The Scholar of Doom

Matt Boyd is a 45-year-old consultant and researcher based in Reefton, a serene former gold-mining town at the foot of the Southern Alps. Over the past five years or so, he has established himself as a leading expert on global catastrophic risk and its implications for New Zealand. Some of the papers that Boyd has written — advocating for border closures and for designating New Zealand as a safe haven in the event of a major disaster — seemed exotic when they were first published.

But the advent of Covid-19 has changed all that. Boyd stands for an increasingly influential school of thought, a Kiwi brand of survivalism, that may have shaped New Zealand’s radical response to the pandemic. In fact, he has collaborated repeatedly with professors Nick Wilson and Michael Baker, both at the University of Otago, who as leading experts on Covid have become household names. We wanted to know more about Boyd’s thinking and