Part One: The Zizians: How Harry Potter Fanfic Inspired a Death Cult

Summary

Summary of "Behind the Bastards" - Part One: The Zizians: How Harry Potter Fanfic Inspired a Death Cult

Release Date: March 11, 2025

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Introduction

In the inaugural episode of the series titled "The Zizians: How Harry Potter Fanfic Inspired a Death Cult," host Robert Evans and guest David Bourie explore the unsettling emergence of the Zizians—a group implicated in recent murders and characterized by their fusion of rationalist philosophies and cult-like behaviors. This episode delves into how seemingly innocuous online subcultures, particularly those influenced by creative fanfiction, can morph into dangerous radical factions.

Background: The Coventry Incident

The episode opens with a discussion between Evans and Bourie about a tragic event that occurred on January 21, where a border patrol agent was fatally shot in Coventry, Vermont, during a traffic stop. The incident involved two individuals in the vehicle; one of them, a German immigrant and trans woman, opened fire, leading to the death of the agent. This event serves as the catalyst for media scrutiny and the association of the Zizians with a series of murders across the United States.

Robert Evans (06:30): "Back on January 21, 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."

Unveiling the Zizians

Evans introduces the Zizians as an offshoot of the rationalist community—an online subculture rooted in platforms like Less Wrong and Overcoming Bias. The group comprises predominantly high-achieving individuals in the tech and scientific sectors, many of whom identify as trans women. Unlike traditional cults with centralized leadership, the Zizians are geographically dispersed, communicating primarily through online forums.

David Bourie (09:45): "This is a very niche group."

Robert Evans (16:04): "They were very weird. They did some weird crime allegations...they were mostly people who kind of identified as both anarchists and members of the rationalist subculture."

Cult Dynamics vs. Traditional Cults

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around distinguishing cult dynamics from traditional cult structures. While traditional cults often feature a singular charismatic leader exerting control, the Zizians utilize "cult dynamics" to influence members without centralized authority. This includes the creation of new language and in-group jargon, fostering a sense of belonging while isolating members from broader society.

Robert Evans (15:24): "They use the tools of cult dynamics and that produces some very cult-like behavior."

The Rationalist Movement and Radicalization

Evans argues that the rationalist movement's emphasis on logic, decision theory, and AI ethics creates a fertile ground for radicalization. Influenced by thought experiments like Newcomb's Paradox and philosophies such as Effective Altruism, members develop a mission-oriented mindset aimed at "saving the world" through the advancement of artificial intelligence. This ideological framework sometimes justifies extreme actions under the guise of the greater good.

Robert Evans (36:31): "They are all obsessed with the Singularity...it'll solve all of our problems...or it might create hell."

Influence of Harry Potter Fanfiction

Central to the Zizians' ideology is the Harry Potter fanfiction titled "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality," authored by Eliezer Yudkowski. This work reimagines Harry Potter as a super-genius applying rational thought to wizardry, serving both as a recruitment tool and a medium for disseminating rationalist ideas.

Robert Evans (68:01): "The foundational text of the entire rationalist movement is a massive...Harry Potter fan fiction written by Elisa Yudkowski."

Decision Theory and Roko's Basilisk

Evans delves into complex philosophical concepts that underpin the Zizians' beliefs. Timeless decision theory, derived from Newcomb's Paradox, and Roko's Basilisk—a thought experiment positing that a future AI might punish those who didn't aid in its creation—are pivotal in shaping the group's extremist outlook.

Robert Evans (52:05): "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."

From Philosophy to Violence

The episode elucidates how abstract rationalist philosophies can spiral into violent justifications. Members influenced by these ideas adopt extreme stances, believing that their actions, even violent ones, are necessary to ensure the creation of a benevolent AI that will "save humanity."

Robert Evans (56:38): "They conclude that if they are ever confronted or threatened, they can never back down. They need to immediately escalate to use maximum force possible."

Online Communities and Echo Chambers

Evans highlights the role of online echo chambers in reinforcing extreme beliefs. The insular nature of internet communities, combined with continuous reinforcement of radical ideas, exacerbates the potential for members to adopt dangerous behaviors.

Robert Evans (46:07): "Human beings need regular contact with human beings they don't know. The most lucid and wisest people are always...connecting to others who know things they don't know."

Notable Quotes

• Robert Evans (00:01): "I'm a guy who spends...reading the deranged writings of a quasi cult leader..."
• David Bourie (09:45): "This is a very niche group."
• Robert Evans (16:04): "They use the tools of cult dynamics and that produces some very cult-like behavior."
• Robert Evans (36:31): "They are all obsessed with the Singularity...it'll solve all of our problems...or it might create hell."
• Robert Evans (68:01): "The foundational text of the entire rationalist movement is a massive...Harry Potter fan fiction written by Elisa Yudkowski."

Conclusion: The Dark Potential of Subcultures

The episode concludes by warning of the inherent dangers within online subcultures that emphasize extreme rationalist ideologies without adequate moderation or real-world interaction. Evans and Bourie stress the importance of recognizing early signs of radicalization and understanding the fine line between harmless subcultures and dangerous cults.

Robert Evans (78:12): "This is the perfect breeding ground. This had to happen."

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Final Thoughts

Part One of "Behind the Bastards" offers a compelling and unsettling examination of how benign online subcultures can evolve into deadly cults under the influence of extremist ideologies. By dissecting the Zizians' origins, philosophies, and actions, Evans and Bourie shed light on the complex interplay between internet communities, rationalist movements, and the potential for radicalization. This episode serves as a cautionary tale about the dark potential lurking within the digital age's interconnected subcultures.

Transcript

[Robert Evans]

Call Zone Media. Welcome back to behind the Bastards. 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. You would be good at it, though. I don't think I would be, Sophie. I do, but I think. But I'm, like, biased. Cause I think you'd be good at most things. 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. Yes, 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?

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

Everything's fun. Oh, yeah, no, yeah. I got up today and read that great new article by Francis Fukuyama. History is still stopped, so everything's good. We're done.

[David Bourie]

I haven't looked at any news yet purposefully, so I'm, 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. Oh, man. Just an extended ad for The Apprentice season 15.

[David Bourie]

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 personally at home think would be a great president. I'm not going to jump into that can of worms right now. LeBron. Ramon LeBron. They made LeBron the president.

[David Bourie]

That's a good one.

[Robert Evans]

That's a good one.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

Honestly, vastly superior than where we are.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, fuck it. Why not? You know, Fucking Kareem Abdul Jabbar. Great president. That would be a motherfucker. Could knock a presidency out of the park. Come on.

[David Bourie]

Veronica Mars, writer, Kareem Abdul Jabbar.

[Robert Evans]

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

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

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

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

What we need to do. What an amazing man. Kareem would be such. Would be such a good choice. Yeah, Bring it on.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. He's way too moral. He's way too. I have a frog name after. Named after him. Yeah. Look, honestly, given where we are right, right now, I'd take fucking. What's his mark? McGuire. Like, Jesus Christ. Anybody? Like, honestly, anyone.

[David Bourie]

I'd take Jose Cansecoseco in a heartbeat.

[Robert Evans]

So funny. Oh, man. Fuck it. Like, I'll take. No, no, I'm not gonna take any hockey players. No hockey players. No hockey players. That's probably fair. We got enough people with brain damage in the White House right now.

[David Bourie]

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.

[David Bourie]

He could get stuff done.

[Robert Evans]

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[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. Right. 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.

[David Bourie]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Have you heard this story of this?

[David Bourie]

I'm not, I'm not 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 hotel issue that it is right now. Like the Republicans have been desperately waiting for like a border patrol officer getting shooted and wounded that they can like use to justify a crackdown. But number one, this happened on the Canadian border, not really their favorite border. And one of the two people who, who drew their guns on the cops was an immigrant, but they were a German immigrant. And so none of this really like.

[David Bourie]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

It was all like right on the edge of being super useful to the right. But it's not as sexy.

[David Bourie]

Like I live. We were dealing with our own right wing immigration propaganda at that time.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. It was just like, it was like the closest to being a perfect right wing, like Reichstag fire event, but like just a little too weird.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

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

[David Bourie]

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. They just looked kind of weird. Okay. The. They look kind of weird. And 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 a gun. Guns and ammo in America terms. Right, right. Especially in Vermont terms.

[David Bourie]

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 because, like, they got pulled over. Like, they can't have been planning this. Right? Like, it didn't, 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 shoot it out with the cops types.

[David Bourie]

Yeah, this is a very niche group.

[Robert Evans]

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

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

Right. 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 this when a friend of mine messaged me and is 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. I'm always, I'm like, you know, I study weird little Internet subcultures in part because like some of them do turn out to do acts of terrorism later. So I was in my weirdos and 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. That'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 discussing rationalism and the ideas of a particular member of that community who goes by the name Ziz. Right, that's, 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 article, Trans Vegan Cult Charged with six Murders.

[David Bourie]

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. So I'll give, 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.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

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 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 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.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

They do. Actually 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.

[David Bourie]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna have to go back and forth to explain all of that.

[David Bourie]

Also, I do wanna know what the etymology of zizzy in it is. It's cause from zips.

[Robert Evans]

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

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

These people are big in the news right now. Cause 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.

[David Bourie]

I guess that's better.

[Robert Evans]

It's just different.

[David Bourie]

You know, you're right.

[Robert Evans]

It was just a different thing. And I think it's important. If you care about cults because you think they're dangerous and you're arguing that, like, hey, this cult seems really dangerous, you should understand 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 Bourie]

Yeah, Much, much stupid.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, so I got to take. 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 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. It's like rape. There's no version of it that's good. 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.

[David Bourie]

I was gonna say it seems a lot more like you have that at work.

[Robert Evans]

You have that at work anywhere.

[David Bourie]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

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

[David Bourie]

And that's like an empowering feeling, right?

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes. Yeah.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

I mean, entertainers, your friend has in jokes, right? Sports. Yeah.

[David Bourie]

The beehive could kill people, right?

[Robert Evans]

Exactly. Yes, yes. And like, you've got, you know, you 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? You know, it's like a diet, you know, so there's a toolbox and we play with it and different organizations, churches, play with it. And obviously a lot of churches cross the line into cults. But there's also aspects of. For example, there's churches that I know, I have seen people go to where it's very common. Everybody gets up and hugs at a certain point. And 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.

[David Bourie]

Is that to qualify for state?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. So that we could get to go? 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. Or not desert. But it was very like. It was a really valuable part of my youth. Cause 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. No, this is something we do for five minutes at the end of every church service. Right. You could very easily turn this into something deeply dangerous and poisonous. Right. But also a lot of people just kind of play around a little bit with pieces of that. A piece of the cult dynamics.

[David Bourie]

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.

[David Bourie]

I was gonna 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 a cool. I don't. I don't know.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I mean, like, I've been to some childish Gambino concerts where it's like, oh, yeah, he's doing. He's a little bit of a cult leader, you know, like just 10%. Right.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So these are. 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 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 60s, 70s, these different sort of guru types are saying that, like, you know, this is how we're going to save the world. If we can get everybody doing, you know, this yoga routine or whatever that I put together, and it'll fix everything.

[David Bourie]

Who's that guy who had the game?

[Robert Evans]

Oh, God, yes.

[David Bourie]

Know what I'm talking about?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yes, We've covered them. That is Synanon. Yes, yes. So that's what I'm talking about. That's what I'm talking about. We have this broader subculture of self help and a cult, Synanon comes out of it, you know, and I get it.

[David Bourie]

It's like the subculture, it's already. It's intimate. You feel closer to those people than anybody else. It definitely feel.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[David Bourie]

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.

[David Bourie]

So does that mean, like, 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.

[David Bourie]

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.

[Robert Evans]

Well, yeah, and I think I. But, but that said, there have been cults that have started out of like popular entertainers and musicians. Like, you know, you could, we could talk about Corey Feldman's weird house full of young women dressed as angels. Right. You know, so yeah, you've got, as a general rule, like there are. 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, gotten like cult y directions. Right. Even if you're talking straight edges. Huh? Yeah. Yes. 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 cult leader DNA in them, you know, Buddy. Yeah.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

Cults all the way down. Yes, exactly, exactly. So I think there's a lot of vested interests in not in 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? Yeah.

[David Bourie]

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

[David Bourie]

He also didn't write it.

[Robert Evans]

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

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

And again that's kind of a good point. Like Star wars fans aren't a cult. But you can also see some of 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, that's not a cult. But also periodically groups of those fans will act in ways that are violent and crazy. And it's because of some of these same factors going on. Right.

[David Bourie]

I think people forget fan is short for fanatic.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly, exactly right. And it's like, you know, the events that I went to very consciously played with cult dynamics. You know, after you got out of the 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 people would talk about like this is 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. And in my case it was like. Cause I was at like a low 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. Like I got a little dose of the drug.

[David Bourie]

Right. It was enough built up an immunity.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

That is, I know what's going on there. So anyway, I needed to get into this because the Zizians, this thing that I think is it's either a full 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 Yidkowski. I have talked about Aliezer on the show before. He's not a. He sucks. 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 Bourie]

Absolutely not.

[Robert Evans]

No, no.

[David Bourie]

Armchair quarterback. Backseat driver.

[Robert Evans]

No. He writes long articles about what he thinks AI would do and what would make it dangerous that are based almost entirely off of short stories you read in the 1990s. Like, this guy.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

It's so much 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 a machine that you talk to. Yeah.

[David Bourie]

I have no credible. I just have an opinion.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[David Bourie]

Outdated opinion.

[Robert Evans]

I hate this guy so much. Speaking of things, I hate not going to ads. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Look, times are hard and they are not getting any easier. None of us get through this without a support system. I don't know where I'd be without the people. The community, really, who. Who help keep me on an even keel. Who let me talk when I'm having trouble. Friends and social support is absolutely crucial. Right. Nobody's got all the answers. But the people who do the best of getting by know when to ask questions and seek support from their community. In a society that glorifies hyper independence, it's easy to forget that we're all better when we have a support system behind us. And part of a good support system is. Can be therapy. And if you are interested in starting a therapy journey, you might try BetterHelp. BetterHelp is fully online, making therapy affordable and convenient. It serves over 5 million people worldwide. You can access a diverse network of more than 30,000 credentialed therapists with a wide range of specialties. And you can easily switch therapists anytime at no extra cost. So build your support system with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com behind to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp H-E-L-P.com behind it's tax season, and by now I know we're all a bit tired of numbers, but here's an important one you need to hear $16.5 billion. That's how much money in refunds the IRS flagged for possible identity fraud last year. Here's another 20%. That's the overall increase in identity theft related to tax fraud in 2024 alone. But it's not all grim news. Here's a good number. 100 million. That's how many data points Lifelock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, LifeLock's US based restoration specialists will fix it, backed by another good number, the million dollar protection plan. In fact, restoration is guaranteed or your money back. Don't face identity theft and financial losses alone. There's strength in numbers with Lifelock identity theft protection for tax season and beyond. Join now and save up to 40% your first year. Call 1-800-LIFELOCK and use promo code iheart or go to lifelock.com iheart for 40% off terms apply. Robert Evans here and if you're anything like me, you like keeping your money where you can see it. Unfortunately, traditional big wireless carriers also like keeping your money where they can see it. If you're tired of overpaying for wireless after years and years of being stuck with their crazy high bills, bogus fees and free perks that cost more in the long run, you should consider switching to Mint Mobile. With Mint Mobile, you can say goodbye to overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly fees and unexpected overages, Mint Mobile is here to rescue you with premium wireless plans that start at just 15 bucks a month. All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all of your existing contacts. So ditch overpriced wireless and get three months of premium wireless service from Mint Mobile for 15 bucks a month. If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop [e-mail] behind that's mintmobile.com behind upfront payment of $45 for 3 month 5 gigabit plan required equivalent to $15 a month new customer offer for first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. C Mint Mobile for details At Ameca Insurance, we know it's more than a life policy. It's about the promise and the responsibility that comes with being a New parent being there day and night and building a plan for tomorrow today for the ones you'll always look out for. Trust amica life insurance. Amica empathy is our best policy. We're back. 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, guys.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

It sucks. Look man, I know that there's like valid activ. But it's just always so stupid. Stupid and annoying to me anyway. A bunch of thought experiments based in game theory with the goal of teaching himself and others to think more logically and effectively about the major problems of the world. His motto for the movement and himself is winning the rationale.

[David Bourie]

Oh, wow.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[David Bourie]

Yeah, that's where Sheen got it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's where Sheen picked it up. Yeah. All right, 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, Yudkowski 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, quote, 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.

[David Bourie]

That's great.

[Robert Evans]

It's awesome.

[David Bourie]

This is Pete.

[Robert Evans]

It's the good stuff. So Yudkowski and his followers see themselves 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.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

He doesn't really deify himself, but he 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. Okay. So there is a little bit. It's more like superherofication, but it's a lot. You know what this is closest to what these people, not all of Them would argue with me about this, But I've read enough of their papers and enough Dianetics to know that this is new Dianetics. Like, this is church. The Church of Scient. Now there's the Church of Scientology. Stuff has more occult and weird magic stuff in it. But this is all about. 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 person.

[David Bourie]

Okay, so the retraining of yourself in order to.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly, exactly. Okay, 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. There's some shit I found that it's like, this could have come right out of a Scientology pamphlet. Do you guys not realize what you're doing? I think they do, actually. So he's. He's, you know, in the process of inventing this kind of new mental science that verges on superpowers. And it's one of those things, like, people don't tend to see these people as crazy. If you just sort of, like, read their 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, like, 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 going to 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, like, some of the women around him. And, like, he has, like, a Bay Area set that hang with him. I don't think he's, like, a cult leader. You know, you could say he's on the scene.

[David Bourie]

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.

[David Bourie]

I'm a Bay Area guy. What?

[Robert Evans]

San Fran. San Fran. Oh, this. This is a San Francisco thing. Because all of these are tech people.

[David Bourie]

Oh, okay. So this is like.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. I wonder what neighborhood feels like a San Fernando. Oakland. You can look it up. People. People have found his house online. Right? Like. Like, it is known where he lives. I'm not saying that for any. Like, I. 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 tech industry subculture. Right?

[David Bourie]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

So the other difference between this and something like Scientology is that it's not just Eliezer laying down the law. Elyser 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 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?

[David Bourie]

Yeah. That's amazing.

[Robert Evans]

Very, very powerful for a very powerful. Yes. Now, the danger with this is that, 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. The reality is that human being xx. The Everything app. I just watched a video of a man killing himself while launching a shitcoin. The Everything app. Oh, fuck. By the way, a hack. A hack Google job indicates it's Berkeley. Thank you. It is Berkeley. Yeah.

[David Bourie]

That makes the most sense to me geographically.

[Robert Evans]

A lot of these people wind up living on boats. And like the Oakland. The Oakland Harbor. Boat culture is a thing.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

No, David. Absolutely not.

[David Bourie]

Feels like it never bodes well.

[Robert Evans]

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

[David Bourie]

It's for fun.

[Robert Evans]

Boats and planes are both constant monuments to hubris. But a plane, its goal is to be in the air just as long as it needs, and then you get it back on the ground where it belongs. A boat's always mocking God in the sea.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

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

[David Bourie]

I'm making your own bullets.

[Robert Evans]

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

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

That's right. That's right. Ah, the life. I want to be like that guy from Jaws. Quint, you're gonna get scurvy. That's exactly getting scurvy. Destroying my liver, eventually getting eaten by a great white shark because I'm too drunk to work my. Ah, that's it. That's the way to go with romance, you know? 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 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 everyone gets crazy, you know, like, it's bad for you. I say this as someone who was raised on these. Right, it's bad for you. And like it's bad for you. In part because when people get really into this, this becomes the only thing. Especially a lot of these kids in isolated who are getting obsessed with 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 it was bad for all of the nobles in France that moved to Versailles. 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 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 that you're wrong and go find a stranger under a bridge. You know, just start.

[David Bourie]

They know some stuff you don't know.

[Robert Evans]

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

[David Bourie]

Oh yeah, pills and powders.

[Robert Evans]

That's what's going on under the bridge.

[David Bourie]

That's an echo chamber. You want to be A part of.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So the issue here is that Yudkowski starts 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 to 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? So the rationalists are all using a 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?

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

A bunch of them have always been actually working in AI. Yudkowster would say, no, I work in AI. He's got a think tank that's dedicated to AI, ethical AI. It's worth noting that most of the people in this movement, including Gidkowski, got 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 hu, 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, like doing this carefully to make sure that AI 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 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. I think it's a stupid question, and I don't really think it's very useful.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

I mean, among other things, part of the issue here is that, like, well, the decision's already been made, right?

[David Bourie]

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 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.

[David Bourie]

Big time latchkey over here.

[Robert Evans]

We've had, like, problems in our lives and stuff, you know, physical bullies, normal. Like, I don't want to, like, shit on people who are in, because this is also harmless. Right. And what this is. 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.

[David Bourie]

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

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

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

[David Bourie]

Oh, boy. Yo.

[Robert Evans]

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

[David Bourie]

Yeah, this is nuts. This is all nuts.

[Robert Evans]

This is all dumb.

[David Bourie]

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 timeless decision theory. And I'm going to quote from an 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 adversarial.

[David Bourie]

Oh, no.

[Robert Evans]

That's a crazy way to live, motherfucker. Have you ever had a problem? Have you ever really? Have you ever dealt with anything?

[David Bourie]

What the fuck are you talking about?

[Robert Evans]

You make every decision honestly. Again, I can't believe I'm saying this now, given where I was in high school. Go play football. Go make a cabinet. You know, like, learn how to change your oil. Go do something.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

You gotta touch grass, man.

[David Bourie]

That's like.

[Robert Evans]

That's crazy if you're talking about this kind of shit. And again, what the fuck are you doing? I know you're all wondering. You started this by talking about a border patrol agent being shot. All of this directly leads to that man's death.

[David Bourie]

We have covered a lot of ground.

[Robert Evans]

This is.

[David Bourie]

I'm excited.

[Robert Evans]

It's.

[David Bourie]

I did forget there was also going to be murder.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, there sure is. So Eliezer 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.

[David Bourie]

Limit on it or do they have like a. Do they have a. 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.

[David Bourie]

You know, he could be amongst us already.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, 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 discussions is that, that, and this is a conclusion a lot of people come to. If in these kinds of situations, 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. That will impact how everyone treats you. And they won't want to start anything with you if you'll immediately try to murder anyone who fights you.

[David Bourie]

That's not to be this guy. But I think this is why people need to get beat up sometimes.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. And again, that is kind of a fringe conclusion among the rationalists. Most of them don't jump to that. But like the people who wind up doing the murders we're talking about that, they are among the rationalists who come to that conclusion. Okay. Because it's starting to make sense. Huh?

[David Bourie]

This is a head fuck. That's so funny. Oh no, I just scared. Cause like 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. This goes bad places. Right? This kind of thinking also leads through a very twisty turny process to the 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.

[David Bourie]

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?

[David Bourie]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Makes total sense.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

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

[David Bourie]

Oh, man.

[Robert Evans]

This becomes so upsetting to some people, it destroys some people's lives. Right?

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

No, right.

[David Bourie]

You could fuck your shit up in a month just living 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 everything about it. Yeah.

[David Bourie]

They're still debating everything online.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And in fact, Elisa Yudkowski is going to, like, ban discussion of Rocco's Basilisk because eventually, 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 me for a thousand eternities?

[David Bourie]

It's funny how they invent this new thing and how quickly it goes into, like, traditional Judeo Christian idea. Like they gotta hell now all the time.

[Robert Evans]

It is very funny. And they come to this conclusion that just reading about Rocco's Basilisk is. 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 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. Just people like, you know, playing around telling scary stories on the Internet. It's fine, there's nothing wrong with it. But all these people are big nerds and all of these behind nearly all of these big concepts. In rationalism, more than there are philosophers and actual philosophical concepts, there's like shit from short stories they read. Yeah, exactly. And so the term infohazard gets used, which is like a book or something, an idea that could destroy your mind. Speaking of things that will destroy your mind, these ads. Robert Evans here. And if you're anything like me, you like keeping your money where you can see it. Unfortunately, traditional big wireless carriers also like keeping your money where they can see it. If you're tired of overpaying for wireless after years and years of being stuck with their crazy high bills, bogus fees, and free perks that cost more in the long run, you should consider switching to Mint Mobile. With Mint Mobile, you can say goodbye to overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly fees and unexpected overages. Mint Mobile is here to rescue you with premium wireless plans that start at just 15 bucks a month. All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all of your existing contacts. So ditch overpriced wireless and get three months of premium wireless service from Mint Mobile for 15 bucks a month. If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop [e-mail] behind that's mintmobile.com behind. Upfront payment of $45 for three month five gigabit plan required equivalent to $15 a month new customer offer for first three months only. Then full Price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. At Amica Insurance, we know it's more than a life policy. It's about the promise and the responsibility that comes with being a new parent, being there day and night and building a plan for tomorrow today. For the ones you'll always look out for. Trust Amica Life Insurance. Amica Empathy is our best policy. How to have fun anytime, anywhere. Step 1 Go to chumbacasino.com chumbacasino.com Got it. Step 2 Collect your welcome bonus. Come to papa. Welcome bonus. Step 3 Play hundreds of casino style games for free. That's a lot of games, all for free. Step 4 Unleash your excitement. Woo hoo. Chumba Casino has been delivering thrills for over a decade. So claim your free welcome bonus now and live the chumba life. Visit chumbacasino.com no purchase necessary. VGW Group void we're prohibited by law. 21/ terms and conditions apply. Hey everybody. So when you get asked, what is Odoo? What comes to mind? Well, I'll tell you. Odoo is a bit of everything. Odoo is a suite of business management software that some people say is like fertilizer because the way it promotes growth. But you know, some people also say that Odoo is like a magic beanstalk because it grows with your company and is also magically affordable. Oh.

[David Bourie]

But then again, you could look at Odoo in terms of how its individual software programs are a lot like building blocks. Whatever your business needs, manufacturing, accounting, HR programs, you can build a custom software suite that's perfect for your company.

[Robert Evans]

So what is Odoo? Well, Odoo is a bit of everything.

[David Bourie]

Odoo is a fertilizer, magic beanstalk. Building blocks for business.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's it. Which means that Odoo is exactly what every business needs. Learn more and sign up [e-mail] that's o d o o.com foreign we're talking about Rocco's Basilisk. And I just said like, you know, there's a number of things that that come into all this. But behind all of it is like popular fiction. And in fact, Rocco's Basilisk. Well, there is 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 greatest 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 start to realize themselves, they realize they've been created only as a weapon. And they become incredibly angry because 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. It is probably the primary influence behind the Terminator series.

[David Bourie]

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 on Terminator and this Harlan Ellison short story. That's where they got it all. That's where they got it all. Like, I'm sorry, brother.

[David Bourie]

Find me somebody who doesn't feel that way.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Terminator is the Old Testament of rationalism, you know?

[David Bourie]

And I get it is very good. It's a great series.

[Robert Evans]

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

[David Bourie]

Come on, man.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, and it's so funny to me because they like to talk about themselves and in fact sometimes describe themselves as high priests of a new era of intellectual achievement for mankind.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

And they do a lot of citations and shit, but half or more of the different things they say and even the names they cite are not like figures from philosophy and science. They are characters from books and movies. For example, the foundational text of the rationalist movement is a book.

[David Bourie]

Is it still an Internet nerd?

[Robert Evans]

They're a few 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. This is all of this is so dumb again. Six people are dead. Like. Yeah. No, and this, this Harry Potter fan fiction plays a role in it, you know? I told you this was like this, this is. This is quite a stranger than fiction, man.

[David Bourie]

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 where Harry is.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

Well, you gotta think this is being written from 2009 to 2015 or so. So, like the online Harry Potter fans are at their absolute peak, you know. Okay, yeah. 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.

[David Bourie]

Oh, man.

[Robert Evans]

Great.

[David Bourie]

Oh man.

[Robert Evans]

The book allows Yudkowski to debut his different theories in a way that would like spread. And this does spread like wildfire among certain groups of 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 fanfic.

[David Bourie]

So this isn't like a. This isn't. We're laughing, but this isn't. This is.

[Robert Evans]

This is not a joke to them. Yeah.

[David Bourie]

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 Bankman Fried was very tight into all of this and he was at one point pretty powerful. And this gets us to. So you've heard of effective altruism?

[David Bourie]

No, I don't know what that is.

[Robert Evans]

That's what Sam.

[David Bourie]

I know both those words.

[Robert Evans]

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 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. And the initial idea is good. 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. And. And they start with some pretty good conclusions. 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. That's good. You know, one of the most effective.

[David Bourie]

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 them each other crazy. And so they go from mosquito nets to actually doing direct work to improve the world is wasteful because we are all super geniuses, right?

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

What's best. And also, here's the other thing, making mosquito nets, giving out vaccines and food, well, that helps living people today, but.

[David Bourie]

They have to be concerned with future selves.

[Robert Evans]

Future people is a larger number of people than current people. So really we should be optimizing decisions to save future people lives. And some of them come to the 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.

[David Bourie]

They want to now they want to make it. Before it would sort of just come about and then they would, but now it's like, like we're gonna 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? Or a lot of people come with a conclusion instead of that, 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. They come to all of these conclusions 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, and this is not all of them. But a decent chunk eventually come to the conclusion like 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, you gotta start a.

[David Bourie]

Coin that makes a lot more sense.

[Robert Evans]

The guy starting a shitcoin to make an LLM that like that guy is doing more to improve the odds of human success.

[David Bourie]

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.

[David Bourie]

Yeah. It's incredible.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And again, there's like people consistently take this stuff at even crazier directions. There are some very rich, powerful people, Mark Andreessen 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.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[David Bourie]

Same thing for how this could have gone.

[Robert Evans]

I don't think this is the end of people in these communities killing people. No.

[David Bourie]

Yeah, exactly.

[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.

[David Bourie]

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.

[David Bourie]

This had to happen.

[Robert Evans]

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

[David Bourie]

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 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 just absolutely unique and fascinating. Anyway, that's why that man died. So we'll get to that and more later. But first, we gotta roll out here. We're done for the day. Man, what a. What a time. How you feeling right now so far? How are we doing, David?

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

There's a. There's so much more Harry Potter to come. Oh, my God. That's what I was hoping. You are not ready to. How central Harry Potter is to the murder of this border patrol agent.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

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

[David Bourie]

I do. I have a podcast called My Mama Told Me. I do it with Langston, Kermit. 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.

[Robert Evans]

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

[David Bourie]

Oh, yeah. I don't think any black people were.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, no, no, no, no.

[David Bourie]

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

[Robert Evans]

No, no. Absolutely not. Oh, boy. Howdy. Okay, well, everyone, we'll be back Thursday. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube.com behindthebastards. Ever wake up feeling lousy knowing something is off with your body? You don't have time for guesswork. You need viome. Forget all the generic health fads. Biome doesn't tell you what you wanna hear. It tells you what's actually going on inside your body. By analyzing your GUT microbiome, viome delivers a custom health plan that's as unique as your DNA. It's science, not nonsense. Want energy? Want better digestion? Viome has your back. Stop trusting amateurs. Go to viome.com for a personalized gut professional now. Call Star Star gut to get $110 off any test that's StarStar488 to receive a link to the offer.

[David Bourie]

You know, some people say that Odoo business management software is like fertilizer, the way it promotes growth and all. But other people say Odoo is like a magic beanstalk because it grows with your company and is also magically affordable. And there's some people who would even say Odoo's individual software programs come together to build the perfect suite. Like building blocks. Well, Odoo is all of these things. Fertilizer, magic beanstalk, building blocks for business.

[Robert Evans]

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