From Story of the Week with Joel Stein: Billionaires Prepping for the Apocalypse

be joel Stein? So it turns on a mike maybe twiddles and knob because a journalist trand has got in that Joel job. I'm Jory single story. Just listen to smart people speak conversation. Filming information is so okay. I got it from the theme song. You're joel Stein. That's the only important part. I'm joel Stein. Every week you call somebody who wrote a story and you interview them

about the story that they wrote. Yeah, we find the long, complicated magazine articles that people spent six months on that we used to read when we subscribe to magazines, and I do the heavy lifting of reading it and then I call someone to have them explain it, and then put my name on the podcast. So I think we call that arbitrage in this business, journalism business. That's exactly what it is. So we're gonna play part of an

episode of your show here in just a minute. It's the one where you interview a writer named Douglas Rushkoff. And so just give me a little setup. Who is Douglas Rushkoff And what's the story. So he's a writer, but he's also a professor, and what he writes about is how the Internet is affecting society. One of his gigs in addition to being a professor and writer, is to go speak a conferences. And he gets invited to this conference out west at some fancy hotel, and he's

paid more than he's ever been paid. He gets forty grands to kind of give a speech, prepares a speech, gets the green rooms waiting to get miked up, and five guys walk in and they're not there to mike him up. They are the conference. And so he's been paid forty thousand dollars just to talk to these five billionaires, And what do they talk about? They don't want his speech, they spend most of their time asking him about where to put their bunkers for the event. And the event

it could be anything, any world ending events. It could be climate disaster, it could be the AI robots taking over, could be nuclear war. They're preparing. They're spending a bunch of their money to build bunkers. So he goes home from this speech that was not a speech. He writes up the story of what happened to him. He publishes it online and medium, and then the part of the show we're going to play now, is this really interesting part about what happens after the article comes out. Yeah,

that's where the adventure really starts. Let's listen to the show. Okay, So after the piece comes out, you get an email from a bunch of people who basically want to sell bunker stuff to rich people and to introduce them to my five billionaires. Right. Oh, I sell the best buckers, I bet that navy seal, you know, employment service, all those kind of things. And one of them is named jac Cole. So who is he and what was his idea that he emailed you about? It's weird. I mean,

people are telling me I shouldn't love this guy. But I do love this guy. So JC Cole is a He's a real maga guy, a maga Trump supporter guy. He was running I forgot what country, like a Glatvia, one of these places. After the fall of the Soviet Union. He was running like the embassy in a Chamber of Chamber of the American Chamber of Commerce in Latvia. And he had to do security and all that. But he had witnessed the fall of the Soviet Union and how

you had to rebuild a society. And he has these a couple of farms and equestrian centers out in Jersey and Pennsylvania. And he got the idea to create kind of sustainable farms in around the country that billionaires could buy shares in. You pay a few million dollars to get shares and then you have a place to go when the ship hits the fan. So he would build them around near like two hours away from each major city and have right ones in Princeton, ones like in

the Poconos. He's trying to build them in different places. And he said, you gotta come, you know, you got to see this place. And I'll come. I'll come. And he's like, do you shoot right, I'm like, So he's like, bring your boots. So I bring like these, you know, like like wife's boots, right to go out like in the mud. Who my wife's but they don't fit. But um, you know, to boots. I want boots, he says, to bring boots. I've used plastic bags on my sneakers. You know.

He's got a muddy farm and he wants to go out in the back and shoot, and do you shoot? I did shoot? It was your first time shooting a gun? Yeah? What do you think? It was kind of cool. It's kind of cool. There's two kinds of gun. There's um, I guess there's more than two. But he had to know. There was a little gun that twenty two rim fire. It's like right, which you could shoot and not it doesn't hurt. Then he had a glocker spiel or whatever it is. You know, that's an industry whatever, a gun

with nine million meters. Yeah, and that you shoot it and it moves your hand. It really well, yeah, requal, it's a whole thing. Okay, So you meet him and you and his idea, his ideas. He's going to build these bunkers, but they're also they're not even bunkers. He's gonna build working farms. You buy a share in this farm. You spend like five million dollars now, and you're investing

in a farm. And then when shit hits, the vanue come out and you live and work on this farm, and they'll be a dentist and a doctor and all the different kinds of things that you need. Several hundred people living on a farm, and they'll be of course a dozen Navy sea armed to the teeth to guard the place. He said something to you that kind of summed it up for me completely. He said, I am less concerned about gangs with guns than the woman at the end of the driveway holding a baby and asking

for food. What did he mean by that and how did it affect you? Well, it was weird. After we had shot rounds and he was talking about the various kinds of military guys and Navy seals that we're going to come protect the place. I was like, yeah, but what if a giant gang of motorcycle guys came with chains of machine guns, you know? And then he said, yeah, I'm less worried about that than I am. The moral quandary of the starving people at the gate, and that's

what made me love this guy. So this guy, the part of his plan that I think is great and that none of the billionaires like, is that your money doesn't just go to the farm that you're living in. Your money is also an investment in a company that is meant to train people around the country how to build their own farms. Because his idea is if we're the only ones able to do this, then everyone's going

to be coming and attacking us. That the more resilient we can make the rest of the country, the more we can have other people taking care of themselves, the better off we are. And that philosophy alone from a supposedly maga Republican gun toting guy is what's keeping the tech billionaires from wanting to even invest in him because he's too egalitarian. He's too communist for them. Okay, so your communitarian farm maga guy is getting no buyers and

his website looks like crap. By the way, he seems like a guy who's not really plugged into the billionaire tech community. And then there are these other companies like Vivos. They're the ones that sell the old nuclear bunkers and then they turn them into what seemed like kind of awesome Miami condominiums where there's like hot tubs and swimming pools and yeah, they're like little doctor sort of retreats,

you know, they sort of look awesome. And then there's a snazzy video on vivos while they're playing the song that says say your last goodbyes. They suddenly have like the basically the coolest looking condo ever and people are buying into that. And this one called Opedum or something in the Czech Republic, whatever is happening in the world outside, you can rest easy and live fully in times of

tranquility and in times of unrest. That's really just a condos kind of it's gargeous condos with into our pool that they they're they're in really fortified you know, subterranean basements and stuff. I mean, it's sort of a version of the RV fantasy for the retiree. You know, your tiny house, you know, there's a there's a there's something that's really kind of sweet about having your house bowed or your tiny house or your RV and you just live there and you open up your little meals and

you know that I mean think about it. It's like it's a hard world and it would just be so simple. Like what other amenities did you see that you were like, oh, this is pathetic. It's never going to work out. Every single amenity I saw I thought was pathetic and wouldn't work out. I mean the ones that were even more pathetic was you know, as I did more research and looked at the kind of the eco farm ideas that

these kind of burning man dudes come up with. You know, they have all these great ideas, but they they believe that somehow they can survive in a hermetically sealed world. So like their solution for topsoil is to have these big plastic tubes that you put top soil in and then you grow your plants there, so you don't have to water the whole earth. You could just water the

tubes in which your food is growing. But where people do that kind of stuff, or vertical farming on rooftops, it's like you get fungus in your system, and what do you do? You call the guy, Hey, what do I do? They come in, they switch out your vertical farm stuff. They say, oh, here's a fresh tube. You know, try a little bit less water next time, maybe that'll What do you do if you're in your bunker and your tube gets the fungus in it? It's I mean,

it's like it doesn't work. There's also this thing that these billionaire preppers do, at least I've read, which is they get lasic because basically the Twilight Zone episode in which the end of the world comes and that guy is super psyched because he loves to read and he's finally left alone and then he steps on his glasses there was time now, it was all the time I needed. So they've all solved for that by getting Lasix because

they want to eliminate that need. Yeah. Well, what you got to realize is the majority of the things they think to solve for are things they've read about. And Neil Stephen, sin Or Seed and Walking Dead, they're they're really particular. So when you mentioned something really normal that they haven't solved for, like, um, what about contamination of your water supply? Uh, that's not like sexy enough for

a novel, but it's like way more possible. Right, There's this thing we thought we might be fun to do with you, which is you don't have to do it one of these bunker places vivos. They have a membership form to apply, and we were wondering if you and I should should fill it out. You could fill it out. Do you want? Do you want at least look at it. I'll look at it. Look at it. Oh my gosh. All right. Yeah, so there's a name and address and stuff.

But then it gets interesting. It's like your age that's important. Oh, this is like giving sperm. They're probably gonna ask for SAT scores. No, no, it's not like giving sports. Is a skills and expertise for people in your group? Right, men's skills and expertis what could you do? But that's smart? Are you a dentist, an EMT, a hunter? Law enforcement? Right? Journalist? Is not not here? Wait? What would what would we check off? I guess we could check off communications? Yeah,

that's an option. Yeah, but communications? Can you can you build a ham radio from crystals? Oh that's what they mean. They don't mean just talking. I like they have one that's just survivalist. Wait, they also have one that's just religion. That's pretty good. I could do that. I'm ordained as a rabbi. And then there's an essay section too, I know, it's like applying to Oberlin. Um. Tell us what skills, nice rotise you have and how you will be a

benefit to a Vivo shelter community. This information will assist us in processing your application. I would think the idea is that the more you have to offer the community, the less you might have to pay. You can get a scholarship. You know, if you're like us, you just got to pay the full billion or whatever it is to get in there. So I just need to hire a chemist and a hunter at a seamstress and make them part of your group. Yeah, we got to form groups, right.

I'm my expert. My expertise is cannibalism. That won't get you in. That's an excerpt from Joel Stein's Story of the Week with Joel Stein. You can listen wherever