Note: This is a character development document for the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. Douglas appears briefly in Chapter 8 and becomes the protagonist of Chapter 10. Start here or learn about the book.
Douglas: The Last Holdout
Douglas Chen is not a villain. He’s a spreadsheet with a heartbeat.
He’s the guy who reads Nassim Taleb at breakfast and runs Monte Carlo simulations before choosing a restaurant. The kind of person who, when told “money can’t buy happiness,” responds with “clearly you haven’t modeled the utility curves correctly.”
When the EXIT Protocol launches, Richard takes the deal. Maria joins Civic Service. The world transforms.
Douglas watches it all from a $147 million bunker in New Zealand, credit card rejected at the local grocery store, running probability calculations on whether he made the right call.
Spoiler: the math eventually tells him he didn’t.
This is his story.
The Man Behind the Model
Full name: Douglas Chen
Age: 56 (born 1973)
Net worth: $6.4 billion (pre-transition)
Background: Serial tech entrepreneur (sold three companies: enterprise software, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure)
Education: Stanford CS ‘95, dropped out of PhD program to start first company
Family: Divorced twice, three children (estranged from all), no current romantic relationships
The Family He Optimized Away:
- First wife, Sarah (married 1998-2004): Met at Stanford. Divorced because Douglas “wasn’t present even when he was in the room.” Two children from this marriage who grew up barely knowing him.
- Second wife, Jennifer (married 2007-2017): The one who almost broke through. They had a daughter, Mei, now in her late twenties. Jennifer used to joke that she was competing with spreadsheets for Douglas’s attention. She stopped joking around 2015. The divorce was “amicable”—which meant Douglas paid enough that Jennifer didn’t have to fight. He used the word “underperforming” to describe the marriage to his therapist. Like she was a quarterly report.
- Mei Chen: Douglas’s daughter from his second marriage. Brilliant, angry, and done waiting for her father to show up. She stopped calling after the divorce. By 2034, their communication is limited to birthday texts and the occasional guilt-check—until the message that changes everything.
Here’s the thing about Douglas: he’s not wrong about most things. That’s what makes him insufferable—and fascinating.
He predicted the 2008 crash three months early. He called COVID’s economic impact before it hit Wuhan news feeds. He shorted a company two weeks before their CEO was arrested for fraud, based purely on “anomalies in their accounts receivable aging reports.”
Douglas doesn’t trust people. He trusts data. And for thirty years, the data kept proving him right.
Personality traits:
- Analytical to a fault: Everything is an optimization problem. Emotions are noise in the signal.
- Self-reliant: “If you want something done right, do it yourself” taken to pathological extremes
- Paranoid-rational: Not clinically paranoid, just highly sensitized to systemic risk after watching institutions fail repeatedly
- Competent: Actually built things, not just bought them. Can read code, understand infrastructure, evaluate technical claims. No dilettante.
- Isolated: Wealth created barriers; success rewarded detachment; trust became a liability
His key contradiction: Douglas values independence above all else, but his bunker strategy depends on global supply chains he cannot control.
He’s built a fortress against civilizational collapse that will collapse without civilization.
The irony is not lost on him. Eventually.
The Bunker: $147 Million Worth of Cognitive Dissonance
Douglas is part of a very real phenomenon. As of 2024-2025, at least 38 doomsday bunkers have been constructed in New Zealand by American billionaires, with some costing upward of $8 million and requiring 19 tractor-trailers to deliver. Peter Thiel bought near Queenstown. James Cameron is becoming a citizen. Mark Zuckerberg built a “little shelter” in Hawaii that happens to be 4,500 square feet with blast-resistant doors.
New Zealand, as one bunker company put it, “is an enemy of no one.” It’s not a nuclear target. It’s politically stable. It has a golden visa program where $5 million in investment buys residency.
Douglas chose Queenstown—the same area where real-world tech billionaires have quietly purchased land, where contractors sign NDAs and there’s no official paper trail.
Location: Queenstown, New Zealand (South Island)
Size: 400-acre compound, 15,000 sq ft underground facility
Cost: $147 million (property + construction + outfitting)
Capabilities:
- Self-sufficient power (solar + battery array + backup diesel generators)
- Water treatment and recycling systems
- Hydroponic growing facilities (4,000 sq ft)
- Medical suite with surgical capability
- Armory (entirely legal under NZ law, carefully documented)
- Communications infrastructure (satellite uplinks, radio, hardened fiber)
- Living quarters for 40 people (currently houses 12)
Staff (as of 2029):
- 2 security consultants (ex-military, American)
- 1 doctor (New Zealand, part-time)
- 3 engineers (maintenance/systems)
- 4 agricultural specialists
- 2 culinary/household managers
What it represents psychologically:
Douglas doesn’t see the bunker as a fortress. He sees it as a lifeboat. When the ship goes down, you don’t need to outrun the ocean—you just need a vessel that floats.
The bunker is insurance against civilizational collapse, climate disaster, pandemic outbreak, grid failure, social unrest. It’s the physical manifestation of his operating philosophy: control what you can, isolate from what you can’t.
There’s just one problem.
By 2033, the bunker has become something else entirely: a cage. The very self-sufficiency he paid for has made him dependent. The hydroponics need replacement parts manufactured in Taiwan. The medical equipment requires software updates from Boston. The diesel generators need fuel refined in Singapore. The security consultants have families in Austin who stopped writing back.
The bunker was supposed to protect him from the world. Instead, it’s shown him how much he still needs it.
Independence, it turns out, was always a performance.
Why He Initially Refused the EXIT
When Richard took the EXIT deal in Chapter 8, Douglas watched with a mixture of contempt and pity. Richard, with his $23 billion logistics empire, was throwing it all away for what? A promise. Some Mission Credits. A seat at a table that might not exist in twenty years.
Douglas had survived three market crashes and two divorces by trusting math, not institutions.
His reasoning (as he explained it to his AI advisors in 2029):
“Richard gave away his agency for a promise. A promise. The Foundation says they’ll honor Founder Status, but who enforces that in twenty years? Who prevents mission creep? Richard traded something real—capital, control, leverage—for something ephemeral: reputation in a system he doesn’t control.
I didn’t survive three market crashes and two divorces by trusting institutions. I survived by trusting math. The bunker is math. Solar panels plus hydroponics plus water recycling equals independence. That equation doesn’t require anyone to keep their word.”
Deeper psychological motivations:
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Loss aversion: Giving up $6.4 billion feels like losing, even if the alternative is objectively better. Behavioral economics 101. The pain of loss is twice the pleasure of equivalent gain.
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Sunk cost fallacy: He spent eight years building the New Zealand compound. Admitting it was unnecessary means admitting he wasted eight years of his life. That’s not a spreadsheet problem—that’s an identity problem.
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Identity threat: Douglas built his self-concept on being smarter than “the herd.” Taking the EXIT means joining the herd. That’s not a strategy change. That’s ego death.
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Distrust of coordination: Every company Douglas sold involved betrayal—partners who turned, investors who maneuvered, employees who leaked. His operating model assumes defection. The Unscarcity framework assumes cooperation. He literally cannot compute a world where cooperation is the dominant strategy.
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Control versus influence: The EXIT offers influence (Impact Points, Founder Status). Douglas wants control. Influence is what you settle for when control isn’t available. Douglas doesn’t settle.
What he told himself in private:
“I’m not refusing progress. I’m just waiting for version 2.0. Let Richard and the other early adopters beta-test the Foundation. If it works, I’ll join later. If it fails, I’ll have been right to wait.”
This is classic late-adopter psychology. It’s also, he would learn, a fundamental misunderstanding of network effects.
The first person to join a phone network gets zero value. The millionth person gets enormous value. But if everyone waits to be the millionth person, no one joins at all.
Douglas understood this intellectually. He just thought it didn’t apply to him.
His AI Advisors: Oracle and Dragon
Douglas has access to both American and Chinese frontier AI models—one of the few individuals on Earth with dual access due to his pre-transition investments in AI compute infrastructure.
He calls them Oracle (US model) and Dragon (Chinese model). He consults both because “you don’t trust a single source when the stakes are civilizational.”
How he uses them:
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Adversarial analysis: He poses the same question to both, compares answers, looks for convergence and divergence. Where they agree, he assumes high confidence. Where they differ, he digs into the assumptions.
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Scenario modeling: Oracle and Dragon run Monte Carlo simulations of geopolitical futures, economic transitions, technology timelines. Douglas lives inside probability distributions.
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Bias correction: He knows AI inherits training data bias. So he explicitly prompts: “What would a person who disagrees with this conclusion argue? Steel-man that position.”
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Personal blind spots: “What am I not asking that I should be asking?” This is the question that eventually cracks his resistance.
The turning point conversation (2033):
Douglas: “Oracle, calculate the probability that my New Zealand compound remains self-sufficient for twenty years given current supply chain dependencies.”
Oracle: “Current probability: 14.3%. Primary failure modes: (1) replacement parts for critical systems unavailable, (2) skilled labor attrition, (3) energy storage degradation, (4) food production vulnerability to disease/contamination. Would you like detailed breakdown?”
Douglas: “Dragon, same question.”
Dragon: “Probability of 20-year self-sufficiency: 11.7%. Confidence interval 9.2%-15.1%. Note: your model assumes static external conditions. If Free Zones expand at current rate, staff retention probability drops to 3.4% by 2038. Skilled personnel will have superior alternatives.”
Douglas stared at the numbers. Both AIs—American and Chinese, trained on different data, built by competing powers—agreed within a margin of error.
His bunker had a 12-14% chance of working.
He’d built a $147 million lottery ticket.
Douglas: “Explain staff retention variable.”
Dragon: “Your head of hydroponics, Dr. Sarah Reeves, has family in Auckland. Auckland Free Zone launches Q2 2034. Her sister will have guaranteed housing, healthcare, educational access for children. Dr. Reeves is currently paid NZ$180,000 annually to maintain your food systems. In the Free Zone, she receives baseline survival plus Impact Point opportunities in agricultural research—her actual passion, per her published papers. Retention probability if she becomes aware of Auckland option: 8.2%.”
Douglas went quiet for a long time.
Douglas: “What is the expected value of taking the EXIT now versus waiting five years?”
Oracle and Dragon: [independently converge on same answer within 2.1% margin]
Oracle: “Expected value of EXIT now: 7.3x current value. Expected value of EXIT in five years: 0.9x current value. Explanation: Impact Point decay curves favor early adopters. Founder Status availability ends 2036. Strategic influence in Foundation architecture available only during formation window.”
Seven times the value now. Less than his current value if he waits.
That was the conversation that changed everything.
Not because Douglas suddenly believed in the Unscarcity vision. But because the math told him to move.
And Douglas always follows the math.
The Three Scenarios: A Probabilist’s Guide to Civilizational Collapse
By 2034, Douglas has accepted that the old world is ending. The question is: which new world is coming?
He tasks Oracle and Dragon with modeling three divergent futures, then calculating his optimal strategy for each.
Scenario 1: Star Wars (Probability: 62%)
Description: Elite capture. A small technological aristocracy controls AI, robots, and fusion. The masses are economically irrelevant but biologically alive. Governments serve elite interests. Free Zones exist but remain constrained, underfunded, perpetually “experimental.”
Think Elysium, but with better PR.
Douglas’s position in this scenario:
- Taking EXIT now: Locks in Founder Status, gives seat at table, allows him to become part of the technological aristocracy rather than being displaced by it
- Waiting: Permanently relegated to “old money” status, assets frozen in legacy financial systems, no pathway to elite tier
Optimal strategy: Take EXIT immediately. In Star Wars future, early position determines permanent hierarchy.
Douglas had assumed he’d be among the elite. The AIs showed him the math: his $6.4 billion was significant in 2029. By 2060, after compound advantage flowing to early Foundation participants, it would be rounding error.
Today’s top hedge fund managers earn $1-4 billion per year. Ken Griffin’s net worth is $50 billion. Douglas was rich. He wasn’t rich rich. And in a Star Wars future, the difference matters.
Scenario 2: Trojan Horse (Probability: 28%)
Description: The Unscarcity framework works roughly as designed. Abundance infrastructure scales, power decays by design, Impact Points reward genuine contribution, Commons proliferate, geopolitical competition transforms into innovation competition. Messy, imperfect, but fundamentally functional.
Douglas’s position in this scenario:
- Taking EXIT now: Moderate influence, genuine legacy, opportunity to shape systems during formation
- Waiting: Joins as late adopter, misses architecture decisions, starts Impact Point accumulation from zero while others have compounding advantages
Optimal strategy: Take EXIT soon. Network effects favor early participation.
Scenario 3: Patchwork Collapse (Probability: 10%)
Description: Uneven transition. Some regions achieve abundance, others collapse into authoritarianism or warlordism. No coordinated global architecture. Balkanization. Century of instability.
Douglas’s position in this scenario:
- Taking EXIT now: Access to most stable zones, portability of assets, options to relocate
- Waiting: Stuck in deteriorating region with illiquid assets, no transferable reputation
Optimal strategy: Take EXIT as insurance. Bunker becomes secondary backup, not primary plan.
The Meta-Analysis
Oracle’s summary: “In 2 of 3 scenarios, early EXIT is optimal. In the remaining scenario (Patchwork), EXIT provides option value. In zero scenarios is ‘wait in bunker’ the dominant strategy.”
Dragon’s summary: “Your current approach optimizes for 2029 conditions. Those conditions no longer obtain. The strategic landscape has shifted beneath your position.”
Douglas’s realization: “I’m not refusing the EXIT because it’s a bad bet. I’m refusing because I’m loss-averse and change-resistant. I’m letting cognitive biases override analysis.”
He’d spent thirty years telling founders to “follow the data.” Now his own data was telling him to move.
The bunker wasn’t protection. It was procrastination with better architecture.
His Relationship to Richard
Douglas and Richard met twice before the transition.
First meeting (2019): Tech conference in San Francisco. Richard’s logistics empire was partnering with Douglas’s cloud infrastructure company. Professional respect. Different personalities—Richard was gregarious, Douglas withdrawn—but mutual recognition of competence.
Second meeting (2027): Private dinner in New York, three months before Richard took the EXIT. Richard was trying to convince Douglas to join him.
Richard: “We can’t outrun this, Douglas. The Labor Cliff is coming. The question is whether we build a bridge or watch people fall.”
Douglas: “You’re building a bridge to nowhere. The Foundation is vapor. Impact Points are monopoly money. You’re giving away leverage for feelings.”
Richard: “I’m trading a dying asset for a living one. The dollar is already losing meaning. You’re holding onto the past.”
Douglas: “And you’re chasing a fantasy. Good luck with that.”
They parted cordially but firmly on opposite sides.
By 2033, Douglas watches Richard’s trajectory with complicated emotions:
- Envy: Richard seems… happy. He’s remarried. His grandchildren visit. He works on fusion grid logistics—real problems, meaningful solutions.
- Vindication-seeking: Douglas keeps looking for signs that Richard’s decision was wrong. The signs don’t come.
- Cognitive dissonance: If Richard was right, then Douglas was wrong. That’s difficult to process.
The call (2034):
Douglas breaks four years of silence. He calls Richard.
Douglas: “The data says I should take the EXIT.”
Richard: “What does your gut say?”
Douglas: “My gut is a pattern-matching engine trained on a world that no longer exists.”
Richard: [laughs] “That’s the most Douglas Chen thing you’ve ever said. So what’s stopping you?”
Douglas: “…I don’t know how to not be in control.”
Richard: “Then let me tell you a secret: you were never in control. None of us were. We were just better at pretending.”
That conversation didn’t convince Douglas. But it planted something.
Character Arc: From Isolation to Participation
Act I: The Rational Refusal (2029-2032)
Douglas is certain he’s made the right call. The bunker is humming. Markets are chaotic, but he’s insulated. He watches the early EXIT adopters with detached curiosity, like an anthropologist studying a cargo cult.
He runs weekly simulations. Tracks Foundation metrics. Monitors staff loyalty indicators.
Everything is under control.
Act II: The Erosion (2032-2034)
Small failures accumulate. A critical pump breaks; replacement parts are backordered indefinitely. His head of security quits—family wants to move to a Free Zone. The local doctor stops making house calls because the Free Zone clinic offers better equipment.
Douglas starts running scenarios. The probabilities don’t look good.
His children still won’t return his calls.
Act III: The Analysis (2034)
The AI conversations. The three-scenario modeling. The realization that his strategy is driven by emotion, not logic. Douglas, who built his entire identity on being rational, has to confront his own irrationality.
The hardest question isn’t “what should I do?” It’s “why haven’t I done it already?”
The answer is uncomfortable: because he’s human. Because loss aversion is real. Because admitting you were wrong hurts more than being wrong.
Act III-B: The Message That Broke the Model
Then the message arrives. From Mei—the first contact in seven months.
“Dad. Mom’s in hospice. The doctors give her weeks. I thought you should know. I’m not asking you to come. I know you won’t leave your bunker. I just thought you should know before she’s gone.”
Jennifer. Dying. And his daughter already knows he won’t come—she’s done the calculation for him.
She’s right, of course. He’d been planning to send flowers through a service. Appropriate. Optimized. Completely empty.
Douglas asks Dragon: “What’s the expected value of visiting Jennifer before she dies?”
The AI pauses. Then: “The question is malformed. Expected value requires a utility function. You have not specified what you’re optimizing for.”
Thirty years of optimization. And he doesn’t know what he’s optimizing for anymore.
Act IV: The Decision (2034-2035)
Douglas doesn’t have an epiphany. He doesn’t “see the light.” But something cracks.
He books a flight to San Francisco. Overrides his security protocols. Leaves the bunker.
He holds Jennifer’s hand at the end—something he hadn’t done in twenty years. Mei is there, silent, watching. They don’t reconcile. But something opens.
Then he takes the EXIT.
Not just because the expected value calculation says it’s optimal. Because he finally asked himself what he was optimizing for—and realized the bunker had no answer.
Act V: The Uncertain Participant (2035-2040)
Douglas enters the Foundation framework with no illusions. He’s a late adopter playing catch-up. His Impact Points start at zero while Richard and the other early adopters have compounding advantages.
But he discovers something unexpected: the system is designed for late joiners too. The Power Must Decay principle means early advantages erode. The Diversity Guard mechanisms resist permanent hierarchies. Axiom IV isn’t just philosophy—it’s architecture.
Douglas will never be a true believer. But he becomes a constructive skeptic—someone who participates, contributes, critiques, improves. The Foundation needs people who assume systems will fail, who look for vulnerabilities, who trust engineering over faith.
That’s Douglas. That’s always been Douglas.
His bunker? He donates it to the Foundation. It becomes a research station studying off-grid resilience systems. Dr. Reeves runs it—pursuing agricultural research instead of maintaining his salad supply. The compound that was supposed to keep one billionaire alive is now feeding thousands.
Douglas moves to Auckland. He works on supply chain resilience for the Foundation layer—the same skills that made him billions, now applied to civilizational infrastructure.
It’s not control. It’s influence. And influence, he slowly learns, might be enough.
The Photo:
Eighteen months after the EXIT, Mei sends him something: a photo of her daughter’s first day of kindergarten. No message. Just the photo.
It’s more than he deserves. He knows that. But he keeps it on his desk anyway—next to the window that looks out over Auckland Harbor instead of the Remarkables.
Some mornings he still misses the certainty of the bunker. Most mornings he doesn’t. The work is harder than hoarding. It’s also, somehow, lighter.
Richard was right. Control was always an illusion. The best you could do was choose which current to swim in.
And sometimes, the current carries you home.
Key Quotes
“I’m not a pessimist. I’m a probabilist. And the probabilities say that institutions fail, supply chains break, and trust is a luxury we can’t afford.”
— 2029, explaining bunker strategy to his security chief
“Richard traded his fortune for a promise. I’m keeping mine until I see proof. The difference between us is that he’s an optimist and I’m an engineer.”
— 2031, interview with Forbes
“The bunker was supposed to protect me from the world. Instead, it showed me how much I need it. Turns out, independence is an illusion. It always was.”
— 2034, conversation with Oracle AI
“I’m not taking the EXIT because I believe. I’m taking it because the expected value calculation says it’s optimal. Maybe belief is overrated. Maybe participation is enough.”
— 2035, final decision
“Richard was right about one thing: we were never in control. We just had better tools for managing uncertainty. But when the uncertainty is existential, no amount of tools can save you. You have to choose a side—not because it’s safe, but because neutrality is choosing the losing side.”
— 2038, reflection three years post-EXIT
Why Douglas Matters
Douglas is the reader’s proxy for skepticism.
He’s not a convert. He’s not inspired by vision. He doesn’t care about legacy or meaning or transcendence. He cares about surviving with agency intact.
And if even Douglas—the bunker billionaire, the ultimate prepper, the man who bet against cooperation—concludes that participation beats isolation, then maybe the skeptical reader can too.
His arc isn’t “from greed to generosity.” It’s “from isolation to interdependence.” That’s a more honest, more achievable transformation.
Douglas doesn’t stop being himself. He stops pretending that being himself is enough.
The bunker preppers of 2024—the Peter Thiels and Mark Zuckerbergs quietly buying New Zealand farmland and Hawaiian retreats with blast-resistant doors—are running the same calculations Douglas runs. They see systemic risk. They hedge against collapse. They trust themselves more than they trust institutions.
Douglas is the version of them who eventually has to confront an uncomfortable truth: you can’t actually opt out of civilization. You can only pretend to while depending on it from a distance.
The bunker isn’t independence. It’s expensive denial.
Douglas’s journey is the journey from denial to acceptance—not of some utopian vision, but of a mathematical reality: interconnection isn’t optional. It’s physics. The only question is whether you participate in shaping what comes next, or whether you watch it happen from your expensive basement while your staff leaves for better opportunities.
That’s the character arc that lands.
Further Reading
- Chapter 8 Companion: The EXIT Protocol - Richard’s story
- The EXIT Protocol - Individual transition framework
- The Sovereign EXIT Protocol - National transition framework
- Chapter 10 Companion: Geopolitics of Abundance - Where Douglas becomes protagonist
This character profile supports Chapter 10 of Unscarcity: The Book.
