The new aristocrats are building drones in an Oxford kitchen

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 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.