How Billionaires Are Preparing For Doomsday - Douglas Rushkoff - #557

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Douglas Rushkoff. He's a media theorist, futurist, writer and a documentarian. The world's richest people are preparing for the end. They're buying up farming land and below ground bunkers in New Zealand. But what catastrophe is it that they think is about to happen? And what happens if technology creates a techno hell instead of a techno utopia? Expect to learn what happens when you're invited to brief billionaires on the future downfall of the earth. Whether having your own sovereign nation at sea is a realistic idea. Whether it's possible to live in an underground missile silo with an indoor infinity pool. What mindset is driving this techno paranoia? And much more. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Whoop. The Whoop 4 is a personalized digital fitness and health coach that monitors your body's physiology 24-7 via a non-invasive wearable and provides you with feedback on your lifestyle, training, sleep and recovery via an accompanying app. It is the best tracker that I've ever used. It's the one that I've stuck with for four years nearly now. And it tracks everything. It tracks my workouts. It tracks the little walks that I do on a morning and in between shows. And they have an exclusive Black Friday sale. You can get 20% off annual and two-year memberships right now. They do not do discounts outside of this. So this is the last time that you're going to be able to get it if you are thinking of getting yourself a Whoop. Now is the time to do it. Also, they have a 30-day money back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it for free. And if you do not like it, they'll give you your money back after 29 days. Go to join.whoop.com/modernwisdom.
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**Douglas Rushkoff** (3:54)
A checkout.

**Chris Williamson** (3:56)
But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Douglas Rushkoff. It seems to me, kind of an inevitability, I've had a lot of conversations on the show about existential risk, talking about the work of people like Toby Ord and Nick Bostrom, are we gonna get turned into Grey Goo or a big bunch of paper clips? You know, this small background risk of a gamma burst destroying us all, or is the polar ends gonna flip, and then all of the technology is gonna fall out? It seems unsurprising to me that the people that have the absolute most resources on the planet, who are exposed to this kind of thinking, who are probably technologists in one form or another, techno utopians, would take that, run with it, and think, I essentially have an unlimited number of resources. How can I try and insulate myself from this problem? That to me doesn't seem very surprising at all.