SURVIVAL OF THE RICHEST: How Tech Billionaires Are Preparing for Doomsday

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Self-improvement, Arts, Books, Society & Culture, Education

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2022

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Have you ever found yourself sitting around a table at a luxury resort with five mega-rich strangers who want to know where you think they should build their doomsday bunkers? Absurd as it may sound, that actually happened to media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. Today on the show he explains why the 0.01 percent are obsessed with escaping climate change, global pandemics, political upheaval ... and us. --- Download the Next Big Idea app today at nextbigideaclub.com/app

Transcript

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0:00.0	LinkedIn presents.
0:06.3	I'm Rufus Griscom, and this is the next big idea.
0:11.2	Today, escape fantasies of tech billionaires.
0:31.0	Because Douglas Rushcoff has written 20 books about media, technology, and society,
0:37.0	people sometimes mistake him for a futurist.
0:40.0	Someone with opinions about the next big thing.
0:43.0	And this case of mistaken identity has its perks.
0:46.5	I get invited to do, thankfully, sometimes high-paid talks for bankers and technology investors,
0:55.5	who, you know, they're not really so interested in my stuff, which is like, how do we build technology
1:00.5	that helps human beings make a better world for ourselves?
1:03.5	They want to know what to bet on.
1:05.5	Most of the time, he RSVPs, no thanks, but every now and then.
1:09.5	I got this kind of mysterious invite that was for a huge amount of money.
1:14.5	It was basically a third of my annual salary as a professor at CUNY.
1:20.5	To go out and do a talk, they said, to talk to us about the digital future.
1:24.5	Doug may be a Marxist, but he still has a mortgage.
1:28.5	So he said yes.
1:29.5	And that's how we found himself at an ultra-lux resort in the middle of desert.
1:34.5	And I had assumed, because of the amount of money and some, you know, the words around it,
1:38.5	that it would be like a couple of hundred bankers and hedge funders in some room,
1:43.5	you know, the way you usually do a talk.
1:45.5	But I was in the green room at this crazy resort, getting ready for the guys to come
	...

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