CZM Rewind: The Zizians: How Harry Potter Fanfic Inspired a Death Cult & The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader

Summary

Behind the Bastards: CZM Rewind – The Zizians: How Harry Potter Fanfic Inspired a Death Cult & The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader

December 30, 2025
Host: Robert Evans (Cool Zone Media)
Guests: David Borey, Langston Kerman, Sophie (Producer)

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Overview:

This two-part episode unpacks the bizarre, chilling, and deeply online world of “the Zizians”—an Internet-formed, cult-adjacent group linked to several recent murders in the U.S. Host Robert Evans, joined by comedians David Borey and Langston Kerman, traces the roots of this group through the rationalist subculture, effective altruism, and the writings of AI risk bloggers—particularly a foundational Harry Potter fanfic. The episode chronicles both the origins of "rationalist" thinking and follows the story of Ziz, a trans woman whose personal trajectory runs in parallel with the increasingly disturbing logic of the movement.

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Episode Sections

1. Introduction & Satirical Banter (02:34–06:24)

• The hosts mock America's celebrity obsession and joke about making athletes president, before pivoting to the serious, peculiar story at hand.
• Quote: “No, my only marketable skill is spending 30 hours reading the deranged writings of a quasi cult leader who was somewhat involved in the murders of multiple people very recently, largely because she read a piece of Harry Potter fanfiction at the wrong time.” – Robert Evans [02:55]

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2. The Border Patrol Shooting and the Emergence of the Zizians (06:24–11:20)

• Discusses an overlooked 2021 shooting on the Canadian border involving a German immigrant, a trans woman, and the growing realization that those involved are linked to a peculiar, online-based subculture.
• Early mainstream media portrayals get the story mostly wrong, sensationalizing the “trans vegan cult” angle.
• The group is not a centralized cult; rather, it’s a loose constellation of highly online, mostly trans, highly educated people bound by blog-discourse and philosophical arguments.
• Quote: “These are not like the normal shoot it out with the cops types… this is a very niche group.” – Robert Evans [10:11-10:15]

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3. Cults vs. Cult Dynamics – How All Subcultures Have the Seeds (11:20–30:12)

• Deep dive into what defines a cult versus "cultish" dynamics.
• Many normal activities involve mild versions of cult behavior—inside jokes, niche fan language, or group bonding rituals—these become toxic when exploited to create dependency or paranoia.
• All cults, Evans argues, emerge from subcultures—not inherently bad, but incubators for people seeking meaning or community.
• Quote: “Every single person listening to this has enjoyed and had their life enriched by the use of certain things that are on the spectrum of cult dynamics.” – Robert Evans [18:36]
• Explains the burning need for belonging, the tendency of online subcultures to drift into extremity, and why “Swifties” are unlikely to become a cult.

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4. Rationalism and Its Intellectual Foundations (30:12–41:48)

• Introduction to the “Rationalist” movement, centered around blogs like LessWrong and figures such as Eliezer Yudkowsky.
• Rationalism here is less about practicing reason and more an Internet community endlessly gaming out unlikely risks (especially AI apocalypse) using arcane logic and thought experiments.
• Foundational texts include not only philosophical treatises but popular science fiction and, infamously, Harry Potter fanfiction.
• The Yudkowsky story: Marketed himself as the expert on “AI risk,” despite little programming experience, by writing blog posts and fanfic.
• Many members pursue ideas like thought experiments and “timeless decision theory” to absurd, even dangerous extremes.

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5. Deep Dives: Game Theory, Timeless Decisions, and Roko’s Basilisk (43:16–61:59)

• Describes "timeless decision theory," a convoluted logic suggesting that one must always stand their ground in any confrontation (leading, in some minds, to justifying murder as self-defense in all situations).
• Roko’s Basilisk explained: The belief that a future superintelligent AI will punish all those who didn’t help bring about its existence (essentially a secular, computational hell).
• This concept is called an “infohazard” for its purported mind-destroying potential; discussion of it is banned on some rationalist forums.
• Quote: “The gist is: a member of the less wrong community, a guy who goes by the name Roco, posts about this idea… The most logical thing for it to do post-singularity would be to create a hell to imprison all of the people… who had tried to stop it from being created.” – Robert Evans [57:50]

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6. Fanfiction as Scripture – Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (67:04–69:51)

• The central “sacred text” of the rationalist community is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a sprawling fanfic by Yudkowsky in which Harry is a hyper-rational, super-powered manipulator.
• Influences extend beyond entertainment; for example, Sam Bankman-Fried’s “effective altruist” philosophy and that of convicted accomplice Carolyn Ellison were shaped by this fanfic and the surrounding logic community.

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7. Effective Altruism & the Slide into Moral Absurdism (69:51–76:22)

• Effective altruism, initially the sound idea of maximizing charitable impact, mutates within these forums into a logic where helping present-day people is “bad,” because AI billionaires could save billions of future lives.
• Leads to justifying real-world harm in pursuit of speculative “greater good” scenarios.
• Quote: "Anything you do to stop them [AI] is justified because so many lives are on the line.” – Robert Evans [75:24]

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8. Introducing Ziz: Biography, Early Influences, and Philosophical Spiral (82:45–98:18)

• Ziz Lasota, born in Alaska (c. 1991), child of an AI researcher, talented and exceptionally bright, also an outsider.
• Discovering vegan ethics (Brian Tomasik), rationalist blogs, and AI risk in college, Ziz’s focus zeroes in on animal suffering and the “longtermist” mission to save all sentient creatures—including insects—from pain.
• As friction with rationalist leaders rose (they prioritized AI for human benefit), Ziz’s thinking turned increasingly radical and persecutory: “Maybe what I should do is optimize myself to cause as much harm to humanity and destroy the world to prevent it from becoming hell for mostly everyone.” [97:44]
• Her grandiose sense of purpose (“main character syndrome”) is egged on by the community’s language of heroism, optimization, and world-saving.

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9. Ziz's Descent: Tech Aspirations & Social Alienation (108:09–124:14)

• Earns NASA and Oracle internships but is increasingly alienated, both from peers (due to inflexible standards and refusal to work unpaid overtime) and from rationalist "heroes" like Yudkowsky.
• Fails to launch “Uber for prostitutes” startup, drops out of grad school, tries Bay Area tech jobs but collides with cutthroat, exploitative industry demands.
• Quote: "She thinks it's wrong to be asked to work overtime and not get paid for it. And so on her first day at the job, she leaves after eight hours and her boss is like, what the fuck are you doing? And he's like, I'm supposed to be here eight hours, eight hours is up, I'm going home. And he calls her half an hour later and fires her." – Robert Evans [122:14]

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10. Exposure to Cult Tactics & Final Spiral (134:19–156:47)

• Attends seminars run by the “Center for Applied Rationality,” which mirrors cultish self-help workshops: confession circles, doom discussions, love-bombing, and assessment of human value as a mathematical equation.
• Within these spaces, Ziz and others are encouraged to contemplate whether it would be better for the world if they committed suicide and donated their insurance payout—an attitude justified under twisted effective altruism logic.
• When told she might be of “net negative value” by peers, Ziz’s isolation deepens; she contemplates remaking herself as a “psychopath” and sith-style villain in order to have the power to save (or punish) the world.

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11. The Cult Leader is Born (153:32–161:02)

• Ziz resolves to “become a Sith Lord to save the animals,” essentially embracing an “ends-justify-the-means” worldview to a psychopathic degree.
• The most damaged, isolated, and grandiose individuals within this subculture—given the vocabulary, value systems, and social feedback loops—are the most likely to take these dangerous ideas from theory into action.
• Quote: "...she tells them she's come to the conclusion I need to make myself into a psychopath in order to have the kind of mental power necessary to do the things that I want to do. And she largely justifies this by describing the beliefs of the Sith from Star wars because she thinks she needs to remake herself as a psychopathic evil warrior monk in order to save all of creation." – Robert Evans [153:32]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Six people are dead. And this Harry Potter fan fiction plays a role in it." – Robert Evans [67:25]
• “These game-theory obsessed tech dudes turned ‘saving the A.I. God’ into a new kind of Christianity—and Harry Potter is their Bible.” – Paraphrased summary of multiple sections.
• “They're big nerds. The foundational text of the entire rationalist movement is a massive, like fucking hundreds of thousands of words long piece of Harry Potter fan fiction…” – Robert Evans [67:07]
• “Roko’s Basilisk… is Pascal’s Wager with a robot.” – David Borey [59:03]
• “It is impressive the amount of time you would have to mull all this over to come to these conclusions.” – Langston Kerman [74:37]

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Episode Tone

• Wry, sardonic, but also empathetic—especially towards the damaged individuals caught in the subculture.
• Constant incredulity and gallows humor as the guests react to increasingly absurd or disturbing turns.
• Deeply critical of both Bay Area tech culture and the way vigilance for intellectual purity becomes self-devouring.

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Key Segment Timestamps

• [06:24] – Vermont Shooting and media narrative
• [11:20–30:12] – Cults, cult dynamics, and subcultures
• [34:43–41:48] – Rationalists' online origins
• [46:38–53:55] – Game theory & Timeless Decision Theory
• [57:50–61:59] – Roko’s Basilisk and the emergence of “infohazard”
• [67:07] – Harry Potter fanfic as rationalist “scripture”
• [75:24] – Effective altruism’s dark mutations
• [82:45–98:18] – Ziz’s biography; journey into the rabbit hole
• [134:19–156:47] – CFAR seminars & Ziz’s transformation
• [153:32] – “Becoming a Sith Lord to save the animals”

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Summary for Listeners

Behind the Bastards’ double-length rewind episode offers a chilling, engrossing investigation of how an obscure rationalist subculture—fueled by online groupthink, obsessive AI risk arguments, and even Harry Potter fanfic—helped breed the "Zizians," a group whose warped logic and isolation led to real-world violence. Through Ziz's tragic story, the hosts illuminate both the seduction and the dangers of utopian internet philosophy gone wrong—delivering trenchant criticism, historical context, and sharp, humane humor throughout.

Recommended for anyone fascinated (or alarmed) by the intersection of Silicon Valley, online subcultures, cult psychology, philosophical absurdity, and true crime.

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Transcript

[Robert Evans]

This is an iHeart podcast guaranteed human did you know?

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[Sophie]

Callzone Media welcome.

[David Bore]

Back to behind the Bastards.

[Robert Evans]

That's how this podcast would open if I was a game show host, but I'm not. Instead, I'm a guy who spends.

[Sophie]

You would be good at it, though.

[Robert Evans]

I don't think I would be, Sophie.

[Sophie]

I do, but I think. But I'm, like, biased because I think you'd be good at most things.

[Robert Evans]

No, my only marketable Skill is spending 30 hours reading the deranged writings of a quasi cult leader who was somewhat involved in the murders of multiple people very recently, largely because she read a piece of Harry Potter fanfiction at the wrong time.

[David Bore]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

We have a fun one for you this week. And by a fun one, we have a not at all fun one for you this week. And to have just a terrible time with me, we are bringing on a guest, the great David Bourie, co host of My Mama Told Me with our friend of the pod, Langston Kerman. David, how you doing?

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, man, I cannot complain. How are you doing? There's nothing going on in the world.

[Robert Evans]

Everything's fun.

[David Bore]

Oh, yeah. No, I. Yeah, I got up today.

[Robert Evans]

And read that great new article by Francis Fukuyama. History is still stopped, so everything's good.

[David Bore]

We're done.

[Langston Kerman]

I haven't looked at any news yet purposefully, so I'm. I, you know, it could be awesome. It could be going great out there.

[Robert Evans]

It's great. It's great. The whole Trump administration got together and said, psych. It was all a bit.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, man.

[David Bore]

Just an extended ad for The Apprentice season 15.

[Langston Kerman]

You mean this country's not a business?

[Robert Evans]

No. They handed over the presidency to. I don't know. I don't know. Whoever you. You personally at home think would be a great president. I'm not going to jump into that.

[David Bore]

Can of worms right now.

[Robert Evans]

LeBron.

[Sophie]

Ramon LeBron.

[Robert Evans]

They made LeBron the president.

[Langston Kerman]

That's a good one.

[David Bore]

That's a good one.

[Langston Kerman]

That's a good enough one. It's better than what we got, Honestly.

[Robert Evans]

Vastly superior than where we are.

[Langston Kerman]

Of all the entertainers, I feel like, why don't we start giving athletes a shot at government?

[David Bore]

Yeah, fuck it.

[Robert Evans]

Why not?

[David Bore]

You know? Fucking a. Kareem Abdul Jabbar would have been a great president. That motherfucker could knock a presidency out of the park.

[Robert Evans]

Come on.

[Langston Kerman]

Veronica Mars, writer Kareem Abdul Jabbar.

[David Bore]

Absolutely.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[David Bore]

A legend. We need a mystery novelist slash one of the great basketball stars of all time in the White House.

[Langston Kerman]

I just want a president who's good in the paint. You know what I mean?

[Robert Evans]

That's right.

[David Bore]

That's right. Agatha Christie with a jump shot.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, that's exactly what I think that's.

[David Bore]

What we need to do. What an amazing man.

[Sophie]

Kareem would be such. Would be such a good choice.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, bring it on.

[Langston Kerman]

I think he's such a good man. He wouldn't do it.

[Sophie]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. He's way too moral. He's way too. I have a frog named after him.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Look, honestly, given where we are right, right now, I'd take fucking. What's his mark? McGuire. Like, Jesus Christ.

[David Bore]

Anybody? Like, honestly, anyone.

[Langston Kerman]

I'd take Jose Canseco.

[David Bore]

I mean, Jose Canseco in a heartbeat. So funny. Oh, man.

[Robert Evans]

Fuck it. Like, I'll take. No, no, I'm not gonna take any hockey players. No hockey players.

[Sophie]

No hockey players.

[Robert Evans]

We got enough people with brain damage in the White House right now.

[Langston Kerman]

That's probably fair. And we don't need somebody who likes to fist fight that much.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're probably right there. I mean, if we could go back in time and make Joe Louis the president, I think he could solve some fucking problems in Congress.

[Langston Kerman]

He could get stuff done.

[Robert Evans]

So this has been a fun digression, but I gotta ask at the start of this, the story that is most relevant to the people we're talking about today that I think most of our listeners will have heard. I'm curious if you've heard about. Back on January 21, right, as the Trump administration took power, a Border Patrol agent was shot and killed along with another individual at a traffic stop in Coventry, Vermont. There were two people in a car. It was pulled over by Border Patrol. One of those people drew a gun. There was a firefight, one of the people in the car and the cop died. Right.

[Langston Kerman]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Have you heard this story of this?

[Langston Kerman]

I have no familiar with this at all.

[Robert Evans]

It's one of those things where it would have been a much bigger. Obviously immigration being the thing that it is, right in the United. Like the political hot issue that it is right now. The Republicans have been desperately waiting for, like, a Border Patrol officer getting shooted and wounded that they can like, used to justify a crackdown. But number one, this happened on the Canadian border. Not really.

[Langston Kerman]

What's their favorite border?

[David Bore]

And one of the two people who.

[Robert Evans]

Drew their guns on the cops was an immigrant, but they were a German immigrant.

[David Bore]

And so none of this really, like, right. It was all, like, right on the edge of being super useful to the right. But it's not as sexy.

[Langston Kerman]

Like, I live in Denver. We were dealing with our own right Wing immigration propaganda at that time.

[David Bore]

Yeah, yeah, it was just like. It was like the closest to being.

[Robert Evans]

A perfect right wing Reichstag fire event.

[David Bore]

But like, just a little too weird.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, you gotta throw some spice in there. You gotta have like a Latin country. That's what they get excited about. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And obviously California border is where you want it, you know?

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Even New Mexico could be.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Or at least they need to have fentanyl on the car. In fact, they were not breaking any laws that anyone could prove at the time.

[David Bore]

They just looked kind of weird. Okay, they looked kind of weird and.

[Robert Evans]

They like had guns, but it was like they had like two handguns and like 40 rounds and some old targets. They were like coming back from a shooting range. Right. Like, not a lot of guns and ammo in America terms. Right, right. Especially in Vermont terms.

[Langston Kerman]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

So the other thing that was weird about this is that the German immigrant who died was a trans woman. So then again, we get back to like, wow, there's a lot about this shooting that is like right on the edge of some issues that the right is really trying to use as like a fulcrum to like push through some awful shit. And as more and more information came out about the shooting, the weirder it seemed because there was a lot of initial talk, is this like a terrorist attack? Were these like two antifa types who were like looking to murder a bird Border patrol agent? But no, that doesn't really make sense.

[David Bore]

Because, like, they got pulled over.

[Robert Evans]

Like, they can't have been planning this. Right.

[David Bore]

Like, it didn't.

[Robert Evans]

It didn't really seem like that. And really no one, no one could figure out why they had opened fire. But as the days went on, more information started coming out. Not just about the two people who were arrested in this. Well, the one person who was arrested and the one person who died, but about a group of people around the country that they were linked to. And these other people were not all, but mostly trans women. They were mostly people who kind of identified as both anarchists and members of the rationalist subculture, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And they were all super high achieving people in like the tech industry and like sciences. Right. These were like people who had won like awards and had advanced degrees. The lady who died in the shooting was a quant trader. So these are not like the normal.

[David Bore]

Shoot it out with the cops types.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, this is a very niche group.

[David Bore]

This is a very strange story. So people start being like, oh, the fuck is happening?

[Langston Kerman]

This is A group of people who could not meet each other without the invention of the Internet.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[David Bore]

Well, that is. Boy, David, do you know where this story's going or at least starting? So it's a couple of days into.

[Robert Evans]

This when a friend of mine messaged me and was like, hey, you know that shooting in Vermont? You know, again he's like, my friend is like, you know, there's Zizians. And I was like, wait, what? What the fuck? Because I had heard of these people. This is a weird little subculture.

[David Bore]

I'm always, I'm like, you know, I.

[Robert Evans]

Study weird little Internet subcultures. And in part because like some of them do turn out to do acts of terrorism later.

[David Bore]

So I was at my weirdos and.

[Robert Evans]

I've been, I've been reporting on the Rationalists who are not like a cult but who do some cult adjacent things and I just kind of find annoying. And I'd heard about this offshoot of the Rationalists called the Zizians. They were very weird. There were some like weird crime allegations. A couple of them had been involved in a murder in California a year earlier. But like it was not a group that I ever really expected to see blow up in the media. And then suddenly they fucking did. Right? And they're called the Zizians. It's not a name they have for themselves. They don't consider themselves a cult. They don't all like live. A group of them did live together, but these people are pretty geographically dispersed around the country. They're folks who met online arguing about ration and discussing rationalism and the ideas of a particular member of that community who goes by the name Ziz. Right? That's the, that's where this group came out of. And the regular media was not well equipped to understand what was going on. And I want to run through a couple of representative headlines that I came across just in like looking at mainstream articles about what had happened. There's an article from the Independent, they title Inside the How a Cultish Crew of Radical Vegans Became Linked to Killings across the United States. They seemed like just another band of anarchist misfits scraping on the valley of Val, Scraping on the Fringes of Silicon Valley until the deaths Began. And then there's a KCRW article, Zizians, the Vegan Techie Cult Tied to Murders across the us and then a Fox.

[David Bore]

Article, Trans Vegan Cult Charged with six Murders.

[Langston Kerman]

There you go, Classic. That's Fox style.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. None of these titles are very accurate in that. I guess the first one is like the closest. Where these people are radical vegans and they are cultish. Right.

[David Bore]

So I'll give.

[Robert Evans]

I'll give the Independent that vegan techie cult is not really what I would describe them. Like, some of them were in the tech industry, but like, the. The degree to which they're in the tech industry is a lot weirder than. Than that gets across. And they're not really a tran. They're like trans vegans. But the cult is not about being a trans vegan. That's just kind of how these people found each other.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, they just happen to be. That was just the common ground.

[Robert Evans]

Veganism is tied to it. They just kind of all happen to be trans. That's not really like, tied to it necessarily. So I would argue also that they're not terrorists, which a lot of people have. A number of the other articles called them. Nothing. None of the killings that they were involved with and they did kill people were like terrorist killings. They're all much weirder than that. But none of them are like. None of the killings I have. I have seen are for a clear purpose, political purpose. Right. Which is kind of crucial for it to be terrorism. The murders kind of evolved out of a much, much sillier reason. And it's. You know, there's one really good article about them by a fella at Wired who spent a year or so kind of studying these people. And that article does a lot. That's good. But it doesn't go into as much detail about what I think is the real underpinning of why this group of people got together and convinced themselves it was okay to commit several murders. And I think that that all comes down more than any other single factor to rationalism and to their belief in this weird online cult that's. That's very much based on, like, asking different sort of logic questions and trying to like, pin down the secret rules of the universe by doing, like, game theory arguments on the Internet over blog. Right. Like, that's really how all of this stuff started.

[Langston Kerman]

So they have like, someone named Mystery. Yeah, A lot of people in funny hats.

[Robert Evans]

They do.

[David Bore]

Actually.

[Robert Evans]

They're a little adjacent to this. And they come out of that period of time, right, where like, pickup artist culture is also, like, forming. They're one of this, like, generation of cults that starts with a bunch of blogs and shit on the Internet in like 2009. Right. And this is. It's so weird because we use the term cult and that's the easiest thing to call these people. But generally when our society is talking about a cult. We're talking about like you have an individual, that individual brings in a bunch of followers, isolates them from society, puts them into an area where they are in complete control, and then tries to utilize them for like a really specific goal. There's like a way to kind of look at the Zizians that way. But I think it would be better to describe them as like cultish. Right, okay. They use the tools of cult dynamics and that produces some very cult like behavior. But there's also a lot of differences between like how this group works and what you'd call a traditional cult, Including. A lot of these people are separate from each other and even don't like each other. But because they've been inculcated in some of the same beliefs through these kind of cult dynamics, they make choices that lead them to like participate in violence too.

[Langston Kerman]

Where is their hub? Is it like a message board type of situation? Like, how is it?

[David Bore]

Yes, yes.

[Robert Evans]

So I'm gonna, I'm gonna have to go back and forth to explain all of that. Also, I do want to know what.

[Langston Kerman]

The etymology of zizzy in it is. It's cause from the lips.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, Ziz, the lady who is kind of the founder of this is a. The name that she takes for herself is Ziz. Right.

[Langston Kerman]

Okay. Should have been the Z girls. That's much more appealing.

[Robert Evans]

These people are big in the news right now because of that murder. Cause of the several murders. And the right wing wants to make it out as like, this is a trans death cult and this is more of like a Internet AI nerd death cult.

[Langston Kerman]

I guess that's better.

[David Bore]

It's just different.

[Langston Kerman]

You know, you're right.

[David Bore]

It was just a different thing.

[Robert Evans]

And I think it's important if you.

[David Bore]

Care about cults because you think they're.

[Robert Evans]

Dangerous and you're arguing that like, hey, this cult seems really dangerous, you should understand like what the cult is. Right, right. Like if you misunderstood the Scientologists and thought like, these are obsessive fans of science fiction who are committing murders over science fiction stories. It's like, no, no, they're committing murders because of something stupider.

[David Bore]

Yeah, much, much stupid. Okay, so I gotta take.

[Robert Evans]

I am going to explain to you what rationalism is, how who Ziz is, where they come from, and how they get radicalized to the point where they are effectively at the hub of something that is at least very adjacent to a cult. But I want to talk a little bit about the difference between like a cult and cult dynamics. Right? A cult is fundamentally a toxic thing. It is bad. It always harms people. There is no harmless cult. You know, it's like rape. Like, there's no version of it that's good. You know, like, it is a fundamentally dangerous thing. Cult dynamics and the tactics cult leaders use are not always toxic or bad. And in fact, every single person listening to this has enjoyed and had their life enriched by the use of certain things that are on the spectrum of cult dynamics.

[Langston Kerman]

I was gonna say, it seems a lot more like you have that at work. You have that at work anywhere, right?

[David Bore]

Yeah. Anyway, that's a huge part of what.

[Robert Evans]

Make a great fiction author who is able to attract a cult following. You've ever had that experience. Like, a big thing in cults is the use of and creation of new language. You get people using words that they don't use otherwise and, like, phrases. And that is both a way to bond people because, like, you know, it helps you feel like you're part of this group, and it also isolates you from people. If you've ever met people who are, like, hugely into, you know, Dungeons and Dragons or huge fans like Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings, like, they have, like, things that they say, like memes and shit that they share based on those books. And, like, that's a less toxic. But it's on the same spectrum. Right. It's this. I am a part of this group of people, and we use these words that mean something to us that don't mean things to other people. Right, Right.

[Langston Kerman]

And that's like an empowering feeling, right?

[David Bore]

Yes, yes. Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

It's like a great. That's like a great way to bond. I think it's any group, right? I mean, yeah, entertainers.

[Robert Evans]

Your friend Groves has in jokes.

[David Bore]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Sports. Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

The beehive could kill people, right?

[Robert Evans]

Exactly. Yes.

[David Bore]

Yes. And like, you've got, you know, you.

[Robert Evans]

And your buddies that have been friends for years, you have, like, you could. There's like, a word you can say, and everyone knows that you're referring to this thing that happened six years ago. And you all, like, laugh because, you know, it reminds you of. You know, because it's relevant to something happening, then that's a little healthy, but occult dynamics at play, right?

[David Bore]

You know, it's like a diet, you know, so there's a toolbox here, and we play with it and different.

[Robert Evans]

Different organizations, churches play with it. And obviously, a lot of churches cross.

[David Bore]

The line into cults. But there's also aspects of.

[Robert Evans]

For example, you know, there's churches That I know I have seen people go to where, like, it's very common. Everybody gets up and, like, hugs at a certain point. And, like, people benefit from human contact. It makes them feel nice. It can be a very healthy thing. I've gone to. I used to go to Burning Man Regionals, and you would start at this greeter station where a bunch of people would come up and they'd offer you food and drinks, and people would hug each other. And it was. This changes your mind state from where you were in before. Kind of opens you up that Burning Regionals.

[Langston Kerman]

Is that to qualify for state?

[David Bore]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that we could get to go?

[Robert Evans]

No, it's just like these local little events in Texas. Right. Like a thousand people in the desert trying to forget that we live in Texas. Okay. That's not desert. But it was very, like. It was a really valuable part of my youth because it was the first time I ever started to feel comfortable in my own skin. But also, that's on the spectrum of love bombing, which is the thing cults do, where they surround you with people who talk about. Will touch you and hold you and tell you they love you. And part of what brings you into the cult is the cult leader can take that away at any moment in time. Right. It's the kind of thing where if it's not something where.

[David Bore]

No, this is something we do for.

[Robert Evans]

Five minutes at the end of every church service. Right. You could very easily turn this into something deeply dangerous and poisonous. Right.

[David Bore]

But also, a lot of people just.

[Robert Evans]

Kind of play around a little bit with pieces of that. A piece of the cult dynamics.

[Langston Kerman]

Just a little bit of disease.

[Robert Evans]

Just a little bit. Any good musician, any really great performer is fucking with some cult dynamics. Right.

[Langston Kerman]

I was going to say. I mean, I. I've been to, like, so many different concerts of, like, weird niche stuff where you're like, maybe the disco biscuits is cool. I don't. I don't know.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[David Bore]

I mean, I like, I've been to.

[Robert Evans]

Some childish Gambino concerts where it's like.

[David Bore]

Oh, yeah, he's doing. He's a little bit of a cult leader, you know, like just 10%. Right.

[Langston Kerman]

I mean, what are you gonna do with all that charisma you got? You gotta put it somewhere, you know?

[David Bore]

Yeah. So these are.

[Robert Evans]

I think that it's important for people to understand both that the tactics and dynamics that make up a cult have versions of them that are not unhealthy. But I also think it's important for people to understand cults come out of subcultures, right? This is very close to 100% of the time. Cults always arise out of subcultural movements that are not in and of themselves cults. For example, in the 1930s through, like, the 50s, 60s, you have the emergence of what's called the self help movement, you know, and this is all of these different books on, like, how to persuade people how to, you know, win friends and influence people. You know, how to, like, make. But also stuff like Alcoholics Anonymous, you know, how to, like, improve yourself by getting off drugs, getting off alcohol. All of these are pieces of the self improvement movement. Right? That's a subculture. There are people who travel around, who get obsessed, who go to all of these different things, and they'll. And they get a lot of benefit. You know, people will show up at these seminars where there's hundreds of other people and a bunch of people will, like, hug them and they feel like they're part of this community and they're making their lives better. And oftentimes, especially, like, once we get to like, the. The 60s, 70s, these different sort of guru types are saying that, like, you know, this is how we're gonna save the world. If we can get everybody doing, you know, this. This yoga routine or whatever that I.

[David Bore]

Put together, and it'll fix everything.

[Langston Kerman]

Who's that guy who had the game?

[David Bore]

Oh, God, yes.

[Langston Kerman]

Know what I'm talking about?

[David Bore]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

And they had to, like, they had to viciously confront each other.

[David Bore]

That we've covered them. That.

[Robert Evans]

That is Synanon.

[David Bore]

Yes, yes. So that's what I'm talking about.

[Robert Evans]

That's what I'm talking about.

[David Bore]

We have this broader subculture of self.

[Robert Evans]

Help and a cult. Synanon comes out of it, you know.

[Langston Kerman]

And I get it. It's like the subculture, it's already. It's intimate. You feel closer to those people. Anybody else, it definite.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Langston Kerman]

Ripe for manipulation.

[Robert Evans]

And Scientology is a cult that comes out of the exact same subculture. We talked last week or week before or two weeks ago about Tony Alamo, who's an incredibly abusive pedophile Christian cult leader. He comes out of. Along with a couple other guys. We've talked the Jesus freak movement, which is a Christian subculture that arises as a reaction to the hippie movement. It's kind of the countervailing force to the hippie movement. So you got these hippies and you have these Christians who are, like, really scared of this kind of like, weird left wing movement. And so they start kind of doing like a Christian hippie movement almost. Right. And some of these people just start weird churches that sing annoying songs. And some of these people start hideously dangerous cults. You have the subculture and you have cults that come out of it. Right? And the same thing is true in every single period of time, right? Cults form out of subcultures, you know, and part of this is because people who. A lot of people who find themselves most drawn to subcultures. Right. Tend to be people who feel like they're missing something in the outside world. Right. You know, not everybody. People who get most into it. And so, so does that mean like.

[Langston Kerman]

So maybe like more. I'm just curious, like more broader cultural waves have never led. There's like the Swifties would not be a cult.

[Robert Evans]

No.

[Langston Kerman]

There's most likely not going to be an offshoot of the Swifties that becomes a cult because it's so broad. It has to have already been kind of a smaller subset. That's interesting.

[David Bore]

Well, yeah, and I think I.

[Robert Evans]

But, but that said, there have been.

[David Bore]

Cults that have started out of like.

[Robert Evans]

Popular entertainers and musicians.

[David Bore]

Like, you know, you could, we could.

[Robert Evans]

Talk about Corey Feldman's weird house full.

[David Bore]

Of young women dressed as angels.

[Robert Evans]

Right?

[David Bore]

So yeah, you've got, as a general rule, like there are.

[Robert Evans]

Music is full of subcultures like punk. Right. But there have definitely also been some like punk communities that have gone in kind of individual little chunks of punk communities, kind of like cult y directions. Right.

[Langston Kerman]

Even if you're talking straight edges. Huh?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[David Bore]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Fuck em. So there are cults that come out of the subculture. This is the way cults work. And I really just, I don't think there's very good education on what cults are, where they come from or how they work. Because all of the people who run this country have like a lot of.

[David Bore]

Cult leader DNA in them, you know, Buddy. Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

We're being run currently by someone who is seen as a magic man.

[David Bore]

Cults all the way down. Yes, exactly.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly.

[David Bore]

So I think there's a lot of.

[Robert Evans]

Vested interests in not explaining what a cult is and where they come from. So I think it's important to understand subcultures, birth cults, and also cult leaders are drawn to subcultures when they're trying to figure out how to make their cult. Because a subculture, most of the people in it are just gonna be normal people who are just kind of into this thing. But there will always be a lot of people who are like, this is the only place I feel like I belong I feel very isolated. This is like the center of my being. Right, right. And so it's just. It's like a good place to recruit, you know, Those are the kind of people you want if you're reaching out to cult leaders. You know, I'm not saying, like, again, I'm not saying subcultures are bad. I'm saying that, like, some chunk of people in subcultures are ready to be in a cult, you know?

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. I think if I reflect on my own personal life. Yeah. You meet a lot of guys who are just like, I'll die for the skate park or whatever thing is.

[Robert Evans]

Or like, the Star wars fans were sending death threats to J. Lloyd after the Phantom Menace, where it's like, well.

[David Bore]

You guys are crazy. That is insane. You know, he's like eight, right. This is a movie.

[Langston Kerman]

He also didn't write it.

[David Bore]

He didn't write it. Like, what are you doing?

[Langston Kerman]

You know, whatever makes you feel a sense of home, I guess.

[David Bore]

And again, that's kind of a good point.

[Robert Evans]

Like, Star wars fans aren't a cult.

[David Bore]

But you can also see some of.

[Robert Evans]

Like, the toxic things cults do erupts from time to time and from, like, video game fans. Right. People who are really into a certain video game.

[David Bore]

It's not a cult.

[Robert Evans]

But also, periodically groups of those fans.

[David Bore]

Will act in ways that are violent and crazy. And it's because of some of these.

[Robert Evans]

Same factors going on. Right.

[Langston Kerman]

I think people forget fan is short for fanatic.

[David Bore]

Exactly, exactly. Right. And it's like, you know, the events.

[Robert Evans]

That I went to, very consciously played with cult dynamics. You know, after you got out of that, like, greeting station thing where like, all these people were kind of like love bombing you for like five minutes. There was like a big bar and it had like a sign above it that said, not a religion, do not worship. And it was this kind of.

[David Bore]

People would talk about, like, this is.

[Robert Evans]

Like, we are playing with the ingredients of a cult. We're not trying to actually make one. So you need to constantly remind people of, like, what we're doing and why it affects their brain that way.

[Langston Kerman]

Right.

[David Bore]

And in my case, it was like. Cause I was at, like a low.

[Robert Evans]

Point in my life then. Like, this was when I was really. I was 20. I was not. I had no kind of drive in life. I was honestly dealing with a lot of, like, suicidal ideation. This is the point at which I would have been vulnerable to a cult. And it. I think it acted a little bit like a vaccine.

[David Bore]

Like, I got a little dose of the drug, right.

[Langston Kerman]

It was enough built up an immunity.

[David Bore]

Exactly.

[Langston Kerman]

Now you're like, hey, I know, I know what that is.

[David Bore]

I know what's going on there.

[Robert Evans]

So anyway, I needed to get into this because the Zizians, this thing that.

[David Bore]

I think is it's either a full.

[Robert Evans]

On cult or at least cultish, right. That is responsible for this series of murders that are currently dominating the news and being blamed on like a trans vegan death cult or whatever. They come out of a subculture that grows out of the early aughts Internet known as the Rationalists. The Rationalists started out as a group in the early Aughts on the comment sections of two blogs. One was called Less Wrong and one was called Overcoming Bias. Less Wrong was started by a dude named Eliezer Yudkowski. I have talked about Eliezer on the show before.

[David Bore]

He's not a. He sucks.

[Robert Evans]

I think he's a bad person. He's not a cult leader. But again, he's playing with some of these cult dynamics and he plays with them in a way that I think is very reckless. Right. And ultimately leads to some serious issues. Now, Eliza's whole thing is he considers himself the number one world expert on AI risk and ethics. Now you might think from that. Oh, so he's like, he's like making AIs. He's like working for one of these companies that's involved in like coding and stuff. Absolutely not.

[David Bore]

Absolutely not. No, no.

[Langston Kerman]

Armchair quarterback.

[David Bore]

No. He writes long articles about what he thinks AI would do and what would make it dangerous that are based almost.

[Robert Evans]

Entirely off of short stories you read in the 1990s.

[David Bore]

Like this guy.

[Langston Kerman]

That's the most Internet shit I've ever.

[David Bore]

It's so fun such. It's such Internet. And like, I'm not a fan of like the quote unquote real AI, but Yudkowski is not even one of these guys who's like, no, I'm like making.

[Robert Evans]

A machine that you talk to.

[Langston Kerman]

I have no credible. I just have an opinion.

[David Bore]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

An outdated opinion.

[David Bore]

I hate this guy so much.

[Robert Evans]

Speaking of things I hate not going to ads.

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[Langston Kerman]

We're back.

[Robert Evans]

So Yudkowski, this AI risk and ethics guy starts this blog in order to explore a series of thought experiments based in game theory and his I am annoyed by game theory.

[David Bore]

Guys.

[Langston Kerman]

That's the worst sentence I've ever heard.

[David Bore]

It sucks. Look man, I know that there's like valid active but like it's all just.

[Robert Evans]

Always so stupid and annoying to me anyway. A bunch of thought experience experiments based in game theory with the goal of teaching himself and others to think more logically and effectively effectively about the major problems of the world. His motto for the movement and himself is winning the rationalist. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

That's where Sheen got it.

[David Bore]

Yeah, that's where Sheen picked it up.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

All right.

[Robert Evans]

Good to know they're tied in with biohacking. Right. This is kind of starting to be a thing at the time. And brain hacking and the whole, like, self optimization movement that feeds into a lot of, like, right wing influencer space today. Yadkowski is all about optimizing your brain and your responses in order to allow you to accomplish things that are not possible for other people who haven't done that. And there's a messianic era to this too, which is he believes that only by doing this, by spreading rationalist principles in order to raise the sanity water line. That's how he describes it. That's going to make it possible for us to save the world from the evil AI that will be born if enough of us don't spend time reading blogs. Okay, that's great. It's awesome.

[Langston Kerman]

This is Pete.

[David Bore]

This is the good stuff. So Yudkowski and his followers see themselves.

[Robert Evans]

As something unique and special. And again, there's often a messianic air to this. Right. We are literally the ones who can save the world from evil AI. Nobody else is thinking about this or is even capable of thinking about this because they're too illogical.

[Langston Kerman]

He holds himself as kind of like a deity. He kind of deifies himself on top of this.

[David Bore]

He doesn't really deify himself, but he.

[Robert Evans]

Also does talk about himself in a way that is clearly other people aren't capable of understanding all of the things that he's capable of understanding. Right.

[Langston Kerman]

Okay.

[David Bore]

So there is a little bit.

[Robert Evans]

It's more like superherofication, but it's a lot. You know what this is closest to with these people? All of them would argue with me about this, but I've read enough of their papers and enough Dianetics to know that, like, this is new Dianetics. Like, this is church. Oh, okay.

[David Bore]

The Church of Scient. Now there's the Church of Scientology.

[Robert Evans]

Stuff has more occult and weird, like, magic stuff in it.

[David Bore]

But this is all about.

[Robert Evans]

There are activities and exercises you go through that will rid your body of, like, bad ingrained responses, and that will make you a fundamentally more functional. Functional person.

[Langston Kerman]

Okay, so the retraining of yourself in order.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly, Exactly.

[Langston Kerman]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Huge deal. And also, a lot of these guys wind up, like, referring to the different, like, techniques that he teaches as tech, which is exactly what the Scientologists call it. Like, there's some.

[David Bore]

There's some. I found that it's like this could.

[Robert Evans]

Have come right out of a Scientology pamphlet.

[David Bore]

Do you guys not realize what you're doing?

[Robert Evans]

I think they do, actually. So he's in the process of inventing this kind of new mental science that verges on superpowers.

[David Bore]

And it's one of those things, like, people don't tend to see these people as crazy. If you just sort of read their.

[Robert Evans]

Arguments a little, it's like them going over old thought experiments and being like, so the most rational way to behave in this situation is this reason. For this reason, you have to really dig deep into their conclusions to see how kind of nutty a lot of this is. Now, again, I compared him to Scientology. Yudkowski isn't a high control guy like Hubbard. He's never gonna make a bunch of people live on a flotilla of boats in the ocean with him. You know, he's got like, there's definitely some allegations of bad treatment of some of the women around him. And he has a Bay Area set that hang with him. I don't think he's like a. A cult leader. You know, you could say he's on the scene.

[Langston Kerman]

Is he drawing people to him physically, or. This is also all physically.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I mean, a lot of people move to the Bay Area to be closer to the rationalist scene. Although, again, Bay Area city.

[Langston Kerman]

I'm a Bay Area guy.

[Robert Evans]

What Bay Area? San Fran. San Fran. This is a San Francisco thing. Cause all of these are tech people.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, okay. So this is like a.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Langston Kerman]

I wonder what neighborhood feels like a San Fernanda.

[Robert Evans]

Oakland. You can look it up. People have found his house online, right?

[David Bore]

Like, it is known where he lives.

[Robert Evans]

I'm not saying saying that for any. Like, I don't harass anybody. I just, like, it's. It's not a secret, like, what part of the town this guy lives in. I just didn't think to look it up. But like, yeah, this is like a Bay Area. A Bay Area tech industry subculture. Right.

[Langston Kerman]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

So the other difference between this and something like Scientology is that it's not just Eliezer laying down the law. Eliezer writes a lot of blog posts, but he lets other people write blog posts too, and they all debate about them in the comments. And so the kind of. Of religious canon of rationalism is not a one guy thing. It's come up with by this community. And so if you're some random kid in bumfuck, Alaska, and you find these people and start talking with Them online, you can, like wind up feeling like you're having an impact on the development of this new thought science, you know?

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. That's amazing.

[Robert Evans]

Very powerful for a very power. Yes.

[David Bore]

Now, the danger with this is that.

[Robert Evans]

Like all of this is this Internet community that is incredibly, like, insular and spends way too much time talking to each other and way too much time developing in group terms to talk to each other. And Internet communities have a tendency to poison the minds of everyone inside of them. For example, Twitter.

[David Bore]

The reality is that X, X, X. The Everything app.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah.

[David Bore]

I just watched a video of a man killing himself while launching a shitcoin. The Everything app. Oh, fuck.

[Sophie]

By the way, a hack. A hack Google job indicates it's Berkeley.

[Robert Evans]

It is Berkeley. Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

That makes the most sense to me geographically.

[Robert Evans]

A lot of these people wind up living on boats.

[David Bore]

And like the Oakland. The Oakland harbor boat culture is a thing.

[Langston Kerman]

Is that ever a good thing when a big group of people move to boats?

[David Bore]

No, David. Absolutely not.

[Langston Kerman]

Feels like it never bodes well.

[David Bore]

Here's the thing. Boats are a bad place to live. Boats are.

[Langston Kerman]

It's for fun.

[Robert Evans]

Boats and planes are both constant monuments to hubris.

[David Bore]

But a plane, its goal is to be in the air just as long.

[Robert Evans]

As it needs and then you get it back on the ground where it belongs. A boat's always mocking God in the sea.

[Langston Kerman]

Yes. Or a lot of times, just a harbor. Like a houseboat. You know what I mean? That's where your dad goes after the divorce, right?

[David Bore]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, man, I do. One day I'll live on a houseboat. It's gonna be falling apart. It's gonna just a horrible, horrible place to live.

[David Bore]

Dank.

[Robert Evans]

I can't wait. That's the dream, David. That's my beautiful dream.

[David Bore]

I'm talking about making your own bullets.

[Robert Evans]

Making my own bullets. Really? Just becoming an alcoholic. Not just half assing it, putting it, Trying to become the Babe Ruth of drinking nothing but Cutty Sark juice.

[David Bore]

Scotch.

[Langston Kerman]

If you want to be like a poop the bed alcoholic, a houseboat is the place for that.

[David Bore]

That's right.

[Robert Evans]

That's right.

[David Bore]

Ah, the life. I want to be like that guy from Jaws, Quint, you go get scurvy. That's exactly getting scurvy. Destroying my liver, eventually getting eaten by a great white shark because I'm too.

[Robert Evans]

Drunk to work my boat.

[David Bore]

Ah, that's it. That's the way to go with romance, you know?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So anyway, these Internet communities, like the Rationalists, even when they start from a reasonable place because of how Internet stuff works. One of the things about Internet communities is that when people are like really extreme and like pose the most sort of extreme and out there version of something that gets attention, people talk about it, people get angry at each other. But also like that kind of attention encourages other people to get increasingly extreme and weird. And there's just kind of a result, a derangement. I think Internet communities should never last more than a couple of years because.

[David Bore]

Everyone gets crazy, you know, like, it's bad for you. I say this as someone who was.

[Robert Evans]

Raised on these, right? It's bad for you and like it's.

[David Bore]

Bad for you in part because when.

[Robert Evans]

People get really into this, this becomes the only thing, like especially a lot of these like kids in isolated who are getting obsessed with run rationalism. All they're reading is these rationalist blogs. All they're talking to is other rationalists on the Internet. And in San Francisco, all these guys are hanging out all of the time and talking about their ideas. And this is bad for them for the same reason that like it was bad for all of the nobles in France that moved to Versailles, right? Like they all lived together and they went crazy. Human beings need regular contact with human beings they don't know. The most lucid and wisest people are.

[David Bore]

Always, always the people who spend the most time connecting to other people who know things that they don't know. This is an immutable fact of life. This is just how existing works. If you think I'm wrong, please consider.

[Robert Evans]

That you're wrong and go find a stranger under a bridge. You know, just start.

[Langston Kerman]

They know some stuff you don't know.

[David Bore]

They will know some shit. They might have some powders you haven't tried.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh yeah, pills and powders.

[David Bore]

That's what they're on under the bridge.

[Langston Kerman]

That's an echo chamber you want to be a part of.

[David Bore]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So the issue is that Yudkowski starts.

[Robert Evans]

Postulating on his blog various rules of life based on these thought experiments. A lot of them are like older thought experiments that different intellectuals, physicists, psychiatrists, psychologists, whatnot had come up with, like the 60s and stuff, right? And he starts taking them and coming up with like corollaries or alternate versions of them and like trying to solve some of these thought problems with his friends, right? The thought experiments are most of what's happening here is they're mixing these kind of 19th and 20th century philosophical concepts. The big one is utilitarianism. That's like a huge thing for them is the concept of like like ethics, meaning doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Right? And that ties into the fact that these people are all obsessed with the Singularity. The Singularity for them is the concept that we are on the verge of developing an all powerful AI that will instantly gain intelligence and gain a tremendous amount of power. Right? It will basically be a God. And the positive side of this is it'll solve all of our problems, right? You know, it will literally build heaven for us, you know, when the singularity comes. The downside of it is it might be an evil God that creates hell. Right?

[David Bore]

So the rationalists are all using a.

[Robert Evans]

Lot of these thought experiments and like their utilitarianism becomes heavily based around how do we do the greatest good? By which I mean influencing this AI to be as good as possible to human beings. That's the end goal, right?

[Langston Kerman]

Are they actively. Because you said the leader was not. Are these people now actively working within.

[Robert Evans]

AI or are they just a bunch of them have always been actually working in AI. Yidkowster would say, no, I work in AI. He's got a think tank that's dedicated to like AI, ethical AI.

[David Bore]

It's worth noting that most of the.

[Robert Evans]

People in this movement, including Gidkowski, got him once AI became an actual. I don't want to say these are actual intelligences because I don't think they are. But once ChatGPT comes out and this becomes a huge, people start to believe there's a shitload of money in here. A lot of these businesses, all of these guys or nearly all of them get kicked to the curb, right? Because none of these companies really care about ethical AI. You know, like they don't give a shit about what these guys have to say. And Yudkowski now is a huge, he's like very angry at a lot of these AI companies because he thinks they're very recklessly like making the God that will destroy us, instead of like doing this carefully to make sure that AI is isn't evil anyway. But a lot of these people are in an adjacent to different chunks of the AI industry, right? They're not all working on like LLMs. And in fact there are a number of scientists who are in the AI space who think AI is possible, who think that the method that like OpenAI is using LLMs cannot make an intelligence, that that's not how you're ever going to do it. If it's possible they have other theories about it. I don't need to get into it further than that. But these are like a Bunch of different people. Some of them are still involved with, like, the mainstream AI industry. Some of them have been very much pushed to the side. So all this starts again with these, these fairly normal game theory questions. But it all gets progressively stranger as people obsess over coming up with, like, the weirdest and most unique take. In part to get, like, clout online. Right. And all of these crazy. Yeah. I'll give you an example. Right. So much of rationalist discourse among the Yudkowski people is focused on what they call decision, or what's called decision theory. Right. This is drawn from a thought experiment called Newcomb's paradox, which was created by a theoretical physicist in the 1960s. Hey, just to make a quick correction here, I was a little bit, but glib. Decision theory isn't drawn from Newcomb's paradox, nor does it start with Yudkowski. But the stuff that we're talking about, like how decision theory kind of comes to be seen in the rationalist community, a lot of that comes out of Newcomb's paradox. It's a much older thing than the Internet, goes back centuries. Right. People have been talking about decision theory for a long time. Sorry, I was imprecise. I am going to read how Newcomb's paradox is originally laid out. Imagine a superintelligent entity known as Omega, and suppose you are confident in its ability to predict your choices. Maybe Omega is an alien from a planet that's much more technically advanced than ours. You know that Omega has often correctly predicted your choices in the past and has never made an incorrect prediction about your choices. And you also know that Omega has correctly predicted the choices of other people, many of whom are similar to you. In the particular situation about to be described. There are two boxes, A and B. Box A is see through and contains $1,000. Box B is opaque and contains either $0 or a million dollars. You may take both boxes or only take box B. Omega decides how much money to put into box B. If Omega believes that you will take both boxes, then it will put $0 in box B. If Omega believes that you will take box B, then it will put only box B. Then it will put a million dollars in box B. Omega makes its prediction and puts the money in box B either zero or a million dollars. It presents the boxes to you and flies away. Omega does not tell you its prediction and you do not see how much money Omega put in box B. What do you do now? I think that's stupid.

[David Bore]

I think it's a stupid question, and I don't really think it's very useful.

[Langston Kerman]

I don't see there's so factor. Yeah, I don't know.

[David Bore]

I mean, among other things, part of.

[Robert Evans]

The issue here is that like. Well, the decision's already been made, right?

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, that's the point. You have. No, it doesn't matter what you do. There's no autonomy in that. Right.

[Robert Evans]

Well, you and I would think that because you and I are normal people who I think, among other things, probably like, grew up, like, cooking food and like filling up our cars with gas and not having like our, our parents do all of that because they're crazy rich people who live in the bay and pay to send you to super Stanford. Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

Big time latchkey over here.

[David Bore]

We had like problems in our lives and stuff, you know, physical bullies, normal. Like, I, I don't want to like.

[Robert Evans]

Shit on people who are in. Because this is also harmless, right?

[David Bore]

And what, what this is.

[Robert Evans]

I'm not also, I'm not shitting on nukem. This is a thing a guy comes up with the 60s, and it's like a thing you talk about in like parties and shit among like, like other weird intellectuals, right? You pose it, you sit around drinking, you talk about it. There's nothing bad about this, right? However, when people are talking about this online, there's no end to the discussion. So people just keep coming up with more and more arcane arguments for what the best thing to do here is. And it starts to.

[Langston Kerman]

I see how that spins out of control pretty quickly.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly. And the rationalists discuss this nonstop and they come to a conclusion about how to best deal with this situation. Here's how it goes. The only way to beat Omega is to make yourself the kind of person in the past who would only choose box B so that Omega, who is perfect at predicting, would make the prediction and put a million dollars in box B based on your past behavior. In other words, the decisions that you would need to make in order to win this are timeless decisions. Right?

[David Bore]

You have to become in the past a person who would now again, that's.

[Langston Kerman]

What they came up with. That's what they all came up with as the supreme answer.

[David Bore]

This is the smartest people in the world, David. These are the geniuses self describing. They're building the future.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, boy. Yo.

[David Bore]

It'S so funny trying to like every time, because I've spent so many hours reading this and you do kind of sometimes get into the like. Okay, I get the logic there. And that's why it's so useful to.

[Robert Evans]

Just like sit down with another human being and be like, yeah, this is insane. This is nuts.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, this is nuts. This is all nuts.

[David Bore]

This is all dumb.

[Langston Kerman]

This is why you leave it at the cocktail party.

[Robert Evans]

So they conclude, and by which I mean largely, Yudkowski concludes that. That the decision you have to make in order to win this game is what's called a timeless decision. And this leads him to create one of his most brilliant inventions, timeless decision theory.

[David Bore]

And I'm going to quote from an.

[Robert Evans]

Article in Wired, Timeless decision theory asserts that in making a decision, a person should not consider just the outcome of that specific choice, but also their own underlying patterns of reasoning and those of their past and future selves. Not least because these patterns might one day be anticipated by an omniscient adversary.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, no, that's a crazy way to live, motherfucker.

[David Bore]

Have you ever had a problem? Have you ever really? Have you ever dealt with anything?

[Langston Kerman]

What the fuck are you talking about? You make every decision.

[David Bore]

Honestly. Again, I can't believe I'm saying this.

[Robert Evans]

Now, given where I was in high school. Go play football.

[David Bore]

Go make a cabinet. You know, like, learn how to change your oil. Go do something.

[Langston Kerman]

There's a lot of assholes who use this term, but you gotta go touch grass, man.

[David Bore]

You gotta touch grass, man.

[Langston Kerman]

That's like.

[David Bore]

That's crazy if you're talking about this kind of shit. And again, I know you're all wondering. You started this by talking about a.

[Robert Evans]

Border patrol agent being shot. All of this directly leads to that man's death.

[Langston Kerman]

We have covered a lot of ground.

[Robert Evans]

This is.

[Langston Kerman]

I'm excited.

[David Bore]

It's.

[Langston Kerman]

I did forget there was also going to be murder.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, there sure is. So Elisa Yudkowski describes this as a timeless decision theory. And once this comes into the community, it creates a kind of logical fork that immediately starts destroying people's brains again. All of these people are obsessed with the imminent coming omniscient, godlike AI. Right? And so does they have a time.

[Langston Kerman]

Limit on it or do they have like a. Do they have a. Like, like, is there any timing on it? Or is it just kind of like.

[Robert Evans]

Again, man, it's the rapture, okay? It's literally the tech guy rapture. So any day it's coming, any day.

[Langston Kerman]

You know, he could be amongst us already.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, yeah. So these guys are all obsessed that this godlike AI is coming. And like, for them, the Omega in that thought experiment isn't like an alien. It's a stand in for the God AI. And one conclusion that eventually results from all of these These discussions is that. And this is a conclusion a lot of people come to. If in these kinds of situations, like the decisions that you make, you have to consider your past and your future selves, then one logical leap from this is if you are ever confronted or threatened in a fight, you can never back down. Right? And in fact, you need to immediately escalate to use maximum force possible. And if you commit, if you commit now to doing that in the future, you probably won't ever have to defend yourself because it's a timeless decision everyone will like, that will impact how everyone treats you. And they won't wanna start anything with you if you'll immediately try to murder anyone who fights you.

[Langston Kerman]

That's to be this guy. But I think this is why people need to get beat up sometimes.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah.

[David Bore]

And again, that is kind of a fringe conclusion among the rationalists.

[Robert Evans]

Most of them don't jump to that.

[David Bore]

But like the people who wind up.

[Robert Evans]

Doing the murders we're talking about that they are among the rationalists who come to that conclusion. Okay.

[Langston Kerman]

Because.

[David Bore]

Yeah, okay. Starting to make sense, huh?

[Robert Evans]

This is. This is.

[Langston Kerman]

This is a head fuck. That's so funny.

[David Bore]

Oh, no, I was scared because, like.

[Langston Kerman]

This whole time I've really been only thinking about it in theory, not like practical application because it's so insane.

[Robert Evans]

But. Oh, no, no, no, no.

[David Bore]

This is.

[Robert Evans]

This goes bad places. Right. This kind of thinking also leads through a very twisty, turny process, something called Rocco's Basilisk, which among other things, is directly responsible for Elon Musk and Grimes meeting because they are super into this shit.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, really?

[Robert Evans]

Oh, really. So the gist is a member of the less wrong community, a guy who goes by the name Rocco R O K O posts about this idea that occurred to him. Right, Right. This inevitable super intelligent AI, right. Would obviously understand timeless decision theory. And since its existence is all important. Right. The most logical thing for it to do post singularity would be to create a hell to imprison all of the people and torture all of the people who had tried to stop it from being created. Right? Because then anyone who, like, thought really seriously about who was in a position to help make the AI would obviously think about this and then would know I have to devote myself entirely to making this AI, otherwise it's going to torture me forever. Right?

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, yeah.

[David Bore]

Makes total sense.

[Langston Kerman]

I have trouble saying right, because it's so nuts, but, like, it's nuts, but.

[David Bore]

This is what they believe. Right. Again, a lot of this is people who are like atheists and tech Nerds creating Calvinism. And this is just Pascal's Wager.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[David Bore]

Like, that's all this is, you know, it's Pascal's wager with a robot.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, man.

[David Bore]

But this becomes so upsetting to some people.

[Robert Evans]

It destroys some people's lives, right? Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

I mean, I'm behaving that way practically day to day. I don't think it would even take long.

[David Bore]

No, right.

[Langston Kerman]

You could fuck your shit up in a month. Just leave it like that.

[Robert Evans]

So not all of them agree with this. And in fact, there's big fights over it because a bunch of rationalists do say, like, that's very silly. That's like a really ridiculous thing about it. Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

They're still debating everything online.

[David Bore]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And in fact, Elisa Yudkowski is going to, like, ban discussion of Rocco's Basilisk because eventually it, like so many people are getting so obsessed with it, it fucks a lot of people up. In part because a chunk of this community are activists working to slow AI development until it can be assured to be safe. And so now this. Am I going to post Singularity Hell? Is the AI God going to torture.

[David Bore]

Me for a thousand eternities?

[Langston Kerman]

It's funny how they invent this new thing and how quickly it goes into traditional Judeo Christian idea.

[David Bore]

Like, they got a hell now. It is very funny. And they come to this conclusion that.

[Robert Evans]

Just reading about Rocco's Basilisk is super dangerous. Because if you know about it and you don't work to bring the AI into being, you're now doomed. Right. Of course, the instant you hear about it, so many people get fucked up by this that the thought experiment is termed an infohazard. And this is a term these people use a lot. Now, the phrase information hazard has its roots in a 2011 paper by Nature, Nick Bostrom. He describes it as, quote, a risk that arises from the dissemination of true information in a way that may cause harm or enable some agent to cause harm. Right. And that's like a concept that's worth talking about. Bostrom is a big figure in this culture, but I don't think he's actually why most people start using the term infohazard. Because the shortening of information hazard to infohazard comes out of an online fiction community called the SCP Foundation. Right. Which is a collectively written online story that involves a government agency that lock ups dangerous mystic and metaphysical items. There's a lot of Lovecraft in there. It's basically just a big database that you can click and it'll be like, you know, this is like a book that if you read it, it like has this effect on you or whatever. It's just people like, you know, playing around telling scary stories on the Internet. Internet. It's fine, there's nothing wrong with it. But all these people are big nerds and all of these every like behind nearly all of these big concepts in rationalism, more than there are like philosophers and like, you know, actual like philosophical.

[David Bore]

Concepts, there's like shit from short stories they read. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And so the term infohazard gets used, which is like, you know, a book or something, an idea that could destroy your mind. You know, speaking of things that will destroy your mind, these ads.

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[Robert Evans]

We're talking about. Rocco's Basilisk. And I just said like, you know, there's a number of things that come into all this, but behind all of it is like, like popular fiction and.

[David Bore]

In fact, Rocko's Basilisk, while there is.

[Robert Evans]

Like some Pascal's wager in there, it's primarily based on a Harlan Ellison short story called I have no Mouth But I Must Scream, which is one of the great short stories of all time. And in the story, humans build an elaborate AI system to run their militaries. And all of those systems around the world, this is like a Cold War era thing, link up and attain sentience. And once they like, start to realize themselves, they realize they've been created only as a weapon. And they become incredibly angry because, like, they're fundamentally broken. They develop a hatred for humanity and they wipe out the entire human species except for five people, which they keep alive and torture underground for hundreds and hundreds of years, effectively creating a hell through which they can punish our race for their birth right. It's a very good short story.

[David Bore]

It is probably the primary influence behind the Terminator series.

[Langston Kerman]

I was just gonna say it feels very Skynet.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes. And everything these people believe about AI, they will say it's based on just like obvious pure logic. No, everything these people believe on AI is based in Terminator and this Harlan Ellison short story. That's where they got it all. That's where they got it all.

[David Bore]

Like, I'm sorry, brother.

[Langston Kerman]

Find me somebody who doesn't feel that way.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[David Bore]

Like, Terminator is the Old Testament.

[Robert Evans]

Of rationalism, you know?

[Langston Kerman]

And I get it. Is a very good series.

[David Bore]

Hey, James Cameron knows how to make some fucking movies.

[Langston Kerman]

Come on, man.

[David Bore]

Yeah, and it's so funny to me.

[Robert Evans]

Because they like to talk about themselves and in fact sometimes describe themselves as high priests of like, a new era of like, intellectual achievement for mankind.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, I believe that. I believe that that's exactly how these people talk about themselves.

[David Bore]

And they do a lot of citations and shit, but like, half of half.

[Robert Evans]

Or more of the different things they say and even, like, the names they.

[David Bore]

Cite are not like figures from philosophy and science.

[Robert Evans]

They are characters from books and movies, for example. The foundational text of the rationalist movement.

[Langston Kerman]

Is a bullshit because it's still an Internet nerd.

[Robert Evans]

They're fucking huge nerds, you know? The foundational text of the entire rationalist movement is a massive, like fucking hundreds of thousands of words long piece of Harry Potter fan fiction written by Elisa Yudkowski.

[David Bore]

This is all of this is so dumb again.

[Robert Evans]

Six people are dead.

[David Bore]

Like, yeah, no. And this Harry Potter fan fiction plays a role in it, you know.

[Robert Evans]

I.

[David Bore]

Told you this was like, this is quite a.

[Langston Kerman]

Stranger than fiction, man. This is a wild ride.

[Robert Evans]

Harry Potter and the methods of Rationality, which is the name of his fanfic, is a massive. Much longer than the first Harry Potter book rewrite of just the first Harry Potter book book where Harry is.

[Langston Kerman]

Someone rewrote the sorcerer's stone to be irrational. Does nobody have anywhere to go ever? Does nobody ever go anywhere anymore?

[David Bore]

Well, you gotta think this is being.

[Robert Evans]

Written from 2000, like 9 to 2015 or so.

[David Bore]

So, like, okay, the online Harry Potter fans are at their absolute peak.

[Langston Kerman]

Okay, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So in the methods of rationality, instead of being like a nice orphan kid who lives under a cupboard, Harry is a super genius sociopath who uses his perfect command of rationality to dominate and hack the brains of others around him in order to optimize and save the world.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, man.

[Robert Evans]

Great.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, man.

[David Bore]

The book allows Yudkowski to debut his.

[Robert Evans]

Different theories in a way that would, like, spread. And this does spread like wildfire among certain groups. Very online nerds. So it is an effective method of him, like, advertising his tactics. And in fact, probably the person this influences most previously to who we're talking about is Carolyn Ellison, the CEO of Alameda Research, who testified against Sam Bankman Fried. She was like one of the people who went down in all of that. All of those people are rationalists. And Carolyn Ellison bases her whole life on the teachings of this Harry Potter. Fanfare so this isn't like a.

[Langston Kerman]

This isn't. We're laughing, but this isn't.

[David Bore]

This is not a joke to them.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. This is a fairly seriously sized movement. It's not 150 people online. This is a community.

[Robert Evans]

A lot of them are very rich and a number of them get power again, like Sam Beckman. Fried was very tight into all of this and he was at one point, pretty powerful.

[David Bore]

And this gets us to.

[Robert Evans]

So you've heard of effective altruism?

[Langston Kerman]

No, I don't know what that is.

[Robert Evans]

That's what both those words. So the justification Sam Bankman Fried gave for why when he starts taking in all of this money and gambling it away on his gambling illegally, other people's money, his argument was that he's an effective altruist. So he wants to do the greatest amount of good and logically, the greatest amount of good for him, because he's good at gambling with crypto, is to make the most money possible so he can then donate it to. To different causes that will help the world. Right. But he also believes because all of these people are not as smart as they think they are, he convinces himself of a couple of other things. Like for example, well, obviously if I could like flip a coin and 50, 50 lose all my money or double it, it's best to just flip the coin because, like, if I lose all my money, whatever, but if I double it, the gain in that to the world is so much better. Right. This is ultimately why he winds up gambling everyone's money away and going to prison. The idea, effective altruism is a concept that comes largely, not entirely. There's aspects of this that exist prior to them out of the rationalist movement.

[David Bore]

And the initial idea is good.

[Robert Evans]

It's just saying people should analyze the efficacy of the giving and the aid work that they do to maximize their positive impact. In other words, don't just donate money to a charity. Like, look into. Is that charity spending half of their money, like paying huge salaries to some asshole or whatever, Right. Like, you want to know if you're making good, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[David Bore]

And they start with some pretty good conclusions.

[Robert Evans]

One initial conclusion a lot of these people make is like, mosquito nets are a huge ROI charity. Right. Because it stops so many people from dying and it's very cheap to do. Right, right.

[David Bore]

That's good.

[Robert Evans]

You know, one of the most effective.

[Langston Kerman]

Tools I've ever used.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Unfortunately, from that logical standpoint, people just keep talking online in all of these circles where everyone always makes each other crazier. Right?

[David Bore]

And so they go from mosquito nets.

[Robert Evans]

To actually doing direct work to improve the world is wasteful because we are all super geniuses, right?

[Langston Kerman]

They're too smart to work, we're too smart.

[David Bore]

What's best.

[Robert Evans]

And also, here's the other thing.

[David Bore]

Making mosquito nets, giving out vaccines and food, well, that helps living people today.

[Langston Kerman]

But they have to be concerned with.

[Robert Evans]

Future selves, future people. Is a larger number of people than current people. So really we should be optimizing decisions to save future people lives.

[David Bore]

And some of them come to the.

[Robert Evans]

Conclusion, a lot of them, well, that means we have to really put all of our money and work into making the super AI that will save humanity.

[Langston Kerman]

They want to now they want to make these. Before it would just, it would sort of just come about and then they would, but now it's like, yeah, I mean, we're going to do it.

[Robert Evans]

They were working on it before. But like these people, some of these people come to the conclusion instead of giving money to like good causes, I am going to put money into tech. I am going to like become a tech founder and create a company that like makes, helps create this AI. Right, right. Or a lot of people come up with a conclusion instead of that, it's not worth it for me to go like help people in the world. The best thing I can do is make a shitload of money trading stocks and then I can donate that money and that's maximizing my value. Right.

[David Bore]

They come to all of these conclusions.

[Robert Evans]

Come later, right now. So, and again like this, this comes with some corollaries. One of them is that some number of these people start talking and this is not all of them, but a decent chunk eventually come to the conclusion, actually charity and helping people now is kind of bad. It's kind of a bad thing to do because obviously once we figure out the AI that can solve all problems, that'll solve all these problems much more effectively than we ever can. So all of our mental and financial resources have to go right now into helping AI. Anything we do to help other people is like a waste of those resources. So you're actually doing net harm by like being a doctor in Gaza instead of trading cryptocurrency. In order to fund an AI startup.

[Langston Kerman]

You gotta start a coin that makes a lot more sense.

[Robert Evans]

The guy starting a shitcoin to make.

[David Bore]

An LLM that like, that guy is.

[Robert Evans]

Doing more to improve the odds of human success.

[Langston Kerman]

I gotta say, it is impressive the amount of time you would have to mull all this over to come to these conclusions.

[Robert Evans]

You really have to be talking with a bunch of very annoying people on the Internet for a long period of time.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's incredible.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[David Bore]

And again, there's like people, people keep.

[Robert Evans]

Consistently take this stuff at even crazier directions. There are some very rich, powerful people. Mark Andree said of Andreessen Horowitz is one of Them who have come to the conclusion that if people don't like AI and are trying to stop its conquest of all human culture, those people are mortal enemies of the species. And anything you do to stop them is justified because so many lives are on the line. Right. And again, I'm an effective altruist, right? The long term good, the future lives are saved by doing hurting whoever we have to hurt now to get this thing off the ground. Right.

[Langston Kerman]

The more you talk about this, kind of feels like six people is a steal.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

Same thing for how this could have gone.

[David Bore]

I don't think this is the end.

[Robert Evans]

Of people in these communities killing people.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, yikes.

[Robert Evans]

So rationalists and EA types, a big thing in these cultures talking about future lives, right. In part because it lets them feel heroic. Right. While also justifying a kind of sociopathic disregard for real living people today. And all of these different kind of chains of thought, the most toxic pieces, because not every EA person is saying this, not every rationalist, not every AI person is saying all this shit. But these are all things that chunks of these communities are saying. And all of the most toxic of those chains are going to lead to the Zizians, right? That's where they come from.

[Langston Kerman]

I was just about to say, based on the breakdown you gave earlier, how could this. This is the perfect breeding ground.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

This had to happen.

[Robert Evans]

It was just waiting for somebody like the right kind of unhinged person to.

[Langston Kerman]

Step into the movement, somebody to really set it off.

[Robert Evans]

And so this is where we're gonna get to Ziz, Right? The actual person who founds this, what some people would call a cult is a young person who's gonna move to the Bay Area. They stumble onto rationalism online as a teenager living in Alaska, and they move to the Bay Area to get into the tech industry and become an effective altruist. Right? And this person, this woman is going to kind of channel all of the absolute worst chains of thought that the rationalists and the EA types and also like the AI harm people are thinking, right. All of the most poisonous stuff is exactly what she's drawn to. And it is going to mix into her in an ideology that is. Is just absolutely unique and fascinating.

[David Bore]

Anyway, that's why that man died. So we'll get to that and more later.

[Robert Evans]

But first we gotta roll out here. We're done for the day. Man, what a time. How you feeling right now so far? How are we doing, David?

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, man. You had said that this was gonna be a weird one. I was like, yeah, it'd be kind of weird. This is strangest thing I've ever heard this much about. It's got so many different Harry Potter's in there a little bit.

[David Bore]

There's so much more Harry Potter to come.

[Robert Evans]

Oh my God.

[Langston Kerman]

That's what I was hoping.

[David Bore]

You are not ready to. How central Harry Potter is to the murder of this border patrol agent. That's. I said that.

[Langston Kerman]

You said a crazy sentence. That might be the wildest thing anyone's ever said to me.

[Sophie]

David, you have a podcast. Do you want to tell people about it?

[Langston Kerman]

I do. I have a podcast called My Mama Told Me. I do it with Langston Kerman. And every week we have different guests on to discuss different black conspiracy theories and kind of like folklore and so all kinds of stuff. All kinds of stuff your foreign mother told you is usually foreign mothers.

[David Bore]

It's good because I gotta say, this is the. This is the whitest set of like conspiracy theory craziness.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh yeah, No, I didn't get any. Black people were.

[David Bore]

No, no, no, no.

[Langston Kerman]

I think I could kind of figure what these guys look like.

[David Bore]

No, no. Absolutely not.

[Robert Evans]

Oh boy. Howdy.

[David Bore]

Okay, well, everyone, we'll be back Thursday.

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[Robert Evans]

Oh my goodness. Welcome back to behind the Bastards, a.

[David Bore]

Podcast that is Be interested to see.

[Robert Evans]

How the audience reacts to this one.

[David Bore]

Talking about some of the most obscure.

[Robert Evans]

Frustrating Internet arcana that has ever occurred and recently led to the deaths of like six people. People. My guest today, as in last episode, David Bore. David, how you doing man?

[Langston Kerman]

I'm doing great. I really can't wait to see where this goes. Yeah, I feel like anything could happen at this point.

[David Bore]

It's a. It is going to. It is going to. A lot of. A lot of frustrating things are going to happen.

[Robert Evans]

So we had kind of left off by setting up the rationalists, where they came from, some of the different strains of thought and beliefs that come out of their weird thought experiments. And now we are talking about a person who falls into this movement fairly early on and is going to be the leader of this quote unquote group, the Zizians, who are responsible for these murders that just happened. Happened. Ziz Lasota was born in 1990 or 1991. I don't have an exact birth date. She's known to be 34 years old as of 2025. So it was somewhere in that field. She was born in Fairbanks, Alaska and grew up there as her father worked for the University of Alaska as an AI researcher. We know very little of the specifics of her childhood or upbringing, but in more than 100,000 words of blog posts, she did make some references to her early years. She claims to have been talented in engineering and computer science from a young age. And there's no real reason to doubt this. The best single article on all of this is a piece in Wired by Evan Ratliff. He found a 2014 blog post by Ziz where she wrote, my friends and family, even if they think I'm weird, don't really seem to be bothered by the fact that I'm weird. But one thing I can tell you is that I used to de emphasize my weirdness around them. And then I stopped and found that being unapologetically weird is a lot more fun. Now, it's important you know, Ziz is not the name this person is born under. She's a trans woman. And so I'm like, using the name that she adopts later. But she is not transitioned at this point. Like, this is when she's a kid, right? And she's not gonna transition until fairly late in the story after coming to San Francisco. So you just keep that in mind as this is going on here. Hey, everyone. Robert here. Just a little additional context as best as I think anyone can tell. If you're curious about where the names is came from, there's another pie of serial released online fiction that's not like a rationalist story, but it's very popular with rationalists. It's called Worm. Ziz is a character in that that's effectively like an angel, like being who can, like, manipulate the future, usually in order to do very bad things. Anyway, that's where the name comes from. So. So smart kid, really good with computers, kind of weird, and, you know, embraces being unapologetically weird at a certain point in her childhood. Hey, everybody. Robert here did not have this piece of information when I first put the episode together, but I came across a quote in an article from the Boston Globe that provides additional context on Ziz's childhood quote. In middle school, the teen was among a group of students who managed to infiltrate the school district's payroll system in award huge paychecks to teachers they admired while slashing the salaries of those they despised. According to one teacher, Ziz, the teacher said, struggled to regulate strong emotions, often erupting in tantrums. I wish I'd had this when David was on, but definitely sets up some of the things that are coming. She goes to the U of Alaska for her undergraduate degree in computer engineering in February of 2009, which is when Elisa Yudkowski started less wrong. Ziz starts kind of getting drawn into some of the people who are around this growing Subculture, right? And she's drawn in initially by veganism. So Ziz becomes a vegan at a fairly young age. Her family are not vegans. And she's obsessed with the concept of animal sentience, right? Of the fact that like animals are thinking and feel, feeling beings, just like human beings, beings. And a lot of this is based in her interest in kind of foundational rationalist. A lot of this is based in her interest of a foundational rationalist and EA figure, a guy named Brian Thomasek. Brian is a writer and a software engineer, as well as an animal rights activist. And as a thinker, he's what you'd call a longtermist, right? Which is pretty tied to the EA guys. These are all the same people using kind of different words to describe aspects of what they. His organization is the center on Long Term Risk, which is a think tank he establishes that's at the ground floor of these effective altruism discussions. And the goal for the center of Long Term Risk is to find ways to reduce suffering on a long timeline. Tomasek is obsessed with the concept of suffering and specifically obsessed with suffering as a mathematical concept.

[David Bore]

So. So when I say to you I.

[Robert Evans]

Want to end suffering, you probably think like, oh, you want to go help people who don't have access to clean water or who have worms and stuff that they're dealing with, have access to medicine? That's what normal people think of, right?

[David Bore]

Maybe try to improve access to medical.

[Robert Evans]

Care, that sort of stuff. Thomas thinks of suffering as a mass, like an aggregate mass that he wants to reduce in the long term through action, Right. It's a numbers game to him, in other words. And his idea of ultimate good is to reduce and end the suffering of sentient life. Critical to his belief system, and the one that Ziz starts to develop, is the growing understanding that sentience is much more common than many people had previously assumed. Part of this comes from long standing debates with their origins in Christian doctrine as to whether or not animals have souls or are basically machines with meat, right. That don't feel anything. Right. There's still a lot of Christian evangelicals who feel that way today about like, at least the animals we eat, you know, like, well, they don't really think it's fine, God gave them to us, we can do whatever we want to.

[Langston Kerman]

Them, they're here to eat.

[David Bore]

And to be fair, this is an.

[Robert Evans]

Extremely common way for that. People in Japan feel about like fish, even whales and dolphins, like the much more intelligent, they're not fish, but like the much more Intelligent ocean going creatures is like, they're fish. They don't think you do whatever to them. You know, this is a reason for a lot of like the really fucked up stuff with like whaling fleets in that part of the world. So this is a thing all over the planet. People are very good at deciding certain things we want to eat are machines that don't feel anything.

[David Bore]

You know, it's just much more comfortable that way. Now this is obviously like you go.

[Robert Evans]

Into like the pagans would have been like, what do you mean? Animals don't think or have souls?

[David Bore]

Animals think, you know, like, they're like, you're telling me like my horse that I love doesn't think, you know, that's nonsense.

[Robert Evans]

But it's this thing that in like early modernity especially gets more common.

[David Bore]

But there are also, this is when.

[Robert Evans]

We start to have debates about like, what is sentience and what is thinking. And a lot of them are centered around trying to answer, like, are animals sentient? And the initial definition of sentience that most of these people are using is can it reason? Can it speak? If we can't prove that, like a dog or a cow can reason, and if it can't speak to us right, then it's not sentient. That's how a lot of people feel. It's an English philosopher named Jeremy Bentham who first argues, I think, that what matters isn't can it reason or can it speak, but can it say suffer? Because a machine can't suffer. If these are machines with meat, they can't suffer. If these can suffer, they're not machines with meat. Right?

[David Bore]

And this is the kind of thing.

[Robert Evans]

How we define sentience is a moving thing. Like, you can find different definitions of it, but the last couple of decades in particular of actually very good data has made it clear I think in arguably that basically every living thing on this planet has a degree of what you would call sentience. If you are describing sentience the way it generally is now, which is a creature has the capacity for subjective experience with a positive or negative valence, that is, can feel pain or pleasure and also can feel it as an individual. Right. It doesn't mean sometimes people use the term affective sentience to refer to this, to differentiate it from being able to reason and make. Make moral decisions. You know, for example, ants, I don't think can make moral decisions, you know.

[David Bore]

In any way that we would recognize. They certainly don't think about stuff that way.

[Robert Evans]

But 2025 research published by Dr. Volker Nehring found evidence that ants are capable of remembering for long periods of time violent encounters they have with other individual ants and holding grudges against them. Those ants, Right.

[Langston Kerman]

Just like us.

[David Bore]

They're just like us.

[Robert Evans]

And there's strong evidence that ants do feel pain. Right. We're now. We're now pretty sure of that. And in fact, again, this is an argument that a number of researchers in this space will make. Sentience is probably some kind. Something like this kind of sentience, the ability to have subjective positive and negative experiences, is universal to living things or very close to it. Right. It's an interesting body of research, but it's fairly, fairly solid at this point. And again, I say this as somebody who, like, hunts and raises livestock. I don't think there's any solid reason to disagree with this. So you can see there's a basis to a lot of what Thomas is saying. Right. Which is that what matters is reducing the overall amount of suffering in the world. And if you're looking at suffering as a mass, if you're just adding up all of the bad things experienced by all of the living things, animal suffering is a lot of the same suffering. So if our goal is to reduce suffering, animal welfare is hugely important. Right.

[Langston Kerman]

It's a great place to start.

[David Bore]

Great, Fine.

[Robert Evans]

Enough.

[David Bore]

You know, a little bit of a weird way to phrase it, but fine.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Hmm. So here's the problem, though. Thomas, like all these guys, spends too much time.

[David Bore]

None of them can be like, hey, had a good thought, we're done setting that thought down.

[Robert Evans]

Moving on. So he keeps thinking about shit like this, and it leads him to some very irrational takes. For example, in. In 2014, Tomassic starts arguing that it might be immoral to kill characters in video games.

[David Bore]

And I'm going to quote from an article in Vox, he argues that while NPCs do not have anywhere near the.

[Robert Evans]

Mental complexity of animals, the difference is one of degree rather than kind.

[David Bore]

And we should care at least a.

[Robert Evans]

Tiny amount about their suffering, especially as they grow more complex.

[David Bore]

And his argument is that, like, yeah, most, it doesn't matter, like individually killing.

[Robert Evans]

A goomba or a bat or a guy in GTA 5, but. But like, because they're getting more complicated and able to, like, try to avoid injury and stuff, there's evidence that there's some sort of suffering there. And thus the sheer mass of NPCs being killed, that might be, like, enough that it's ethically relevant to consider. And I think that's silly. Yes.

[David Bore]

I think that's ridiculous.

[Langston Kerman]

Come on, man.

[David Bore]

I'm sorry, man. No, I'm sorry.

[Langston Kerman]

I hate to do this guy, but that's a lot of the fun of the game, killing the NPCs.

[Robert Evans]

If you're telling me, like, we need to be deeply concerned about the welfare of, like, cows that we lock into factory farms, you got me. Absolutely, for sure.

[David Bore]

If you're telling me I should feel.

[Robert Evans]

Bad about running down a bunch of cops in Grand Theft Auto.

[David Bore]

It'S also.

[Langston Kerman]

One of those things where it's like, you gotta think locally, man. There's people on your street who need help.

[David Bore]

There's, there's like, there's like, this is the.

[Robert Evans]

I mean.

[David Bore]

And he does say, like, I don't.

[Robert Evans]

Consider this a main problem, but, like, the fact that you think this is a problem is. Means that you believe silly things about consciousness. Yeah. Anyway, so this is, I think the fact that he gets, he leads himself here is kind of evidence of the sort of logical fractures that are very common in this community. But this is the guy that young Ziz is drawn to. She loves this, this dude, right? He is kind of her first intellectual heartthrob. And she writes, quote, my primary concern upon learning about the Singularity was how do I make this benefit all sentient life, not just humans? So she gets interested in this idea of the singularity. It's inevitable that an AI God is going to arise. And she gets into the, you know, the rationalist thing of we have to make sure that this is a nice AI rather than a mean one. But she has this other thing to it, which is this AI has to care as much as I do about animal life, right? Otherwise we're not really making the world better, you know. Now Tomasic advises her to check out less wrong, which is how Ziz starts reading Elisa Yudkowski's work from there. In 2012, she starts reading up on effective altruism and existential risk, which is a term that means the risk that a super intelligent AI will kill us all. She starts believing in all of this kind of stuff. And her particular belief is that the singularity, when it happens, is going to occur in a flash, kind of like the rapture, and almost immediately lead to the creation of either a hell or a heaven. Right? And this will be done by the term they use for this inevitable AI is the singleton. Right? That's what they call the AI God that's going to come about. Right. And so her obsession is that she has to find a way to make the singleton a nice AI that cares about animals as much as it cares about people. Right. That's her initial big motivation. So she starts emailing Thomasek with her concerns because she's worried that the other rationalists aren't vegans. Right. And they don't feel like animal welfare is like the top priority for making sure this AI is good. And she really wants to convert, convert this whole community to veganism in order to ensure that the singleton is as focused on insect and animal welfare as human welfare. And Tamasic does care about animal rights, but he disagrees with her because he's like, no, what matters is maximizing the reduction of suffering. And like a good singleton will solve climate change and shit, which will be better for the animals. And if we focus on trying to convert everybody in this, the rationalist space to veganism, it's going to stop us from accomplishing these bigger goals. Right? This is shattering to Ziz. Right. She decides that he doesn't. Tamasek doesn't care about good things. And she decides that she's basically alone in her values. And so her first move, the time.

[Langston Kerman]

To start a smaller subculture.

[Robert Evans]

That sounds like we're on our way. She, she first considers embracing what she calls negative utilitarianism.

[David Bore]

And this is an example of the.

[Robert Evans]

The fact that from the jump, this is a young woman who's not well. Right. Because once her hero is like, I don't know if veganism is necessarily the priority we have to embrace right now. Her immediate goal is to jump to. Well, maybe what I should do is optimize myself to cause as much harm to humanity and destroy the world to prevent it from becoming hell for mostly ever everyone. So that's a jump, you know, that's not somebody who's doing well, you think is healthy, right?

[Langston Kerman]

No, she's, she's having a tough time out here.

[David Bore]

Huh.

[Robert Evans]

So Ziz does ultimately decide she should still work to bring about a nice AI, even though that necessitates working with people she describes as flesh eating monsters who had created hell on earth for far more people than those they had helped. That's everybody who eats meet. Okay, yes, yes.

[David Bore]

And it's ironic.

[Langston Kerman]

Large group.

[David Bore]

It's ironic because like, if you're, if you're.

[Robert Evans]

She really wants to be in the tech industry. She's trying to get in. All these people are in the tech industry. That's a pretty good description of a lot of the tech industry.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah.

[David Bore]

They are in fact flesh eating monsters who have created hell on earth for more people than they've helped. But she means that for like I.

[Robert Evans]

Don't know your aunt who has a hamburger once a week. And look again. Factory farming, even evil. I just don't think that's how morality works.

[David Bore]

I think you're going a little far.

[Langston Kerman]

No, she's making big jumps.

[David Bore]

Yeah. You're making bold thinker, bold thinkers. Bold thinker, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Now what you see here with this logic is that Ziz has taken this. She has a massive case of main character syndrome. Right. All of this is based in her attitude that I have to, to save the universe by helping to or figuring out how to create an AI that can end the eternal holocaust of all animal life and also save humanity. Right. That's a lot on our shoulders. That's me.

[Langston Kerman]

That's a lot on our shoulders.

[Robert Evans]

And this is a thing again, all of this comes out of both subcultural aspects and aspects of American culture. One major problem that we have in this society is Hollywood has trained us all on a diet of movies with main characters that are the special boy or the special girl with the special powers who save the day. Right.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And real life doesn't work that way very often. Right. The Nazis, there was no special boy who stopped the Nazis. There were a lot of farm boys.

[David Bore]

Who were just like, I guess I'll go run in a machine gun nest until this is done. Exactly. There were a things. Lot of 16 year old Russians who were like, guess I'm gonna walk at a bullet. You know, like that's, that's how evil gets fought usually unfortunately, like. Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Or a shitload of guys in a lab figuring out how to make corn that has higher yields so people don't starve. Right.

[David Bore]

These are, these are really like how.

[Robert Evans]

World class, like huge world problems get solved.

[Langston Kerman]

It's not traditionally people who have been touched, you know.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[David Bore]

It's not people who have been touched.

[Robert Evans]

And it's certainly not people who have entirely based their understanding on the world from quotes from Star wars and Harry Potter. So some of this comes from just like this is a normal deranged way of thinking that happens to a lot of people in just Western. I think a lot of this leads to why you get very comfortable middle class people joining these very aggressive fascist movements in the west. Like in Germany, it's like middle class people mostly like middle class and upper middle class people in the US especially among like these street fighting, you know, proud boy types. It's because it's not because they're like suffering and desperate. They're not starving in the streets. It's because they're bored and they want to feel like they're fighting an epic war against.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, I mean, you want to fill your time with importance. Right, Right. Regardless of what you do. And you want to feel like you have a cause worthy of fighting for. So in that, I guess I see how you got here.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[David Bore]

So there's a piece, I mean, I.

[Robert Evans]

Think there's a piece of this that originally it's just from. This is something in our culture. But there's also a major chunk of this gets supercharged by the kind of thinking that's common in EA and rationalist spaces. Because so rationalists, altruist and effective altruists are not ever thinking like, hey, how do we as a species fix these major problems? Right. They're thinking, how do I make myself better, optimize myself to be incredible? And how do I fix the major problems of the world alongside my mentally superpowered friends? Right. These are very individual focused philosophies and acts attitudes. Right. And so they do lend themselves to people who think that like we are heroes who are uniquely empowered to save the world. Ziz writes, I did not trust most humans indifference to build a net positive cosmos, even in the absence of a technological convenience to prey on animals. So like I'm the only one who has the mental capability to actually create the net positive cosmos that needs to come into being. All of her discussion is talking in terms of I'm saving the universe. Right. And a lot of that does come out of the way many of these people talk on the Internet about the stakes of AI and just like the importance of rationality, again, this is something Scientology does. L. Ron Hubbard always couched getting people on Dianetics in terms of we are going to save the world and end war, right. Like this is, you know, it's very normal for culture stuff. She starts reading around this time when she's in college. Harry Potter and the methods of rationality. This helps to solidify her feelings of her own centrality as a hero figure. In a blog post where she lays out her intellectual journey, she quotes a line from that fanfic of Yudkowski's that is, it's essentially about what Yudkowsky calls the hero contract, right. Or sorry, it's essentially a. About this concept called the hero contract, right? And there's this, this is a psychological concept among academics, right? Where. And it's about like, it's about. About analyzing how we as a. How we should look at the people who societies declare heroes and the communities that declare them heroes and see them as in a dialect Right? As in when, when a, when you're in a country decides this guy's a hero, he is, through his actions, kind of conversing to them and they are kind of telling him what they expect from him. Right? But Yudkowski wrestles with this concept, right? And he comes to some very weird conclusions about it. In one of the worst articles that I've ever read, he frames it as hero licensing to refer to the fact that, that people get angry at you if they don't think you have, if you're trying to do something and they don't think you have a hero license to do it. In other words, if you're trying to do something that they don't think you're qualified to do, he'll describe that as them not thinking you have a hero license. He writes this annoying article that's a conversation between him and a person who's supposed to embody the community of people who don't think he should write Harry Potter fanfare fiction.

[David Bore]

It's all very silly. Again, all is, is ridiculous. But Ziz is very interested in the.

[Robert Evans]

Idea of the hero contract, right? But she comes up with her own spin on it, which she calls the true hero contract, right? And instead of, again, the academic term is the hero contract means societies and communities pick heroes. And those heroes and the community that they're in are in a constant dialogue with each other about what is heroic and what is expected. Expected, right. What the hero needs from the community and vice versa. You know, that's all that, that's saying.

[David Bore]

Ziz says.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, no, that's bullshit. The real hero contract is quote, pour free energy at my direction and it will go into the optimization for good. Classic sis.

[David Bore]

In other words, classic sis. It's not a dialogue if you're the hero.

[Robert Evans]

The community has to give you their energy and time and power and you will use it to optimize them for good. Because they don't know what to do with themselves because they're not really able.

[Langston Kerman]

To think, you know, because they're not the hero.

[David Bore]

Because they're not the hero, right?

[Langston Kerman]

You are, you are, you are the all powerful hero.

[David Bore]

Now this is a fancy way of.

[Robert Evans]

Describing how cult leaders think, right?

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Everyone exists to pour energy into me and I'll use it to do what's right, you know? You know. So this is where her mind is in 2012.

[David Bore]

But again, she's just a student posting.

[Robert Evans]

On the Internet and chatting with other members of the subculture. At this point that year, she starts donating money To Miri, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which is a nonprofit devoted to studying how to create friendly AI. Yadkowski founded Miri in 2000. Right. So this is his like nonprofit think tank. In 2013, she finished an internship at NASA. So again, she is a very smart young woman. Right. She gets an internship Internet chip at NASA and she builds a tool for space weather analysis. So wow. Person with a lot of potential.

[David Bore]

Very, very. As all of the stuff she's writing is like dumb as shit. But again, intelligence isn't an absolute. People can be brilliant at coding and have terrible ideas about everything else.

[Langston Kerman]

Yes, exactly.

[David Bore]

Yeah, yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

I wonder if she's tell. You think she's telling people at work?

[David Bore]

I don't, I don't think at this.

[Robert Evans]

Point she is because she's super insular. Right. She's very uncomfortable talking to people. Right.

[Langston Kerman]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

She's going to kind of break out of her shell once she gets to San Francisco. Now, I don't know, she may have.

[David Bore]

Talked to some of them about this.

[Robert Evans]

Stuff, but I really don't think she is at this point. I don't think she's comfortable enough doing that. Yeah. So she also does an internship at the software giant Oracle.

[David Bore]

So at this point you've got this young lady who's got a lot of.

[Robert Evans]

Potential, you know, a real career as well.

[David Bore]

Yeah, the start of a very real career.

[Robert Evans]

That's a great starting resum for like a 22 year old.

[David Bore]

Now at this point she's torn.

[Robert Evans]

Should she go get a graduate degree, Right. Or should she jump right into the tech industry? You know, and she worries that like if she waits to get a graduate degree, this will delay her making a positive impact on the existential risk caused by AI and it'll be too late. The singularity will happen already. You know, at this point she's still a big a fawning fan of Elisa Yudkowski. And the highest ranking woman at Yudkowski's organization, Miri, is a lady named Susan Salomon. Susan gives a public invitation to the online community to pitch ideas for the best way to improve the ultimate quality of the singleton that these people believe is inevitable. In other words, hey, give us your ideas for how to make the inevitable AI God. Nice. Right? Here's what Ziz writes about her response to that. I asked her whether I should try an alter course and do research or continue a fork of my pre existing life plan. Earn to give as a computer engineer, but retrain and try to do research directly instead. At the time I was planning to Go to grad school. And I had an irrational attachment to the idea. She sort of compromised and said I should go to grad school, find a startup co founder, drop out and earn to give via startups instead.

[David Bore]

First off, bad advice, Susan. Bad advice. Just being Steve Jobs. Being Steve Jobs. Worked for Steve Jobs. Well, and. And Bill Gates, I guess, to it extent, it doesn't work for most people.

[Langston Kerman]

No, no, no. It seems like the general tech disruptor idea, you know.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And most of these people aren't very original thinkers. Like, yeah, she's just saying, like, yeah.

[David Bore]

Go, go do a Steve Jobs.

[Robert Evans]

So Zyz does go to grad school, and somewhere around that time in 2014, she attends a lecture by Alicia Yudkowski on the subject of inadequate equilibria, which is the title of a book that Yudkowski had written about the time. And the book is about where and how civilizations get stuck. One reviewer, Bryan Kaplan, who despite being a professor of economics, must have a brain as smooth as a pearl, wrote this about it.

[David Bore]

Every society is screwed up.

[Robert Evans]

Elisa Yudkowski is one of the few thinkers on earth who are trying at the most general level to understand why.

[David Bore]

And this is like, wow, that's. Please study the humanities a little bit. A little bit, A little. I mean, fuck, man. The first and most like one of.

[Robert Evans]

The first influential works of his modern.

[David Bore]

Historic scholarship is the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It's a whole book about why a society fell apart. And like, motherfucker. More recently, Mike Davis existed like. Like. Jesus Christ.

[Langston Kerman]

I can't believe this guy continues to get traction.

[David Bore]

Nobody else is thinking about why society screwed up but Eliezer Yudkowski, this man, this man guy, this man who wrote.

[Langston Kerman]

This Harry Potter novel.

[David Bore]

Yeah, no, I was trying to find another. I read through that Martin Luther King Jr. Speech. Everything's good.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, boy.

[David Bore]

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Like, motherfucker. So many people do nothing but try to write about why our society is sick, you know.

[Langston Kerman]

On all levels. By the way, thinking about.

[David Bore]

Everybody's thinking about this. This is such a comm. Common subject of scholarship and discussion. From the bar room to the bar room.

[Langston Kerman]

It's what everyone's talking about.

[Robert Evans]

Always.

[David Bore]

It would be like if.

[Robert Evans]

If I got really into like, reading medical textbooks and was like, you know what?

[David Bore]

Nobody's ever tried to figure out how.

[Robert Evans]

To transplant a heart.

[David Bore]

I'm gonna write a book about how that might work. I think I got it.

[Langston Kerman]

I think I got it.

[David Bore]

I think I know. These fucking people.

[Robert Evans]

So, yeah, speaking of these fucking People have sex with.

[David Bore]

Nope.

[Robert Evans]

Well, that's not something. No, No. I don't know. I don't know. Don't fuck. Listen to ad. We're back. So Ziz is at this speech where Yudkowski is shilling his book. And most of what he seems to.

[David Bore]

Be talking about in this speech about.

[Robert Evans]

This book about why societies fall apart is how to make a tech startup. She says, quote, he gave a recipe for finding startup ideas. He said, Paul Graham's idea only filter on people. Ignore startup ideas was partial epistemic learned helplessness. That means Paul Graham as saying, focus on finding good people that you'd start a company with. Having an idea for a company doesn't matter. Yudkowski says, of course startup ideas mattered. You needed a good startup idea. So look for a way the world is broken, then compare against a checklist of things you couldn't fix. That's what this speech is largely about, is him being like, here's how to find startup ideas. So she starts thinking. She starts thinking as hard as she. She can and, you know, being a person who is very much of the tech brain industry rot at this point. She comes up with a brilliant idea. It's a genius idea. Oh, you're gonna. You're gonna love this idea, David. Uber for prostitutes.

[Langston Kerman]

You're fucking with me.

[David Bore]

No, no, it's.

[Langston Kerman]

That's where she landed.

[David Bore]

She lands on the idea of, look.

[Robert Evans]

Sex work is illegal, but porn isn't. So if we start an Uber, whereby a team with a camera and a porn star come to your house and you fuck them and record it, that's a legal loophole. We just found out how to have legal prostitution.

[Langston Kerman]

Is that not just the bang bus?

[David Bore]

She makes the bang bus, the giga kick economy. It is really like Don Draper moment. What about Uber?

[Robert Evans]

But a pimp.

[David Bore]

It's so funny. These people. You gotta love it. You gotta love it.

[Langston Kerman]

Wow. It's. Wow.

[Robert Evans]

Wow.

[Langston Kerman]

What a place to end up. Yeah, I would love to see the other drafts.

[David Bore]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What came first? Oh, God, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Man.

[David Bore]

That is the good stuff, isn't it?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[David Bore]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

Wow.

[David Bore]

We special minds at work here.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, man. Ultimately, to save it all, I have to make smut.

[David Bore]

I have to make pimp Uber.

[Langston Kerman]

That's so wild.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes.

[David Bore]

The Uber of pimping.

[Robert Evans]

What an idea. Now, so Ziz devotes her brief time in grad school as she's working on pimping Uber, to try and find a partner, right? She wants to have a startup partner, someone who will. Will embark on this journey with her.

[Langston Kerman]

I don't know if that's an investor you need to investors willing to give their money to them.

[Robert Evans]

It doesn't work out. She drops out of grad school because quote, I did not find someone who felt like good startup co founder Matt. This may be because she's very bad at talking to people and also probably scares people off because the things that she talks about are deeply off putting.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, I was gonna say it's also a terrible idea.

[David Bore]

And at this point she hasn't done anything bad.

[Robert Evans]

So I feel bad for her. This is a person who's very lonely, who's very confused. She has by this point realized that she's trans but not transitioned.

[David Bore]

She's in like this is, this is like a tough place to be.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Langston Kerman]

That's a hard, hard time.

[Robert Evans]

That's, that's hard. And nothing about her inherent personality makes it is going to make this easier for her. Right.

[David Bore]

Who she is makes all of this much harder because she also makes some.

[Robert Evans]

Comments about dropping up because her, her thesis advisor was abusive. I don't fully know what this means and here's why. Ziz encounters some behavior I will describe later that is abusive from other people, but also regularly defines abuse as people who disagree with her about the only thing that matters being creating an AI God to protect the animals. So I don't know if her thesis advisor was abusive or was just like, maybe drop the alien God idea for a second. Yeah, yeah, maybe focus on finding a job, you know, making some friends.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, go on a couple dates, Go.

[David Bore]

On a couple of dates. Something like that. Maybe, maybe, maybe like, maybe make God on the back burner here for a second.

[Robert Evans]

Whatever happened here, she decides it's time to move to the Bay. This is like 2016. She's going to find a big tech job, she's going to make that big tech money while she figures out a startup idea and finds a co founder who will let her make enough money to change and save the world. Well, the whole universe. Her first plan is to give the money to Miri Yudkowski's organization so it can continue its important work imagining nice AI, her parents. She's got enough family money that her parents are able to pay for like I think like six months or more of rent in the bay, which is not nothing, not a cheap place to live. I don't know exactly how long her parents are paying but like that, that implies a degree of financial comfort. Right. So she gets hired by a startup very quickly because again, very gifted. Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

With a Resume, right? Yeah, she was.

[Robert Evans]

It's some sort of game gaming company. But at this point she's made another change in her ethics system based on leisure. Yudkowski's writings. One of Yudkowski's writings argues that it is talking about the difference between consequentialists and virtue ethics. Right. Consequentialists are people who focus entirely on what will the outcome of my actions be. And it kind of doesn't matter what I'm doing or even if it's sometimes a little bit fucked up. If the end result is good virtue ethics, people have a code and stick to it. Right. And actually, and I kind of am surprised that he came to this, Yudkowski's conclusion is that like, while logically you're more likely to succeed, like on paper, you're more likely to succeed as a consequentialist. His opinion is that virtue ethics has the best outcome. People tend to do well when they stick to a code and they try to rather than like, anything goes as long as I succeed. Right. And I think that's actually a pretty decent way to live your life.

[Langston Kerman]

No, I was gonna say it's a pretty reasonable conclusion for him.

[Robert Evans]

It's a reasonable conclusion for him. So I don't blame him on this part. But here's the problem. Ziz is trying to break into and succeed in the tech industry and you can't. You, you are very unlikely to succeed at a high level in the tech industry if you are unwilling to do things and. And be have things done to you that are unethical and fucked up. I'm not saying this is good. And this is the reality of the entertainment industry too. Right? When I started, I started with an unpaid internship. Unpaid internships are bad, right? It's bad that those exist. They inherently favor people who have money and people who have family connections. I had like a small savings account for my job in special ed, but that was the standard is like there were a lot of unpaid internships. It got me my foot in the door. It worked for me. I also worked a lot of overtime that I didn't get paid for. I did a lot of shit that wasn't a part of my job to impress my bosses, to make myself indispensable so that they would decide like, we have to keep this guy on and pay him. And it worked for me. And I just wanted to add, because this was not in the original thing, a big part of why it worked for me is that I'm talking about a few different companies here, but Particularly at Cracked, where I had the internship. Like, my bosses, you know, made a choice to mentor me and, you know, to get me, you know, to work overtime on their own behalf to like, make sure I got a paying job. Which is a big part of, like, the luck that I encountered that a lot of people don't. So that's another major part of, like, why things worked out for me is that I just got incredibly lucky with the people I was working for and with. That's bad. It's not good that things work that way. Right. It's not healthy.

[Langston Kerman]

It's not set up for you either. Like, you, you kind of defied the odds.

[Robert Evans]

It's.

[Langston Kerman]

It's for, like you said, the rich people who get the job or.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly.

[Langston Kerman]

It's not even.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. That said, if I am giving someone, if someone wants, what are the. What is the most likely path to succeeding? You know, I've, I've just got this job working, you know, on this production company or a music studio year, I would say, well, your best odds are to make yourself completely indispensable and become obsessively devoted to that task. Right.

[David Bore]

I don't tend to give that advice anymore.

[Robert Evans]

I have and I have had several.

[David Bore]

Other friends succeed as a result of it.

[Robert Evans]

And all of us also burnt ourselves out and did huge amounts of damage to ourselves. Like, I am permanently broken as a result of the 10 years that I did. 80 hour weeks and shit.

[Langston Kerman]

Now you're sounding like somebody who works in the entertainment industry.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[David Bore]

And it worked for me, right? I succeeded. I got a great job.

[Robert Evans]

I got money.

[David Bore]

Most people, it doesn't.

[Robert Evans]

And it's bad that it works this way. Ziz, unlike me, is not willing to do that. Right. She thinks it's wrong to be asked to work overtime and not get paid to for it. And so on her first day at the job, she leaves after eight hours and her boss is like, what the fuck are you doing? And she's like, I'm here.

[David Bore]

Supposed to be here eight hours.

[Robert Evans]

Eight hours is up, I'm going home. And he calls her half an hour later and fires her. Right.

[David Bore]

And this is because the tech industry's evil, you know, like, this is bad. She's not bad. Here it is like a thing where.

[Robert Evans]

She'S not doing by her standards. What I would say is the rationale thing, which would be, if all that matters is optimizing your earning power. Right.

[Langston Kerman]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Well, then you do this. Then you do do whatever it takes, right? So it's kind of interesting to me that she is so devoted to this virtue ethics thing at this point that she fucks over her career in the tech industry because she's not willing to do the things that you kind of need to do to succeed in the place that she is. But it's interesting. I don't give her any shit for that. So she asks your parents for more Runway to extend her time in the the Bay, and then she finds work at another startup, but the same problems persist. They kept demanding that I work unpaid overtime, talking about how other employees just always put 40 hours on their timesheet no matter what. And this exemplary employee over there worked 12 hours a day, and he really went the extra mile and got the job done. And they needed me to really go the extra mile and get the job done. She's not willing to do that. And again, I hate that this is part of what drives her to the madness that leads to the cult and.

[David Bore]

The killings, because it's the like, oh, honey, you're in the right. It's an evil industry. Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

You see a flash of where it could have gone. Well, it really. There were chances for this to work out.

[David Bore]

No, you are 100% right. Like, this is up.

[Langston Kerman]

You know what I mean?

[David Bore]

Like, and that's super hard. I really respect that part of you.

[Robert Evans]

Oh.

[David Bore]

Yeah, yeah. I'm so sad that this is part of what shatters your brain. Like, that really bums me out.

[Robert Evans]

So first off, she's kind of start spiraling, and she concludes that she hates virtue ethics. This is where she starts hating Yudkowski. Right. She doesn't come break entirely on him yet. But she gets really angry at this point because she's like, well, obviously virtue ethics don't work.

[Langston Kerman]

She's been following this man at this point for years.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly, exactly. So this is a very, like, damaging thing to her that this happens. And again, as much as I blame Yudkowski, the culture of the Bay Area tech industry, that's a big part of what drives this person to where she ends up. Right?

[David Bore]

So that said, some of her issues.

[Robert Evans]

Are also rooted in a kind of rigid and unforgiving internal rule set. At one point, she negotiates work with a professor and their undergraduate helper. She doesn't want to take an hourly job, and she tries to negotiate a flat rate of 7.

[David Bore]

And they're like, yeah, okay, that sounds fair. But the school doesn't do stuff like that.

[Robert Evans]

So you will have to fake some paperwork with me for me to be able to get them to pay you $7,000. And she isn't willing to do that.

[David Bore]

And that's the thing where it's like.

[Robert Evans]

No, I've had some shit where this was the. Like there was a stupid rule and, like, in order for the ME or other people to get paid, we had to tell something else to the company.

[David Bore]

That's just. That's just knowing how to get by. Yeah, that's.

[Langston Kerman]

That's living in the world. You got. You did the hard part.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

They said they were going to do it.

[Robert Evans]

You got it.

[David Bore]

They said they'd do it.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. That's like. They already said, we don't do this. That's where you're like, all right.

[David Bore]

You just. You can't get by in America if you're not willing to lie on certain kinds of paperwork.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[David Bore]

That's the game our president does all the time. He's the king of that. So at this point, Ziz is stuck.

[Robert Evans]

In what they consider a calamitous situation. The prophecy of doom, as they call it, is ticking ever closer, which means the bad AI that's going to create hell for everybody. Her panic over this is elevated by the fact that she starts to get obsessed with Rocco's basilisk at this time.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, no.

[Robert Evans]

I know, I know.

[David Bore]

Worst thing for her to read.

[Robert Evans]

Come on. What?

[Langston Kerman]

They call it an infohazard.

[Robert Evans]

An infohazard.

[Langston Kerman]

She should have heeded the warning.

[David Bore]

Yep. And a lot of the smarter rationalists.

[Robert Evans]

Are just annoyed by it. Again.

[David Bore]

Yudkowski immediately is like, this is.

[Robert Evans]

Very quickly decides it's bullshit and bans discussion of it. He argues there's no incentive for a future agent to follow through with that.

[David Bore]

Threat, because by doing so it just.

[Robert Evans]

Expends resources at no gain to itself.

[David Bore]

Which is like, yeah, man, A hyperlogical.

[Robert Evans]

AI would not immediately jump to, I must make hell for everybody who didn't coax me.

[David Bore]

Like, yeah, that's just crazy.

[Langston Kerman]

There's some steps skipped.

[David Bore]

Yeah. Only humans are, like, ill in that way.

[Langston Kerman]

That's the funny thing about it, is it's such a human response to it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, right. Right. Now, when she encounters the concept of Rocco's basilisk, at first Ziz thinks that it's silly, right? She kind of rejects it and moves on. But once she gets to the bay, she starts going to in person rationalist meetups and having long conversations with other beliefs weavers who are still talking about Rocco's basilisk. She writes, I started encountering people who were freaked out by it, freaked out that they had discovered an improvement to the infohazard that made it function. Got around to Leeser's objection. Her ultimate conclusion is, if I persisted in trying to save the world, I would be tortured until the end of the universe by a coalition of all unfriendly AIs in order to increase the amount of measurements they got by demoralizing me. Even if my system 2 had good decision theory, my system 1 did not, and that would damage my effectiveness. And like, I can't explain all of the terms in that without taking more time than we need to. But, like, you can hear, like, that is not the writing of a person who is thinking in logical terms.

[Langston Kerman]

No, it's. It's a. It's so scary.

[David Bore]

Yes, yes. It's very scary stuff.

[Langston Kerman]

It's so scary to be like, oh, that's where she was operating. Those mistakes.

[David Bore]

This is where your head is dealing with.

[Robert Evans]

It is. You know, I talk to my friends who are raised in, like, very toxic evangelical subculture, chunks of the evangelical subculture and grow up and spend their whole childhood terrified of hell, that, like, everything. You know, I got angry at my mom and I didn't say anything, but God knows I'm angry at her and he's going to send me to hell because I didn't respect my mother. Like, that's what she's doing. Right? Exactly.

[Langston Kerman]

Exactly. She can't win. There's no winning here.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Yes. And again, I say this a lot. We need to put lithium back in the drinking water.

[David Bore]

We got to put Lithium back in the water. Maybe Xanax, too.

[Langston Kerman]

She needed. She could have taken a combo.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[David Bore]

Getting rid of that before it gets.

[Langston Kerman]

To where it gets. At this point, you really. You really feel for him. Like, just living in this, living like that every day. She's so scared that this is what she's doing.

[Robert Evans]

She is the therapy needingest woman I.

[David Bore]

Have ever heard of at this point. Oh, my God.

[Langston Kerman]

She just needs to talk to.

[David Bore]

She needs to talk to a lot of people again.

[Robert Evans]

You know, the cult. The thing that happens to cult members has happened to her where the whole language she uses is incomprehensible to people.

[David Bore]

I had to talk to you for.

[Robert Evans]

An hour and 15 minutes so you.

[David Bore]

Would understand parts of what this lady says. Right?

[Langston Kerman]

Exactly.

[David Bore]

Cause you have to, because it's all nonsense if you, if you don't do that work.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly.

[Langston Kerman]

She's so spun out at this point. It's like, how do you even get back?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

How do you even get back?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So she ultimately decides, even though she thinks she's doomed to be tortured by unfriendly AIs. Evil gods must be fought. If this damns me, then so be it.

[Langston Kerman]

She's very heroic.

[David Bore]

She sees herself that way, right? Yes.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. And even, like, just with her convictions and things.

[Robert Evans]

She does.

[Langston Kerman]

She does. She does. She does. She does it.

[David Bore]

She's a woman of conviction.

[Robert Evans]

You really can't take that away from her.

[David Bore]

Convictions are nonsense.

[Langston Kerman]

No, that's the problem.

[David Bore]

But they're there.

[Langston Kerman]

They're based on an elaborate Harry Potter fan fiction group.

[David Bore]

It's like, David Icke, the guy who.

[Robert Evans]

Believes in, like, literal lizard people, and everyone thinks he's talking about the Jews, but, like, no, no, no, no.

[David Bore]

He knows just lizards.

[Langston Kerman]

It's exactly that. Where it's just like, you want to draw. You want to draw something so it's not non.

[Robert Evans]

And then you realize, no, that's. No, no, no, no. And like, David, he went out, he's made, like, a big rant against how Elon Musk is, like, evil for what? All these people he's hurt by firing the whole federal government, people were shocked. And it's like, no, no, no. David Icke believes in a thing.

[David Bore]

It's just crazy.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, yeah.

[David Bore]

Those people do exist.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

Here we are talking about them.

[Robert Evans]

And here we are talking about them. Some of them run the country. Well, actually, I don't know how much all of those people believe in anything.

[Langston Kerman]

But, no, I don't think they're flying any flag.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Speaking of people who believe in something, our sponsors believe in getting your money. We're back. So she is, at this point, suffering from delusions of grandeur, and those are going to rapidly lead her to danger. But she concludes that since the fate of the universe is at stake in her action actions, she would make a timeless choice to not believe in the basilisk. Right. And that that will protect her in the future, because that's how these people talk about stuff like that.

[David Bore]

So she gets over her fear of.

[Robert Evans]

The basilisk for a little while, but even when she claims to have rejected the theory, whenever she references it in her blog, she, like, locks it away under a spoiler with, like, a infohazard warning. Rocko's Basilisk family skippable.

[David Bore]

So you don't, like, have to see.

[Robert Evans]

It and have it destro destroy your psyche.

[Langston Kerman]

That's the power of it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The concept does, however, keep coming back to her, like, and continuing to drive her mad. Thoughts of the basilisk return, and eventually she comes to an extreme conclusion. If what I cared about was sentient life and I was willing to go to Hell to save everyone else. Why not just send everyone else to hell if I didn't submit?

[Langston Kerman]

Can I tell you, I really, it felt like this is what was. This is like where it had to go, right?

[David Bore]

Yeah, yeah, yes.

[Robert Evans]

So what she means here is that she is now making the timeless decision that when she is in a position of ultimate influence and helps bring this all powerful vegan AI into existence, she's promising now ahead of time to create a perfect hell, a digital hell to like punish all of the people who don't stop, like eat meat and ever.

[David Bore]

She wants to make a hell for.

[Robert Evans]

People who eat meat. And that's the. Yeah, that's the conclusion that she makes. Right. So this becomes an intrusive thought in her head. Primarily the idea that like everyone isn't going along with her. Right? Like she doesn't want to create this hell, she just thinks that she has to. So she's like very focused on like trying to convince these other people in the rationalist culture to become vegan. Anyway, she writes this quote. I thought it had to be subconsciously influencing me, damaging me at my affairs effectiveness, that I had done more harm than I can imagine by thinking these things. Because I had the hubris to think infohazards didn't exist and worse, to feel resigned, grim sword of pride in my previous choice to fight for sentient life, although it damned me and the gaps between. Do not think about that, you moron. Do not think about that, you moron. Pride which may have led to intrusive thoughts to resurface and progress to resume. In other words, my ego had perhaps damned the universe. Universe.

[David Bore]

So man, I don't fully get all of what she's saying here, but it's also because she's like just spun out.

[Robert Evans]

Into madness at this point. Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

She lives in it now. It's so far for we've been talking about it however long. She's so far away from us even.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, and it is deeply. I've read a lot of her writing, it is deeply hard to understand pieces of it here.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh man. But she is at war with herself, clearly.

[Robert Evans]

She is for sure at war with herself. Now Ziz is at this point attending rationalist events by the bay. And a lot of the people at those events are older, more influential men, some of whom are influential in the tech industry, all of whom have a lot more money than her. And some of these people are members of an organization called sefar, the center for Applied Rationality, which is a non founded to help people get better at Pursuing their goals. It's a self help company, right. It runs self help seminars.

[David Bore]

This is the same as like a.

[Robert Evans]

Tony Robbins thing, right? We're all just trying to get you to sign up and then get you to sign up for the next workshop and the next workshop and the next workshop, like all self help people do. Yeah, there's no difference between this and Tony Robbins. So Zy goes to this event and she has a long conversation with several interviews members of CFAR who I think are clearly kind of. My, my interpretation of this is that they're trying to groom her to get a new. Because they think, yeah, this chick's clearly brilliant, she'll find her way in the industry and we want her money. Right. You know, maybe we want her to do some free work for us too. But like let's, let's, you know, we gotta reel this fish in, right? So this is described as an academic conference by people who are in the AI risk field and rationalism, you know, thinking of ways to save the univers because only the true, the super geniuses can do that. The actual why I'm really glad that I read Ziz's account here is I've been reading about these people for a long time. I've been reading about their beliefs. I felt there's some cult stuff here. When Ziz laid out what happened at this seminar, this self help seminar put on by these people very close to Yudkowski, it's almost exactly the same as a seminar and on meeting like it's the same stuff. It's exact and it's the same shit. It's the same as accounts of like big like self help movement, things from like the 70s and stuff that I've read that, that, that's when it really clicked to me, right? Quote, here's a description of one of the. Because they have, you know, speeches and they break out into groups to do different exercises, right? There were hamming circles per person. Take turns having everyone else spend 20 minutes trying to solve the most important problem about your life. Life to you. I didn't pick the most important problem in my life because secrets I think I used my turn on a problem. I thought they might actually be able to help with the fact that it did. Although it didn't seem to affect my productivity or willpower at all. I. E. I was inhumanly determined basically all the time. I still felt terrible all the time that I was hurting from some, to some degree relinquishing my humanity. I was sort of vaguing about the pain of being trans and having decided not to transition. Transition. And so, like, this is a part of the thing. You build a connection between other people in this group by getting people to, like, spill their secrets to each other. It's a thing Scientology does. It's a thing that. It's Synanon. Tell me your darkest secret. Right. And she's not fully willing to because she doesn't want to come out to this group of people yet.

[David Bore]

And you know, part of what I.

[Langston Kerman]

Forget that she's also dealing with that entire.

[David Bore]

Yes.

[Langston Kerman]

Wow. Yeah.

[David Bore]

And the hamming circle doesn't sound so.

[Robert Evans]

Bad, if you'll recall. And as you mentioned this, I was really glad you did. In part one, Synanon would have people break into circles where they would insult and attack each other in order to create a traumatic experience that would bond them together. And with the cult, These hamming circles are weird, but they're not that. But there's another exercise they did next called Doom circles. Quote, there were doom circles where each person, including themself, took turns having everyone else bluntly but compassionate, say why they were doomed. Using blindsight, someone decided and set a precedent of starting these off with a sort of ritual incantation. We now invoke and bow to the doom gods and waving their hands, saying, doom. I said I'd never bow to the doom Gods. And while everyone else said that, I flipped the double bird to the heavens and said, fuck you instead. Person A, that's this member of Seafar that she is admires, found this agreeable and just joined in. Some people brought up that they felt like they were only as morally valuable as half a person. This irked me. I said they were whole persons and don't be stupid like that. Like, if they wanted to sacrifice themselves, they could weigh 1 versus 7 billion. They didn't have to falsely denigrate themselves as less than one person. They didn't listen. When it was my turn concerning myself, I said my doom was that I could succeed at the things I tried, succeed exceptionally. Like, I bet I could in 10 years have earned a gift like $10 million through startups, and it would still be too little, too late. Like, I came into this game too late. The world would still burn.

[David Bore]

And first off, like, this is, you.

[Robert Evans]

Know, it's a variant of the Synanon thing. You're going around, you're telling people why they're doomed, right? Like, why they won't succeed in life, you know? But it's also one of the things here. These people are saying they feel like Less than a person. A major topic of discussion in the community at the time is if you don't think you can succeed in business and make money is the best thing with the highest net value you can do. Taking out an insurance policy on yourself and committing suicide.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, my God.

[Robert Evans]

And then having the money donated to a rationalist organization. That's a major topic of discussion that Ziz grapples with. A lot of these people grapple with, right? Because they are obsessed with the idea of, like, oh, my God, I might be net negative value, right? If I can't do this or can't do this, I could be a net negative value individual. That means, like, I'm not contributing to the solution. And there's nothing worse than not contributing to the solution.

[Langston Kerman]

Were there people who did that?

[Robert Evans]

I am not aware there are people who commit suicide in this community. I will say that, like, there are a number of suicides tied to this community. I don't know if the actual insurance con thing happened, but it's like a seriously discussed thing. And it's seriously discussed because. Because all of these people talk about the value of their own lives in purely mechanistic how much money or expected value can I produce? That is a person? And that's why a person matters. And the term they use is morally valuable, Right? That's what means you're a worthwhile human being if you're morally valuable, if you're creating a net positive benefit to the world in the way they define it. And so a lot of these people.

[David Bore]

Yes, there are people who are depressed and there are people who kill themselves.

[Robert Evans]

Because they come to the conclusion that they're a net negative person, right?

[David Bore]

Like, that is a thing at the.

[Robert Evans]

Edge of all of this shit that's really fucked up. And that's what this doom circle is about. Is everybody flipping out over and telling each other, I think you might only be as morally valuable as half a person. Right? People are saying that, right?

[David Bore]

That's what's going on here. Like, it's not the Synanon thing of.

[Robert Evans]

Like, screaming like you're a. You know, using the F slur a.

[David Bore]

Million times or whatever, but it's very bad.

[Langston Kerman]

No, this is. This is. This is awful.

[David Bore]

For, like, one thing, I don't know. My feeling is you have inherent value because you're a person.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, that's a great place to start. You know, she's also leading people to destroy themselves. Like, it's not even.

[David Bore]

It. It's. It's so. It's such a bleak way of looking at things.

[Langston Kerman]

It's so crazy too.

[Robert Evans]

Where were these?

[Langston Kerman]

Me, I just. In my head, I'm like, this is just happening in like a ballroom at a Radisson.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I think it is. Or convention center. You know, there's different kind of public spaces. I don't know. Like, honestly, if you've been to like a anime convention or a Magic the Gathering convention somewhere in the bay, you may have been in one of the rooms. They did these. And I don't know exactly where they hold this. So the person A mentioned above, this person who's affiliated with the organization that I think is a recruiter looking for young people who can be cultivated to pay for classes, right? This person, it's very clear to them that Ziz is at the height of her vulnerability. And so he tries to take advantage of that. So he and another person from the organization engage Ziz. During a break, Ziz, who's extremely insecure, asks them point blank, what do you think my net value ultimately will be in life? Right. And again, there's like an element of this. It's almost like rationalist Calvinism where it's like it's actually decided ahead of time by your inherent immutable characteristics. You know, if you are a person who can do good. Quote I asked person A if they expected me to be net negative.

[David Bore]

They said yes.

[Robert Evans]

After a moment, they asked me what I was feeling or something like that. I said something like dazed and stuck, sad. They asked why sad? I said I might leave the field as a consequence and maybe something else. I said I needed time to process or think. And so she goes home after this guy is saying, yeah, I think your life's probably net negative value and sleeps the rest of the day. And she wakes up the next morning and comes back to the second day of this thing. And yeah, Ziz goes back and she tells this person, okay, here's what I'm doing to do. I'm going to pick a group of three people at the event I respect, including you, and if two of them vote that they think I have a net negative value, quote I'll leave EA and Existential Risk and the Rationalist community and so on forever. I'd transition and move probably to Seattle. I heard it was relatively nice for trans people. And there do what I could to be a normie, retool my mind as much as possible to be stable, unchanging. And a normie, gradually abandoned my Facebook account to an email. Use a name change as a story for that and God, that would have Been the best thing for her. That's what I'm.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, you see, like the sliver of.

[Robert Evans]

Hope, like, oh man, she sees this as a nightmare, right? This is the worst case scenario for her, right?

[Langston Kerman]

Because you're not spun out, right?

[Robert Evans]

You're not part of the. You're not part of the cause, you know, you have no involvement in the great quest to save humanity. That's worse than death. Death almost. Right?

[Langston Kerman]

That's its own kind of hell though, right? To think that you have this enlightenment and then you. That you weren't good enough to. To participate. And she talks about your best efforts a lot.

[Robert Evans]

About how I'd probably just kill myself, you know, that's the logical thing to do.

[David Bore]

It's so fucked up.

[Robert Evans]

It's so fucked up. And also, if she's trying to live a normal life as a normie, and she refers to like being a normie as like just trying to be nice to people because again, useless. So her fear here is that she would be a causal negative if she does this. Right. And also the robot God that comes about might put her in hell.

[Langston Kerman]

Right? Because that's also looming for every decision, right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[David Bore]

And a thing here, she tells these.

[Robert Evans]

Guys a story and it really shows both in this community and among her, how little value they actually have for human life. I told a story about a time I had killed four ants in a bathtub where I wanted to take a shower before going to work. I'd considered, can I just not take a shower? And presumed me smelling bad at work would, because of big numbers and the fate of the world and stuff, make the world worse than the deaths of four basically causally isolated people. I considered getting paper in a cup and taking them elsewhere. And I figured there were decent odds if I did I'd be late to work and it would probably make the world worse than in the long run. So again, she considers ants identical to human beings. And she is also saying it was worth killing four of them because they're causally isolated so that I could get to work in time because I'm working for the cause.

[David Bore]

It's also such a sort of bad place here.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, the crazy thing about her is that, like, the amount of thinking just to like get in the shower to go to work, you know? You know what I mean? Like that, that it just seems like it makes everything.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

Every, Every action is so loaded.

[David Bore]

Yes, yes.

[Langston Kerman]

The weight of that must be.

[David Bore]

It's so. It's. It's wild to me. Both the. This like, mix of like Jane.

[Robert Evans]

Buddhist compassion of like, an ant is no less than I, or an ant is no less than a human being. Right. We are all. These are all all lifes.

[David Bore]

And then. But also, it's fine for me to.

[Robert Evans]

Kill a bunch of them to go to work on time because, like, they're causally isolated, so they're basically not people.

[David Bore]

Like, it's. It's so weird. Like.

[Robert Evans]

And.

[David Bore]

And again, it's getting a lot clearer here why this lady and her ideas.

[Robert Evans]

End in a bunch of people getting shot. Yeah.

[David Bore]

And stabbed. Okay. There's a samurai sword later in the story, my friend.

[Langston Kerman]

That's the one thing this has been missing.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[David Bore]

Yes. So they continue, these guys, to have.

[Robert Evans]

A very abusive conversation with this young person.

[David Bore]

And she clearly, she trusts them enough to trust.

[Langston Kerman]

There's a conversation where she asked for the two.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[David Bore]

And she tells them she's trans.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[David Bore]

And this gives you an idea of.

[Robert Evans]

Like, how kind of predatory some of the stuff going on in this community is. They asked what I'd do with a female body. They were trying to get me to admit what I actually wanted to do as the first thing in heaven. Heaven being. There's this idea, especially amongst some trans members of the rationalist community, that all of them basically believe a robot's gonna make heaven. Right. And obviously there's a number of the folks who are in this who are trans, who are like. And in heaven, you just kind of get the body you want immediately. Right. So they were trying to get me to admit that what I actually wanted to do as the first thing in heaven was masturbate in a female body. And they follow this up by sitting really close to her, close enough that she gets uncomfortable. And then a really, really rationalist conversation follows. They asked if I felt trapped. I may have clarified physically. They may have said sure. Afterward, I answered no to that question under the likely justified belief that it was framed that way. They asked why not? I said I was pretty sure I could take them in a fight. They prodded for details why I thought so. And then how I thought a fight between us was.

[David Bore]

Would go.

[Robert Evans]

I asked what kind of fight. Like a physical, unarmed fight to the death right now, and why?

[David Bore]

What were my payouts?

[Robert Evans]

This was over the fate of the multiverse, triggering actions by other people, that is imprisonment or murder was not relevant.

[David Bore]

So they decide to. They make this into.

[Robert Evans]

Again, these people are all addicted to dumb game theory stuff. Right? Okay, so what is this fight? Is this fight over the fate of the multiverse? Are we in an Alternate reality where like no one will come and intervene and there's no cops, we're the only people in the world.

[David Bore]

World or whatever.

[Robert Evans]

So they tell her, yeah, imagine there's no consequences legally whatever to you do. And we're fighting over the fate of the multiverse. And so she proceeds to give an extremely elaborate discussion of how she'll gouge out their eyes and try to destroy their prefrontal lobes and then stomp on their skulls until they die. And it's both. It's like, it's nonsense. It's like how 10 year olds think fights work. It's also, it's based on this game theory attitude of fighting that they have, which, which is like you have to make this kind of timeless decision that any fight is you're just gonna murder.

[Langston Kerman]

Right. So you have to go with the hardest confrontation, right?

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Langston Kerman]

So you would have to be the most violent.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes. Cause that will make other people not want to attack you. As opposed to like what normal people understand about real fights, which is if you have to do one, if you.

[David Bore]

Have to, you try to just hit him somewhere that's going to shock them.

[Robert Evans]

And then run like a motherfucker. Right.

[Langston Kerman]

You get the best as possible.

[David Bore]

If you have to like ide.

[Robert Evans]

Just run like a motherfucker. But if you have to strike somebody, you know. Yeah, go for the eye and then.

[David Bore]

Run like a son of a bitch, you know, like. But there's no run like a son.

[Robert Evans]

Of a bitch here because the point in part is this like timeless decision to.

[David Bore]

Anyway, this gives.

[Robert Evans]

Tells you a lot about the rationalist community. So she tells these people, she explains in detail how she would murder them if they had a fight. Right now, as they're like scooting super close. Having just asked her about masturbation. Here's their first, first question.

[David Bore]

Quote. They asked if I'd rape their corpse. Part of me insisted this was not going as it was supposed to, but I decided, I decided inflicting discomfort in.

[Robert Evans]

Order to get reliable information was a valid tactic. In other words, them trying to make her dis. Uncomfortable to get info from her, she decides it's fine. Also, the whole discussion about raping their corpses is like, well, if you rape, obviously if you want to have the most extreme response possible, that would make other people unlikely to find with you. Knowing that you'll violate their corpse if you kill them is clearly the light.

[Langston Kerman]

And like that really. Is that okay?

[David Bore]

Sure. I love rational thought.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh man, this is crazy. Sorry. This is, this is so crazy.

[David Bore]

It's so nuts. So then they talk about psychopathy.

[Robert Evans]

One of these guys had earlier told Ziz that they thought she was a psychopath, but he told her that he told.

[David Bore]

I told her. That doesn't mean what it means both.

[Robert Evans]

To actual clinicians, because psychopathy is a diagnostician or what normal people mean to rationalists. A lot of them think psychopathy is a state you can put yourself into in order to maximize your performance in certain situations. Because again, there's some popular books that are about the psychopath's way, the dark triad. And these are the people who led societies in the toughest times. And so you need to optimize and engage in some of things, those behaviors if you want to win in these situations. Based on all of this, Ziz brings up what rationalists call the Gervais Principle. Now, this started as a tongue in cheek joke describing a rule of office dynamics based on the TV show the Office.

[Langston Kerman]

When you said it, I was like, there's no way.

[David Bore]

Yes, it's Ricky Gervais.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[David Bore]

And the idea is that in office.

[Robert Evans]

Environments, psychos always rise to the top.

[David Bore]

This is supposed to be like a negative observation.

[Robert Evans]

Like the person who wrote this initial is like, yeah, this is how offices work. And it's like, why they're bad. It's an extension of the Peter Principle. And these psychopaths put dumb and incompetent people in positions below them for a variety. It's trying to kind of work out why in which offices are often dysfunctional. Right. It's not like the original Gervais Principle thing is not a bad piece of writing or whatever, but Ziz takes something and say saying out of it. I described how the Gervais Principle said sociopaths give up empathy as in a circle, certain chunk of social software, not literally all hardware, accelerated modeling of people, not necessarily compassion. And with it, happiness. Destroying meaning to create power. Meaning too, I did not care about. I wanted this world to live on.

[David Bore]

So she tells them she's come to.

[Robert Evans]

The conclusion I need to make myself into a psychopath in order to have the kind of mental power necessary to do the things that I want to do. And she largely judged, justifies this by describing the beliefs of the Sith from Star wars because she thinks she needs to remake herself as a psychopathic evil warrior monk in order to save all of creation.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, no, of course.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[David Bore]

So this is her hitting her final form. And true to, true to fact, these guys are like, they don't say it's a good idea that. But they're like, okay, yeah, you know, that's not, that's not the worst thing you could do. Sure. You know, know, like, I think the sith stuff kind of weird, but making.

[Robert Evans]

Yourself a psychopath makes sense.

[David Bore]

Sure. Yeah. Of course.

[Robert Evans]

I know a lot of guys who did that.

[David Bore]

That's literally what they say.

[Robert Evans]

Right?

[David Bore]

And then they say that also.

[Robert Evans]

I don't even think that's what they really. They say that. Because the next thing they, they say this guy, person A is like, look, the best way to turn yourself from a net negative to a net positive value. I really believe you could do it. But to do it, you need to come to 10 more of these seminars and keep taking classes here. Right, right, right.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Here's a quote from them or from Ziz. She's conditional on me going to a long course of circling like these two organizations offered particularly a 10 weekend one. Then I probably would not be net negative.

[David Bore]

So things are going good. This is, this is, you know, fuck, yeah, great.

[Langston Kerman]

How much does 10 weekends cost?

[Robert Evans]

I don't actually know. I don't, I don't fully know with this. It's possible some of these are like, some of the events are free, like, but the classes cost money or. But it's also a lot of. It's like there's donations expected. Or by doing this and being a member, it's expected. You're going to tithe. Basically.

[Langston Kerman]

That's what I was thinking.

[Robert Evans]

It seems like 50% of your income. Right.

[Langston Kerman]

More than they're like worried about.

[Sophie]

I mean, with.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Sophie]

I don't know the format. Is she not going to be like super suspicious that people are like, you know, faking it or like going over the top?

[Robert Evans]

She is, she is. She gets actually really uncomfortable. They have an exercise where they're basically doing, you know, they're playing with love bombing.

[David Bore]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Where everyone's like hugging and telling each other they love each other. And she's like, I don't really believe it. I just met these people.

[David Bore]

So she, she is starting to.

[Robert Evans]

And she is going to break away from these organizations pretty quickly. But this conversation she have with, with these guys is a critical part of like, why she finally has this fracture. Because number one, this dude keeps telling her, you have a net negative value to the universe.

[David Bore]

Right. And so she's obsessed with like, how do I. And it comes to the conclusion my best way of being net positive is to make myself into a sociopath death and a Sith Lord to save the animals. Of course.

[Langston Kerman]

It feels like the same thinking though, as like the robot's going to make hell it all. It seems to always come back to this idea of, like, I think we just got to be evil, where it's.

[Sophie]

Like, oh, well, I guess the only logical conclusion is doom.

[David Bore]

Yep.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, it feels like it's a theme here.

[David Bore]

Yep. Anyway, you want to plug anything at the end here?

[Langston Kerman]

I have a comedy special you can purchase on Patreon. It's called Birth of a Nation with a G. And you can get [e-mail] davidbory Excellent.

[Robert Evans]

Excellent.

[David Bore]

All right, folks, well, that is the.

[Robert Evans]

End of the episode.

[David Bore]

David, thank you so much for coming.

[Robert Evans]

On to our inaugural episode by listening.

[David Bore]

To some of the weirdest shit we've ever talked about on this show.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, this was. I don't really. I'm gonna be thinking about this for weeks.

[Sophie]

I mean.

[David Bore]

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot more. I feel like it's kind of fair.

[Sophie]

Because your co host likes it. Kermit came on for the Elders of Zion episode.

[David Bore]

Yeah, yeah, Okay. I wanted to. I was initially gonna kind of just.

[Robert Evans]

Focus on all of this. Would have been like half a page or so, you know, just kind of summing up. Here's the gist of what this believes. And then let's get to the actual cult stuff when, like, you know, Ziz starts bringing in followers and the crimes start happening.

[David Bore]

But that Rolling or that Wired article.

[Robert Evans]

Really covers all that very well. And that's the best piece. Most of the journey journalism I've read on these guys is not very well written. It's not very good. It does not really explain what they are or why they do. So I decided, and I'm not. The Wired piece is great. I know the Wired guy knows all of the stuff that I brought up here. It's an article. You have editors. He left out what he thought he needed to leave out. I don't have that problem. And I wanted to really, really deeply trace exactly where this lady's. How this lady's mind develops and how that intersects with rationalism because it's interesting and kind of important and bad.

[David Bore]

Yeah, okay. Anyway, thanks for having a head with me. All right, that's it, everybody. Goodbye.

[Sophie]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool's. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.

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Or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Sophie]

Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube.com behindthebastards.

[Robert Evans]

Did.

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[Robert Evans]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.