—just gifted, highly motivated people picked by a few people of good judgment.” The Cambridge LMB followed this and produced Nobel Prize after Nobel Prize, * The UK over-indexes on universities: We rely more heavily on the university department model than almost any other advanced science nation. Germany has Max Planck and Fraunhofer. America has DOE labs and tech company research. We have... more universities in Midlands towns acting as jobs programs, * Westminster ejects the misfits: James was part of the Cummings misfits experiment. As soon as key supporters l
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The King Charles III Space Station is broadcasting almost live, with Aeron at ground control ready to cut the transmission at the first sign of blackpilling. Tom and Calum inaugurate a new format of news roundups and shorter interviews with a mixed report from the home planet: manufacturing is growing, the pubs keep disappearing, and Britain still needs to find itself an Antarctic patrol ship.
This episode is sponsored by Isembard, the industrial base for the West. If you want to own and operate a factory in Britain, America, Germany or France, email [email protected] and go reindustrialise the West. No guest makes it through the airlock this week, which is fortunate because Tom has brought a better visitor: pictures of potato-sized black lumps from the bottom of the Pacific. Calum keeps finding him in the sitting room gazing at manganese nodules. Tom would prefer the real thing. Our hosts set out to explain why the metals embedded in those improbable objects matter to every magnet, battery, submarine, missile and wind turbine Britain hopes to build. The story begins with a message from Queen Victoria that took nearly seventeen hours to crawl across the first transatlantic cable. Its failure started a quarrel between Wildman Whitehouse, who wanted to solve the problem with more voltage, and the future Lord Kelvin, who wanted to understand the ocean. That quarrel opens a path for the sickly naturalist Charles Wyville Thomson, his deep-sea dredges and a succession of Royal Navy vessels culminating in HMS Challenger: a 200-foot corvette stripped of fifteen of its seventeen guns and refitted as a floating laboratory. Four years, tens of thousands of specimens and thousands of new species later, the expedition has found the deepest known point in the ocean and hauled up strange, metal-rich nodules wrapped around teeth, bones and fragments of sponge. The Victorians went looking for a cable route and discovered a resource frontier. A century later, Malta’s Arvid Pardo declares the seabed beyond national jurisdiction the common heritage of mankind. The principle becomes an international regime, complete with a proposed UN mining enterprise, compulsory technology transfer, Ronald Reagan’s refusal to sign and, eventually, the International Seabed Authority. While that system spends decades debating a mining code, China becomes what the hosts call an electrostate: a country whose command of critical-mineral supply chains gives it the geopolitical leverage that oil once gave petrostates. The environmental question is real. Mining machines are giant underwater Henry Hoovers, sediment plumes do not respect claim boundaries, and the nodules are habitat for sponges, corals and the ghostly “Casper” octopus. But leaving the seabed untouched does not make the mineral demand disappear. It only moves the damage out of sight. Britain now occupies a peculiarly British position. The government supports a moratorium on commercial deep-sea exploitation while continuing to sponsor two exploration contracts in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, now held through UK Seabed Resources by Glomar Minerals. To Calum and Tom, that tension is not a reason to surrender the option. It is a reason to decide what the option is for. Should Britain remain inside the UN system and shape it, align with an American route around it, or accept that China will write the rules by being the country prepared to act? And what does it say that the government’s own 2035 ambition is to meet only 10 per cent of annual critical-mineral demand through domestic production? Recycling yesterday’s stock cannot supply an economy that intends to build several times more of everything. The Anglofuturist answer runs from the ocean floor to the edge of the possible: rebuild the Royal School of Mines, train mining engineers, specialise in autonomous excavation robots, carry those machines from the North Sea to the Pacific and eventually to asteroids, and treat scientific data with the same seriousness as physical resources. There is, Tom observes, more stuff Britain chooses not to do than it actually does. Fifty years from now, Britain could be one of the world’s major electrostates — rich in energy, minerals, machines and the leverage to set its own course. We have business in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. The episode explores — Tom’s habit of gazing longingly at pictures of manganese
Space is tight in the King Charles III Space Station’s dining room this week — ten million pounds a square metre, the collapse in housebuilding having consequences even in orbit — which is fitting, because coming through the airlock are two men who tried harder than most to fix it. Jamie Rumbelow and Henry Dashwood founded Tract, the venture-backed startup that set out to speed Britain’s planning system up with software. Two years later they returned the capital and wrote the postmortem everyone in British tech has read. But this episode isn’t about that postmortem. It is about what Jamie and Henry learned when they pulled back the curtain on the people who are meant to be building Britain’s homes. With sincere apologies from production, this interview has sat in our backlog since last autumn. Nevertheless it is, perhaps unsurprisingly given the subject, utterly timeless. Our thanks to Henry and Jamie for being so patient. The episode explores * How Jamie was radicalised by The Housing Theory of Everything * Why £1,600 a month makes housing a moral issue * What a land promoter actually does: title deeds, unanswered letters to farmers, and a month of knocking before anyone will talk * Twenty thousand pounds a hectare until planning permission touches it * Forty types of document for a small builder, versus the 1990s red-line sketch that got you an agreement * The land-banking myth: housebuilders aren’t hoarding, they’re terrified of paying subcontractors to do nothing * NIMBYs have a legitimate point: traffic, GP waiting times, and Section 106 as a feudal tribute system * Abolish stamp duty first — the quickest win in housing, and the one that sorts everyone into the right house * Why not Birmingham? * Reading every single Paul Graham essay, making all the same mistakes anyway, and the unglamorous responsibility to build a very big company very quickly * Victorian railways approved by committees of six MPs forbidden from owning land on the route * Thirty million Londoners at the density of Paris, “we could be Taiwan”, and the ten-storey Sloaney Pony Jamie and Henry’s postmortem of Tract is at buildwithtract.com. Henry writes at henrydashwood.com and Jamie is at jamierumbelow.net. Anglofuturism remains open to sponsors — get in touch with [email protected].
No guest at the airlock this week — no radar contact at all, in fact, because Tom is patching in from a French heatwave, leaving Calum alone in the captain’s seat. Domestic matters first: the long-foretold big score has finally materialised (34 runs, since you ask), and England are in a World Cup semi-final. Which turns out to be geopolitically relevant, because Britain’s principal adversary this century could well be Argentina. The last country to declare war on us has a standing claim on the Antarctic Peninsula and a date circled for 2048, when the treaty system parking everyone’s claims comes up for review. Elsewhere: Tom, broadcasting from a continental-sized armpit at nearly forty degrees, discovers France is having a full culture war about air conditioning while Britain quietly makes cooling near-impossible to permit and calls the heat character-building. And a new Acemoglu paper hands the show a victory lap on a long-running thesis: labour scarcity forces innovation. The episode explores: * Why Britain’s principal adversary this century might be Argentina, with 2048 circled in the diary * “The Antarctic Peninsula is British and it shall remain British. I am sending a task force to Port Lockroy” — the duelling Thatcher impressions * The dream of an episode entitled simply Gotcha * Why there is still no British city on the Falklands despite ten trillion pounds of oil in the neighbourhood * Harry Kane, the Chagos Islands, and the Diego Garcia tattoo * How England should handle Messi (flood the midfield; he doesn’t run very much) * France’s aircon culture war: Le Pen promising cooling for all, Mélenchon scandalised * Air conditioning as civilisational technology — the most important thing Lee Kuan Yew did for Singapore’s civil service * Barocal, the Cambridge spinout doing solid-state barocaloric cooling with no refrigerant and 2-3x the efficiency of commercial HVAC * The Acemoglu natural experiment: wartime labour loss, 9.1 per cent higher GDP per capita fifty years on * The automated car wash you never build while labour stays artificially cheap * The Motor Car Act, the Isle of Man TT, and what the CAA could accidentally do for drones * Politics as downstream of TFR: pensions eating the state and Luttwak’s end of the heroic generation This one is a salon for our paid subscribers — thank you for keeping the station pressurised. Anglofuturism remains open to sponsors: get in touch with [email protected].