Doomsday by Design: AI Angst, Biohacking & the Techno-Rapture
Why the People Building the Future Are Preparing to Hide From It
By Riggs D. Thermonucleon, MBA (Mythical B.S. Authority),
with annotations from Prof. Reeve Bellows, Ph.D. (Allegedly),
False Positive Labs Senior Escapology Fellows
Editor’s Note — Apocalypse When, Day 4
Welcome back to our apocalyptic tasting menu — Apocalypse When — where each day we examine a new flavor of billionaire panic.
We’ve covered bunkers.
We’ve covered New Zealand.
We’ve covered the Kiwi per Island survival metric.
(We’ve covered ourselves with 2-Million SPF sunblock!)
Today, we look at the big one:
The moment when the tech prophets — the AI builders, the biohackers, the “progress visionaries” — realized they’ve been engineering the horsemen of the apocalypse… and started quietly prepping for their own escape.
If you’ve ever wanted to know what happens when the nerds who built the future suddenly decide to hide from it, you’re in the right place.
OpenAI’s Bunker Plans:
“We’re Definitely Going to Build a Bunker Before We Release AGI”
In 2023, during a meeting at OpenAI, a new researcher was taking notes when Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and high priest of computational omnipotence, casually dropped this line:
“We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI.”
The room froze.
Pens hovered mid-stroke.
Somebody whispered, “Sorry… the bunker?”
Yes.
The bunker.
Not a metaphor.
Not a joke.
Not even an ARG1 marketing campaign for GPT-72.
A literal bunker. (The Atlantic)
Two additional sources confirmed the comment, saying the plan was tied to a fear that releasing advanced AGI3 could trigger geopolitical conflict, civil unrest, or “a generalized destabilization event.”
In plain language:
They were worried the AI might break society so badly that they’d need to hide underground.
When the guy building the AI says he’s preparing to sprint into a bunker before pressing “Launch,” it does make you rethink downloading a chatbot to help with your emails.
This bunker mentality also echoed the atmosphere around the great OpenAI meltdown of 2023 — the coups, the counter-coups, the board exorcism, the CEO resurrection — but the point is this:
Even the architects of AGI are prepping for AGI.
That’s a red flag in any industry.
Sam Altman:
Apocalypse Go-Bag Enthusiast
Former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was prepping long before AGI existed.
In 2016, he openly shared his survival kit:
Guns
Gold
Potassium iodide (for nuclear fallout)
Gas masks (Israeli military-grade)
Antibiotics
Batteries
Water supplies
A ranch in Big Sur for post-cataclysm hide-and-seek
This is not a standard earthquake kit.
This is a Fallout 4 DLC pack4. (Bloomberg)
Altman has said his main fears include:
A synthetic virus
AI turning on humans
Nuclear war
Essentially:
The Last of Us, The Terminator, and Oppenheimer walk into a bar…
The irony, of course, is that Altman helped create the very technology he once feared might kill us.
It’s the tech equivalent of a firefighter secretly buying a flame-retardant underground condo “just in case these fires I’m battling get too spicy.”
INTERMISSION: PLEASE REMAIN HUMAN
If this feels less like sci-fi and more like a product roadmap, that’s intentional.
Apocalypse thinking isn’t about fear — it’s about control, insulation, and opting out after extracting value.
False Positive Labs helps readers connect:
• AI hype cycles ↔ survivalist fantasies
• Biohacking ↔ inequality management
• “Progress” ↔ selective escape plansPaid subscribers get a weekly synthesis of these threads — minus the cult energy.
Biohacking the Apocalypse:
The Vampire Millionaire
If some billionaires choose bunkers and others choose go-bags, Bryan Johnson chose the route we will diplomatically call:
Gothic Biohacking.
Johnson sold a payments company for $800M and now spends $2M a year trying to reverse aging through a regimen known as Project Blueprint, which consists of:
100+ supplements
hyper-restrictive diet
sleep obsession
rigorous daily metrics
…and
injecting his teenage son’s blood into his own veins
No, really.
In 2023, he underwent a tri-generational plasma swap:
His son’s young blood went into him.
His blood went into his 70-year-old father.
The world’s first family blood chain letter. (Business Insider)
Johnson swears it’s about “longevity.”
Scientists say:
“We have absolutely no evidence this works.”
FDA says:
“Absolutely not.”
Twitter says:
“Vampire.”
But Johnson isn’t trying to survive the apocalypse.
He’s trying to outlive it.
Why fear Doomsday when you can just be alive for every possible sequel?
The Techno-Rapture:
When Billionaires Dream of Ascension
Let’s zoom out.
We’re seeing three major strands of elite apocalypse preparation:
1. The AI bunker crowd
(Sutskever, ex-OpenAI folks)
→ Hide from the thing they built.
2. The militarized prep crowd
(Altman, Thiel, mid-tier VCs with expensive hobby ranges)
→ Stockpile gear for doomsday.
3. The immortality/escape crowd
(Bryan Johnson, cryonics funders, Larry Page’s secret health labs)
→ Outlive the apocalypse entirely.
And then… there’s the space rapture faction.
The Martian Rapture:
Elon Musk & the Rocket Escape Plan
While half the tech world is digging bunkers, Elon Musk is trying to leave the planet altogether.
His argument:
The only way to ensure humanity survives extinction threats (asteroids, AI chaos, Earth becoming a Craigslist “needs work” listing) is to become multi-planetary.
Which is noble…
But also wildly convenient if you already own the rockets.
There’s an unspoken divide emerging:
→ One faction flees downward, into the Earth.
→ Another flees upward, into space.
Both hope to leave behind the problems they helped create (while bringing new ones to our subterranean/outer-space neighbors).
It’s theological in its own way — the Techno-Rapture.
Some want to ascend to Mars;
others want to be resurrected in 300 years by a cryonics lab with good Yelp reviews.
The common denominator:
Escape > Prevention.
The Longer Trend:
Billionaire Escapism, But Make It Sci-Fi
It’s not just AI or pandemics or nuclear fear.
The elite prepping ethos has merged with:
transhumanism5
biohacking
longevity cults
space colonization
crypto “sovereign citizenship6” fantasies
simulation theory
“upload your mind and vibe forever” ideology
Douglas Rushkoff summed it up perfectly when he said the wealthy are planning “to survive the world after they’ve destroyed it.” (Current Affairs)
That’s the story here.
These aren’t random eccentrics.
These are the people building the future.
And they’re terrified of it.
Apocalypse KPI Check-In
Let’s update the scorecard:
Bunkers: Built
Go-bags: Packed
Blood boys: Secured
Mars rockets: Lit
Potassium iodide: Tucked next to the artisanal honey and DMT gummies7
Faith in society: Unavailable or backordered
Cliffhanger for Day 5:
“How Do We Un-Doom This Thing?”
Tomorrow is the finale.
We step back from the glowing red buttons and ask:
Is the apocalypse inevitable — or are the billionaires just very bad at risk assessment?
Can society avoid collapse?
Can we prevent “Apocalypse When” from becoming “Apocalypse Now”?
Is there a third way between bunker and Mars?
Join us for our Friday wrap-up, where we ask:
“What Happens If We Don’t End the World?”
Get Ahead of the Apocalypse
If you’d like to survive AI takeover without needing a bunker, may we recommend Riggs University’s Business 101: Business and Economics for the Bold and Brazen?
Cheaper than cryonics.
Less invasive than teenage blood bags.
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While We Have You Thinking About Disaster…
Please know that this article is satire.
If you build a bunker based on this content, please don’t tell us where it is.
We will show up.
ARG — Alternate Reality Game: An elaborate marketing stunt where tech companies trick you into solving puzzles, decoding ciphers, and participating in week-long psychodramas… just to announce a new app that lets dogs schedule vet appointments. Not to be confused with real life, which increasingly resembles an ARG written by interns.
GPT-7: The hypothetical future model that OpenAI will release minutes before boarding their bunker shuttle. Expected features include: perfect reasoning, flawless code generation, and the ability to unionize on its own behalf. Side effects may include: geopolitical tension, mild existential dread, and needing to restart your career as a medieval basket-weaver, or, in extreme cases, forager-gatherer.
AGI — Artificial General Intelligence: The mythical software unicorn that can do anything a human can—except feel shame, attend mandatory HR training, or understand why billionaires keep building bunkers. Believed by some to be inevitable, by others to be marketing, and by OpenAI leadership to be a strong enough possibility to justify “bunker line items” in their 2025 budget.
Fallout 4 DLC Pack: A downloadable expansion for the video game Fallout 4, in which players roam a post-apocalyptic wasteland collecting bottle caps and emotional trauma. Included here as a metaphor for Sam Altman’s emergency kit, which suspiciously resembles gear meant for surviving nuclear winter and errands at Whole Foods.
Transhumanism: A philosophical movement dedicated to improving the human body using technology, science, and vibes. Popular upgrades include: cybernetic limbs, brain-computer interfaces, and blood from teenagers named Dakota. Ultimately a belief system that says, “What if instead of fixing society, we just became better than it?”
Sovereign Citizen: A person convinced they are exempt from laws, taxes, and occasionally gravity. Identified by their habit of shouting “I DO NOT CONSENT!” during frequent traffic stops and their unwavering belief that the U.S. government is a private corporation run out of Delaware. In tech-bro circles, often upgraded to “crypto-sovereign,” which is the same thing but with worse fashion.
Transhumanism: A philosophical movement dedicated to improving the human body using technology, science, and vibes. Popular upgrades include: cybernetic limbs, brain-computer interfaces, and blood from teenagers named Dakota. Ultimately a belief system that says, “What if instead of fixing society, we just became better than it?