“Sociopathic ELITES! - Billionaires Secret Plan for END OF WORLD | Douglas Rushkoff • 450
Julian Dorey · 17 Jul 2026 · 2h 60m
Guest: Douglas Rushkoff · Host: Joey Def, Julian Dorey
Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff describes years spent as an outside consultant and occasional 'entertainment' for the ultra-wealthy, including a now widely circulated account of five hedge-fund billionaires who quizzed him about bunker logistics, Bitcoin versus Alaska versus New Zealand, and how to keep security guards loyal after money loses meaning. He connects that story to broader claims about tech-billionaire culture: an obsession with transcendence, life extension, and 'leveling up' while treating the rest of humanity as expendable. The conversation moves through his membership in the Club of Rome and contrasts it with murkier networks like Bilderberg and Peter Thiel's Hereticon, his history in the psychedelic and early internet counterculture, and his brush with Jeffrey Epstein-adjacent literary and science circles via an old party invitation from a literary agent. He and the host range across soil depletion, gut microbiomes, the economics of data centers and AI, effective altruism, Steve Bannon's 'burn it down' politics, and the Levittown-era design of suburban isolation. Throughout, Rushkoff argues for distinguishing technologies that connect people from those that atomize them, for local mutual aid over accumulation, and for finding meaning in small acts of care even without certainty that the larger system survives. It's a wide-ranging, digressive talk about power, technology, and what he calls the 'soul' of how things get built.
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Timestamps link into the episode on YouTube.
- Billionaires and end-of-world planning
- Club of Rome membership and origins
- Funding climate science and soil depletion
- Gut microbiome and jet lag
- Early internet, Netscape IPO, and ad-driven web
- Algorithms, advertising, and behavior control
- Effective altruism and 'The Last of Us' dilemma
- Peter Thiel, monarchy, and Nick Land's accelerationism
- Billionaire bunker meeting story in detail
- Epstein-adjacent literary party and Edge Foundation
- Transhumanism, ascension, and Christlikeness
- Finding happiness without optimism
Said on this episode
Quoted from the auto-generated transcript, which mishears names and technical terms. podcite.com reports what a show said; it does not endorse or fact-check it.
“And these are people who would rather have with robots or teenagers than women, right?”
“If you're taking water away from a black child in Alabama in order to feed your data server, it's not right.”
“the richest, most powerful people I've ever met felt utterly powerless to impact the future.”
“Ambition is a drug that turns its addicts into potential mad men.”