Mark Conde

The billionaires already have a name for what's coming. They call it "The Event." And when they sat down to plan for it, their biggest fear wasn't the disaster itself. It was their own guards. In 2017, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff was driven hours into the desert to a luxury resort. He'd been booked to give a talk on the future of technology, for a fee worth about half his yearly salary as a professor. Nobody wanted the talk. Instead, five ultra-wealthy men from the top of the tech and hedge fund world were brought to his table with questions. First: New Zealand or Alaska? Which one rides out the collapse better? Then a brokerage CEO who had nearly finished building his own underground bunker asked the question that took over the rest of the hour: "How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?" Not if. How. Because once money is worthless, what stops the armed men guarding your bunker from taking it? What stops them from picking their own leader? These men had already gamed it out. Combination locks on the food supply that only they would know. Disciplinary collars for the guards, in exchange for being allowed to survive. Or robots to replace the guards entirely, if the technology could be developed in time. Rushkoff told them the only real answer was to treat their security people like family, starting now. They rolled their eyes. Now look at what else came out that same year. In January 2017, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman told The New Yorker he'd guess more than half of Silicon Valley's billionaires had bought some form of "apocalypse insurance." Saying you were "buying a house in New Zealand," he said, had become a wink between them. That same month, the world learned Peter Thiel had quietly become a New Zealand citizen back in 2011, after spending just 12 days in the country. New Zealand again. Bunkers. Secret second citizenships. Locks on the food. Collars on the guards. You don't plan any of that for a bad week. You plan it for a world that doesn't come back. In 2023, Wired reported that Mark Zuckerberg's 1,400-acre compound on Kauai was being built with an underground shelter of around 5,000 square feet. It has its own energy and food supplies, an escape hatch, and what appears to be a blast-resistant door. He calls it "a little shelter." Like a basement. Now go back to the robots. "If the technology could be developed in time." In time for what? Nine years later, it's being developed at factory speed. Tesla is turning the Fremont line that built the Model S and X into an Optimus line, with a stated goal of a million robots a year. Figure went from building one humanoid a day to one an hour in 120 days. Agility built a robot factory sized for 10,000 units a year. China's AgiBot passed its 10,000th humanoid earlier this year. Robots don't need to be paid. They don't need to be fed. And they never pick their own leader. One last detail. Look at Rushkoff's list of what "The Event" could mean: environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, an unstoppable virus, a hack that takes everything down. And a solar storm. Only one thing on that list comes from beyond our planet. No human starts it. No human can stop it. They call it The Event. I call it the Geophysical Event.