051. Josh Lavorini: The new aristocrats building drones in an Oxford kitchen
About this episode
The episode explores the implications of a new elite in technology, automation's role in society, and the aesthetics of Anglofuturism.
Back from the break and fuelled by Diet Coke, Tom and Calum push Josh on the harder questions. If HomeDAO is selecting for a new elite — relentless, agentic, indifferent to the rules of polite society — what kind of elite is it? The aristocrat as leader, or the aristocrat as exploiter? 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…
More episodes of Anglofuturism
- 050. Britain's growth obsession is delusional
- 049. Josh Lavorini: Inside HomeDAO, Oxford's monastery for unicorn founders
- 048. Katie Lam: Everything has to change for anything to stay the same
- 047. Ben Judah: Britain is squandering an empire
- #046 - Will Orr-Ewing | The tutoring industry is a billion pounds pointed at completely the wrong thing
- #045 - Will Orr-Ewing | Aristocratic tuition, and why GCSEs are failing everyone
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