Concealed with Art Simone · iHeart Podcasts Australia

Be Prepared ☄️

·24 min·1 clip

Robert says wealthy people are building “luxury bunkers” in New Zealand with medical facilities and staff.

Art does not arrive quietly. She introduces Robert, an Arizona State University researcher from the US, and instantly makes the concealed-fact setup feel playful and a little theatrical. Robert gives the kind of profile that sounds ordinary until the topic drops. Outside work, he bakes sourdough, rides a bicycle, does the New York Times crossword, and has spent serious time researching the people who prepare for the end of the world. Art leans all the way into the bit. She jokes about her own 2:30 a.m. glam routine, then nudges the conversation from light confusion toward the actual subject: doomsday prepping and the communities that take it seriously. The research opens up fast. Robert explains that preppers are not just the caricatured outskirt weirdos people imagine, because there are established networks, different motivations, and different price points. The first example is gloriously absurd. He describes a timeshare-like model for doomsday, where people pay fees and wait for a compound to be ready when things go bad. Then the conversation gets more expensive. Art and Robert move on to decommissioned nuclear missile silos that are being turned into luxury condos, which sounds like a joke until it is discussed as a real market. The scale keeps climbing. Robert points to New Zealand as a magnet for the super-wealthy, where major tech figures have sought citizenship and built mountain compounds with medical facilities and staff. The show never pretends this is normal. Art reacts like someone watching the apocalypse get a concierge package, and she keeps pushing for the end plan behind all this expensive survival fantasy. By the close, Art has fully recast the end of the world as a Priscilla-style drag road trip with a pink bus, glitter, makeup, lashes, and a big bar on board. The tone stays cheeky right to the end. The episode finishes with a sign-off and a socials plug, leaving it as a quick, nosy, very camp conversation about fear, status, and what people build when they think tomorrow may never arrive.

As heard by us

A concealed-fact gag opens into doomsday prepping, luxury bunkers, and very expensive ways to imagine survival.

Art Simone opens with a concealed-fact tease, and the episode quickly wanders into doomsday prepping, timeshares for doomsday, and the strange business of decommissioned nuclear missile silos turned into luxury condos.

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Why you'd press play

Glitter meets doomsday bunkers in a Priscilla-style chat with a doomsday prepper researcher.

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