Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult

Summary

Behind the Bastards: Part Three - How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult Might Work

Release Date: March 18, 2025

In the third installment of "Behind the Bastards," host Robert Evans delves deep into the unsettling transformation of a fringe group within the rationalist community, tracing the evolution of The Zizians from earnest rationalists to a full-blown death cult. Joined by producer Sophie Lichterman and guest David Bourie, Evans unpacks the intricate dynamics, psychological breakdowns, and catastrophic consequences that unfurled within this insular group.

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1. The Emergence of Ziz in the Rationalist Community

Timestamp: 06:48 – 08:20

Robert Evans introduces Ziz, a fervent member of the rationalist subculture who yearned to impact the world profoundly. However, like many who immerse themselves deeply, Ziz began to experience significant personal and communal struggles.

Robert Evans (00:48): "Outlook is terrible. Microsoft has really gone far off of making a lot of products that people hate to use."

2. Struggles in the Bay Area

Timestamp: 08:24 – 11:37

Ziz's relocation to the Bay Area, driven by the desire to engage more deeply with the rationalist ethos, quickly turned sour. The exorbitant living costs forced her into abusive rental situations, exacerbating her mental health issues and fueling her disillusionment with the community.

Robert Evans (09:35): "Craiglist is a crapshoot."

3. Transition and Theoretical Obsessions

Timestamp: 11:37 – 16:17

Amidst her personal turmoil, Ziz began transitioning and delving into complex theories about cognitive mechanisms and self-improvement tools like Beeminder. These obsessions led her to develop an intense belief system, intertwining rationalist principles with fantastical elements inspired by pop culture, particularly "Star Wars."

Ziz (11:37): "I was inexperienced with convincing body language inclusive lies like this. I did not have the right false face."

4. Formation of the Vegan Sith and Isolation

Timestamp: 16:18 – 26:00

Ziz, alongside Gwyn Danielson and others, started segregating from the broader rationalist community, forming a secluded group aboard sailboats anchored in the Berkeley Marina. Their isolation fostered an environment ripe for cult-like dynamics, where grandiose plans to "save the cosmos" overshadowed reason and empathy.

Robert Evans (16:17): "All that cult stuff."

5. Dangerous Ideologies and Psychological Manipulation

Timestamp: 26:00 – 34:44

The group’s ideology became increasingly erratic, blending rationalist jargon with notions of sociopathy and manipulative power structures. Ziz propagated the idea of "mana," equating persuasive ability with magical power, and indoctrinated members to accept extreme measures to achieve their goals.

Ziz (29:19): "We have to make ourselves into Ricky Gervais sociopaths."

6. The Ripple Effect: Tragedies Within the Community

Timestamp: 34:44 – 56:54

The toxic environment led to severe mental health crises among members. Maya Pasek, a young rationalist, succumbed to depression exacerbated by the group's doctrines, ultimately leading to her suicide. This tragedy underscored the catastrophic impact of the group's manipulative practices.

Robert Evans (37:06): "Rational."

7. The Final Descent into a Death Cult

Timestamp: 56:54 – 75:32

As internal conflicts intensified, Ziz and Gwyn's antagonistic relationship spiraled into lethal confrontations. Their fixation on saving the world through destructive means culminated in a chilling plan to eradicate perceived threats within their ranks, marking their complete descent into a death cult.

Ziz (62:47): "I know this is likely to kill or destroy a lot of the people I reach out to, but I think it's so important that it's like worth taking that risk with their lives."

8. The Role of Mainstream Rationalism and Systemic Issues

Timestamp: 75:32 – End

Evans highlights the broader implications of The Zizians' transformation, criticizing mainstream rationalist circles for inadvertently fostering environments where such extremist groups can flourish. Issues like lack of oversight, toxic masculinity, and unchecked ambitions within these communities are scrutinized as contributing factors to the emergence of dangerous offshoots like The Zizians.

Robert Evans (75:32): "This is an engine for making cults."

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Notable Quotes:

• Robert Evans (16:20): "They call themselves vegan Sith around this man."
• Ziz (44:15): "This is terminal."
• David Bourie (34:19): "They create a cult factory."
• Robert Evans (62:47): "That's the goal."

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Insights and Conclusions:

"Behind the Bastards" meticulously unravels the psychological and social mechanisms that can transform passionate individuals into dangerous cult leaders. Through Ziz's story, the episode underscores the fragility of rationalist communities when overshadowed by unchecked ideologies and lack of compassionate oversight. The narrative serves as a cautionary tale about the potential for rationality to be perverted into destructive forces when divorced from empathy and ethical grounding.

Listeners gain a profound understanding of how influential beliefs, when combined with societal pressures and mental health vulnerabilities, can lead to the formation of cult-like groups with devastating outcomes. The episode emphasizes the importance of community support, ethical leadership, and mental health awareness within any ideological group to prevent such tragedies.

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For more insights and deep dives into the lives of history's most notorious figures, subscribe to "Behind the Bastards" on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, or your preferred podcast platform.

Transcript

[Zone Media]

Call Zone Media.

[Robert Evans]

Welcome to behind the Bastards, a podcast where I, Robert Evans, am going to war. Like a one man. Like Rambo. Like one of the later Rambo movies, not the first one that was actually about the cost of PTSD and Imperial War, but like the later ones where he's a one man army. I'm doing that and I'm doing it against Microsoft because I fucking hate copilot. With me to talk about how much we hate Microsoft Copilot, my producer, Sophie Lichterman and our wonderful guest, David Bourie. David, how do you feel about Microsoft copilot?

[David Bourie]

Ah, Rambo 3, let's go.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, okay, okay.

[David Bourie]

Kill a ton of brown people.

[Robert Evans]

Well, no, I mean in this one we're just. It's just like Microsoft copilots were killing.

[David Bourie]

Okay, all of them. All of them.

[Robert Evans]

They're not really people.

[David Bourie]

It's so bad.

[Robert Evans]

It's so bad. Outlook is terrible. Microsoft has really gone far off of making a lot of products that people hate to use.

[Zone Media]

Speaking of products people hate to use, David said before we started recording that he was excited to hear this story. I just want you to know where we're starting on this story is page 21 of the script. And where we end the script is page 49.

[David Bourie]

Whoa.

[Robert Evans]

I made a mistake in doing this. I'm gonna admit that right now. Before we get further, I'm gonna say I erred in this. And it's, you know, I've made peace with the inevitability of fucking stuff up. Especially when like every week you're doing a different chunk of history and we're veering from like, we're talking about fucking 17th and 18th century France. And then like now we're talking about like a fucking guy who did a genocide in Darfur or whatever. Right? Like you're going to. These are all important topics, but like, you simply can't every single week cover the breadth of stuff that we do. And not. You're going to misspeak, you're going to make errors and stuff. And when it comes to like, I'm talking about Hitler, I'm talking about like, not obviously those are important, but you know, if I, if I fuck up some fact about like early 1900s Germany, I'm not gonna be like too bent out of shape. Cause it's like, you know, there's, there's no perfection in this. But in this case, it's this tiny little community that nearly all of the reporting on has been like, deeply incomplete. And I feel like the stress over what do I Include in here. And the other problem is that none of these people have editors. And so everybody in this story has a blog, and every blog post is like 40,000 words. So it's just like.

[David Bourie]

Yeah, I was gonna say, what media are you able to get? You're getting this all straight from the source, right?

[Robert Evans]

A lot of it. I mean, I've read most of ziz's blog entries, and I've at least done little surveys of the blogs of everybody else involved in this. There were also a couple of very helpful compilations that, like, people. There's like, one that like a former. Sometimes it's like former members of the community. Sometimes it's folks who are like, rationalists that were trying to warn other rationalists about Zizians. But, like, people in and around the community have put together compilations where they'll, like, clip mixes of news stories and, like, conversations online. And obviously these folks, like, blog, mixtape is nasty work. Yes, yes. And I'm deeply grateful. We'll have source and everything in here. I note when I'm kind of like, pulling something from something directly. But I'm very grateful to the maniacs who put together these documents that have helped me piece together what's happening. Cause really, if you're coming in as an outsider, if you weren't embedded in this community while all this crazy shit was going on, it's kind of impossible to get everything you need to get. You have to refer to these interior sources. It's just the only way to actually understand stuff.

[David Bourie]

No, Yeah. I, as an outsider, I don't know what's going on. I don't know where it's going. I for sure don't know where it's going.

[Robert Evans]

It's going. We know where it ends. Which is we know where it ends. A member of Congress shows up at the library in Vermont that the US and Canada shares because a Border Patrol agent was murdered there and, like, threatens to take over Canada. And that's all. Like, there's a degree to which you can kind of tie heightened tensions between the US and Canada to the murder of this Border Patrol agent, which itself is directly tied to the fact that Alicia Yudkowski wrote a piece of Harry Potter fan fiction.

[David Bourie]

I love that. It all goes back to that.

[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

So part three we spent last episode talking about Ziz's moving to the Bay and their first interactions with the rationalist community. That big CFAR conference they went to that was very reminiscent. Had a lot of exercises. Reminiscent of like Synanon shit.

[David Bourie]

Right, Right, right. Very, very lotta talk of murder. Yes.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Lotta talk of murder. These people love theorizing about when it's okay to kill people. Constant factor in all of this, which.

[David Bourie]

Can'T be a step in a good direction.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. You know, you should be aware of if your community's talking about the E escalating to murder in random arguments. Too much. Maybe be a little worried if someone.

[David Bourie]

Sits down next to you and says, how would you murder me? Or whatever they said. You always gotta get out of that room.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. You wanna leave immediately. Yes.

[David Bourie]

And furthermore, if they're like, yeah, that's the right way, even worse sign.

[Robert Evans]

And then if they're like, yeah. Would you perform necrophilia in order to, in the past, scare people away from attacking you? Like, get out of that room. Leave. Bad con. This is not a crew you want to be a part of.

[David Bourie]

Yeah, maybe just take a pickleball or something.

[Robert Evans]

I have lots of stuff to do. Pickleball. People never talk about necrophilia playing pickleball.

[David Bourie]

I don't think one time.

[Robert Evans]

I don't think.

[David Bourie]

Not one time.

[Robert Evans]

No. They all talk about how they're getting knee replacements. And that's the beauty of pickleball.

[David Bourie]

Exactly.

[Robert Evans]

So in spite of how obviously bad this community is, Ziz desperately wants to be in the center of the rationalist subculture. And that means being in the Bay. Unfortunately, the Bay is a nearly impossible place to survive in if you don't have shitloads of money. And one of the only ways to make it in the Bay if you're not rich, is to wind up in deeply abusive and illegal rental situations. You know this, David.

[David Bourie]

Come on.

[Robert Evans]

I'm not spreading any news to you. No.

[David Bourie]

Shout out to my landlord, Mr. Lou.

[Robert Evans]

So Ziz winds up in a horrible sublet with a person she describes as an abusive alcoholic. I wasn't there. I don't know if she was the problem. And this person, like, I. Obviously, I've got one side of this story. But her claim is that it ends in physical violence. Ziz claims he was to blame, but she also describes a situation where they're like, after a big argument, bump into each other and he calls the cops on her for assault. I wouldn't put it past Ziz to be leaving some parts out of this. But also, I know a bunch of people who wound up in horrible sublets with abusive alcoholics who assaulted them in the Bay Area and in la.

[David Bourie]

No, Craigslist is a crapshoot.

[Robert Evans]

You know, Craigslist is a crapshoot. Yeah.

[David Bourie]

Every time.

[Robert Evans]

I always. I feel like the need to, like, qualify with, like, this is just Ziza's account. But also, this sounds like a lot of stories I know people have had.

[David Bourie]

Yeah, no, it's tough to get by there.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So she calls the. Or he calls the. The cops on her and then, yeah, they do nothing and he attacks her in her bedroom that night. So she decides to, like, he's, like, throwing a chair at her and shit. So she decides, I got to get out of this terrible fucking sublet. And unfortunately, her next best option, a very common thing in the rationalist community is to have whole houses rented out that you fill with rationalists. Who don't have a lot of money. It never kind of like artists, yet kind of like artists are like content producer houses. It never explodes. People never have horrible times in these. This particular rationalist house is called Liminal because, you know, Gen Z loves talking about their liminal spaces on the Internet. One resident of the house reacts very negatively when Ziz identifies herself as a non transitioning trans woman and basically asks like, when are you going to leave? So she has, you know, she, she says that as soon as she arrives, one of the other residents is transphobes. She can't stay there very long. Again, all sounds like a very familiar Bay Area housing situation story. She bounces around some short term solutions, Airbnbs, moving constantly while trying to find work. She gets an interview with Google, but the hiring process there is slow. There's a lot of different stages to it and it doesn't offer immediate relief from her financial issues. Other potential offers fall through as she conflicts with the fundamental snake oiliness of this era of Silicon Valley development. Ziz blames it on the fact that she couldn't feign enthusiasm for companies she didn't believe in. Quote, I was inexperienced with convincing body language inclusive lies like this. I did not have the right false face, but very quick to think up words to say. So like, I'm not good enough at lying that I'm excited about working for an app to, you know, help you do your laundry better. Which is like a third of the bay at this point.

[David Bourie]

Yeah. And once again she has like flashes of like, oh wow, you really, you really have strong morals and all. You know what I mean?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[David Bourie]

Strong resume. Right. It wasn't.

[Robert Evans]

She does, she wants like an award as a NASA intern, right? Yeah. She really is good at a lot of this stuff. And all of these Zizians, as silly as their beliefs about philosophy and like cognitive science are, they're all extremely accomplished in their fields. Nearly. It's good evidence of the fact that it's always a mistake to think of intelligence as like an absolute characteristic. Like, I am a genius software engineer, therefore I am smart. It's like, no, no, no, you're dumb at plenty of things, Mr. Software Engineer.

[David Bourie]

Yeah, don't sell yourself short.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So she does start to transition during this period of time. She goes on finasteride, which helps to avoid male pattern baldness. And she starts experimenting with estrogen and antiandrogens. She'd wanted to avoid this for, I'm sure she had a variety of reasons, but as soon as she starts taking hormones they have such a positive effect. She describes it as a hard to describe felt sense of cognitive benefits. And she decides to say, stay on them. By October, she'd committed to start writing a blog about her own feelings and theories on rationalism. And her model here was Yudkowski. She names this blog Sincere Ously, and it was her attempt to convince other rationalists to adopt her beliefs about, like, veganism and such. Her first articles are like, pretty bland. It's these scattered concepts and thought experiments. Very basic stuff like, can God create a rock so big God couldn't move it? And then like throwing a rationalist spin on that. So it's, you know, a lot of this is like, oh, maybe in an area in which college didn't cost 200 grand, you could have just gotten a philosophy degree and that would have made you happy. Like, right, you just wanted to spend a couple of years talking through silly ideas based on dead Greek guys.

[David Bourie]

Well, you know, the bay is the place to do that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, well, unfortunately. So she starts to really show an interest early on though. And this is where things get unsettling in enforcement mechanisms, which are methods by which individuals can like, blackmail themselves into accomplishing difficult tasks for personal betterment. She writes about an app called Beeminder which lets you set goals and punish yourself with a financial penalty if you don't make regular progress. And she's really obsessed with just the concept of, of using enforcement mechanisms to make people better writing. Often you have to break things to make them better. So not a great path we're going down here.

[David Bourie]

Is she following this herself?

[Robert Evans]

She's working on. She's trying to use some of these tactics on herself to make herself to deal with what she sees as her flaws that are stopping her from saving the cosmos. Great stuff. A lot of good pressure to put on yourself.

[David Bourie]

Yeah. This poor woman has been under the highest stakes this whole time.

[Robert Evans]

Well, and that's again, that comes. That comes. That's not Ziz. That's the entire rationalist subculture. The stakes are immediately we have to save the world from the evil AI that will create hell to punish everybody who doesn't build it. And that. Actually, we'll talk about this later. That breaks a ton of people in this. She is not the only one kind of fracturing her psyche in this community. So right around this time, as she's bouncing around short term rentals and desperately trying to get work, she meets a person named Jasper Gwynn, who at that identified as a trans woman, who now goes by Gwyn Danielson. And uses they, them pronouns. That's how I'm going to refer to them. But for clarity's sake, I'm going to call them Gwyn or Danielson, even though they went by a different name at this time, because that's what they're called now. Gwyn was a fan of Ziz's blog and had some complex rationalist theories of her own. They came to believe that each person had multiple personalities stored inside their brain, a sort of, like, mutation of the left brain, right brain hypothesis. And each of these sides of your brain was like a whole, like, intact person. Right. Like, great.

[David Bourie]

Okay, yeah, cool.

[Robert Evans]

No, you guys are going to be fucking with your heads. Real heart. Great.

[David Bourie]

Oh, man, these poor people.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So Ziz falls in love with Gwyn's ideas and she starts bringing them up in rationalist events, trying to brute force them into going mainstream among the community. But people are like, this is a little weird, even for us. And she does not succeed in this. And as a result, she and Danielson and a couple of other friends start, like, talking and theorizing together separately from the bulk of the community. So now, again, you've had this. They're starting to calve off from the broader subculture, and they're starting to, like, really, like, dig ruts for themselves in a specific direction that's leading away from the rest of the rationalists, literally.

[David Bourie]

All that cult stuff, huh?

[Robert Evans]

All that cult stuff.

[David Bourie]

All that cult stuff.

[Robert Evans]

Now, Gwyn and Ziz largely, like, bonded over their struggle paying Bay Area rents, and together they stumbled upon a solution beloved by generations of punks and artists in Northern California. Taking to the sea, specifically. It's great. It's great. I mean, I've known, like, three separate people who lived on boats in the Oakland harbor because it was like, this is the only way I could afford to live in the bay.

[David Bourie]

My little brother went to school right outside of San Francisco, and his principal lived on a boat just like a mile away from the school. And everybody loved it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, everybody loved it. I mean, I gotta say, everyone I know who lived on a boat lived on a shitty boat. But I'm also not convinced there are boats that any boats that stay nice for very long.

[David Bourie]

Yeah, it feels like you would be dank, I guess is the word.

[Robert Evans]

Dank is a good description of boat life, I think, in general. Yeah. Yeah. So Gwyn's boat was anchored off the Encinal Basin, and Ziz found this a pretty sweet solution. She goes over to stay over one night, and while they're like hanging out, staying up, probably taking drugs they don't like. Usually write about it. But from other community conversations, I think we have to assume an awful lot of the time when these people are staying up all night and talking. There's a lot of ketamine and stuff being used too, that isn't written into the narrative.

[David Bourie]

That also goes along with the Bay Area.

[Robert Evans]

That also goes along with the Bay Area.

[David Bourie]

Pills and powders are big.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Quote, they talked about how when they were a child, their friend who was a cat had died and they had to use their own retroactive paraphrasing, sworn an oath of vengeance against death. These are just people doing great, very healthy. It's like the opposite of what you want a kid to learn when their pet dies is like, yeah, you know, death is inevitable. It happens to everything. You know, it'll happen to you one day. And it's sad, but just something we have to accept. No, no, no. War against death.

[David Bourie]

No. They were like, no, no, no. I can fix this, okay?

[Robert Evans]

I, as a parent, have failed in this situation. This was an unsuccessful step in my child's development.

[David Bourie]

Maybe no more pets for a while.

[Robert Evans]

Maybe no more pets. Gwyn also spent way too much time online, which is how they wound up reading hundreds of theoretical articles about how AGI, artificial General intelligence agents, would destroy the world. And again, AGI is like a mainstream term now because fucking ChatGPT came out a couple of years ago and everyone started talking about it at this point, 2016, 17. It's only like real people who are really into the industry in a nerdy way who are using that frame. Like regular people on the street. Don't know what you fucking mean when you're talking about this stuff, but this is a term that is in use among them. And like, Ziz Gwyn moved to the Bay Area to get involved in fixing the problem. They were an Otherkin. Are you familiar with this online community?

[David Bourie]

Which one?

[Robert Evans]

Otherkin?

[David Bourie]

Otherkin. No, I have. No. I've never heard of that.

[Robert Evans]

It's like the Mormonism of furrydom. Almost like.

[David Bourie]

That's insane what you said.

[Robert Evans]

I don't wanna be like, it's harmless, right? These are people who. There's a mix of beliefs. Some of them literally believe they're fantasy creatures. Some of them just want to be.

[Zone Media]

They like half identify as a non human creature, right?

[David Bourie]

Oh, like their furry Persona is their true.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, kinda. That's close enough for government work. In Gwyn's case, it's even different. Where I don't think they believe they are literally a dragon, but they believe that when there's a singularity and the robot God creates heaven, they'll be given the body of a dragon. Because the robot God will be able to do that if it's a good singularity, at least. That's why this is all so important to them. Making sure it's like a nice AI so they'll be able to get their animal friends back and get their dragon.

[David Bourie]

Body tail as old as time, you.

[Robert Evans]

Know, tale as old as time. Again, a lot of this could be avoided by just like processing death and stuff like that a little better. But we don't do that very well in our society anyway. We've got a lot of people who are committed to denying that. So I'm not surprised shit like this happens at like the corners, right? Like, this is. This is just a little downstream from that Brian Johnson guy tracking his erections at night and trying to get the penis of a 19 year old.

[David Bourie]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

Like there's not like a massive sanity gap between these two things, really.

[David Bourie]

No, no, it's. It's. I think, I think it's. I think we're drinking from the same well.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. So this is a result or. So Ziz commits herself to turning Gwyn to the dark side, which is a term she started to use. Obviously it's a Star wars term. And it comes out as a result of her obsession with what's called Akrasia. Akrasia is an actual Greek term for a lack of willpower that leads someone to act in ways that take them further from their goals in life. It's an actual, like. I think Ekrasia often was like an early term for like what we call adhd. Right. Like people who have difficulty, like, focusing on tasks that they need to complete. One of the promises of rationalism was to arm a person with tools to escape this state of being and act more powerfully and effectively in the world. Ziz adds to this some ideas cribbed from Star Wars. She decides that the quote unquote way of the Jedi, which is like accepting moral restrictions, you know, about not murdering people and the like, is a prison for someone who's like, truly great and has the opportunity to accomplish important goals. Right. If you're that kind of person, you can't afford to be limited by moral beliefs. So in order to achieve the kind of vegan singularity that she thinks is critical to save the cosmos, she and her fellow rationalists need to free themselves from the restrictions of the Jedi and become vegan Sith. That's, that's more or less where things are going here. So it's here. I should note that while Gwynne and Ziz are spinning out on their own everything that you're seeing from them, these feelings of grandiosity and cosmic significance, but also paranoid obsession are the norm in rationalist and effective altruist circles. There's a great article in Bloomberg News by Ellen Hewitt. It discusses how many in the EA set would suffer paralyzing panic attacks over things like spending money on a nice dinner or buying ice cream, obsessing over how many people they'd killed by not better optimizing their expenses and quote, in extreme pockets of the rationality community, AI researchers believed their apocalypse related stress was contributing to psychotic breaks. MIRI EMPLOYEE and that's one of these organizations created by the people around Yudkowski. Jessica Taylor had a job that sometimes involved imagining extreme AI torture scenarios. As she described it in a post on Less Wrong, the worst possible suffering an AI might be able to inflict on people at work. She says she and a small team of researchers believed we might make God, but we might mess up and destroy everything. In 2017, she was hospitalized for three weeks with delusions that she was intrinsically evil and had destroyed significant parts of the world with my demonic powers, she wrote in her post. Although she acknowledged taking psychedelics for therapeutic reasons, she also attributed the delusions to her job's blurring of nightmare scenarios. In real life, in an ordinary patient, having fantasies about being the devil is considered megalomania. She wrote here. The idea naturally followed from my day to day social environment and was central to my psychotic breakdown.

[David Bourie]

Oh man.

[Robert Evans]

Just taking ketamine and convincing yourself you're the devil. Normal rationalist stuff.

[David Bourie]

Yeah. And I mean, hey, we've all been there, right?

[Robert Evans]

We've all been there. No, in fact, I don't think we have.

[David Bourie]

No. This is the least relatable group of people I've ever heard of.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, exactly. Cause it's this like grandiosity, it's this absolute need to whatever else is going on, even if you're like the bad guy, feel like what you're doing is like of central cosmic significance. It's this fundamental fear that all is integral to all of these tech guys. It's at the core of Elon Musk too, that like one of these days you're not going to exist and very few of the things that you valued in your life are going to exist and there's still gonna be a world. Cause that's life that's just.

[David Bourie]

Yeah, that it's so crazy how it boils down to just like. Yeah, man. Well, I don't know what you thought was gonna happen.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, bro, sorry.

[David Bourie]

Yeah, that's just how it goes.

[Robert Evans]

You know, we've got like 10,000 years of like philosophy and like thinking and writing on the subject of dealing with this. But you didn't take any humanities in your STEM classes, so you don't know any of that. You're just trying to bootstrap it.

[David Bourie]

You just watched Star wars again and decided you got it figured out.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. You watched Star Wars 137 times and figured that was going to replace reading a little bit of fucking Plato or something. I don't. I know, man. Maybe it didn't work. Also, again, the ketamine's not helping.

[David Bourie]

No, no, no, no. God, to be a fly on that wall.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, God. Yeah. The rationalist therapists are raking it in.

[David Bourie]

Oh, man. Honestly, well deserved.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about infohazards. Jesus.

[David Bourie]

Oh, man.

[Robert Evans]

So I have to emphasize here again that I wanna keep going back to the broader rationals community because I felt like a risk of this is that I would just be talking about how lady and her friends were and it's like, no, no, no. Everything they're doing, even the stuff that is a split off and different and like more extreme than mainstream rationalism is a. Is directly related to shit going on in the mainstream rationalist community, which is deeply tied into big tech, which is deeply tied into like the Peter Thiel circle. A lot of these folks are close to, in and around the government right now. Right. So like that is, it's. Ziz is not nearly as much of an outlier as a lot of rationalists want people to think.

[David Bourie]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Anyway, at rationalist meetups, Ziz began pushing this whole vegan sith thing hard and again meets with little success. But she and Gwyn gradually start to expand the circle of people around them. Meanwhile, in her professional life, that Google interview process moves forward. Ziz says that she passed every stage of the process, but that it kept getting dragged out, forcing her to ask her parents for more help. In November, around the time her blog started to get a following, she says Google said she'd passed the committee and would be hired once she got picked for a team. Now I don't know what happens after this. She says Google asked for proof of address, which she doesn't have. She's just turned 26 and she's not on her parents health insurance either. She's been pages describing what is a very familiar nightmare scenario to me of like trying to get proof of address so you can get a job and like continue getting like, you know, get on Calimed and stuff. And I do think it's probably worth acknowledging that as her brain is starting to break and she's getting further and further into all these delusional ideas, she's also struggling with being off of her parents health insurance and trying to find stable housing in the bay. And that influences the situation.

[David Bourie]

And still in the process of transitioning, right?

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes, exactly. And still in the process of transitioning, yes.

[David Bourie]

It's a heavy workload.

[Robert Evans]

You're doing too much to your brain right now, sis. So. And then she makes the worst possible decision, which is to live with her friend Gwyn in their tiny sailboat which is now anchored by the Berkeley Marina. Again, this is not like a houseboat. This is like a sailboat with one small room, right? Like a bathroom.

[David Bourie]

It's got a court, like. Yeah. What is there? There's like a bed, a table and a sink, I assume, Right?

[Robert Evans]

Like a little bathroom probably. Maybe a kitchenette. But it's not like livable for two people. You should.

[Zone Media]

Anybody who's like ever lived in too small of a place space with a roommate knows that just like no matter where you're at, it's horrible, it's a bad idea.

[Robert Evans]

Imagine if that shitty tiny apartment that you remember from your past was a boat. Just, just disastrous. And this is not a good situation. Ziz would later write. I couldn't use my computer as well. I couldn't set up my three monitors, there was no room, couldn't have a programming flow state. For nine hours. I had trouble sleeping. The slightest noise in my mind kept alerting me to the possibility that someone like my roommate from several months ago was going to attack me in my sleep. So this is not a healthy situation. And both Guinenses have endured some specific traumas and both are also prone to flights of grandiosity and delusion. And now they are trapped all day, every day together in a single room where their various neuroses are clashing with each other and their only relief is talking for hours about how to save the world.

[David Bourie]

Oh my God. This is a. It's a real villain story. It couldn't get any worse than that.

[Robert Evans]

It couldn't. And it's like at this point I don't think either of them is like intentionally doing anything bad. You've kind of created a cult where like you're Trading off on being the cult leader and cult member for each other. Like you've isolated each other away from the world and you're spending time brainwashing each other together in your little boat.

[David Bourie]

Yeah. How often do you think they were leaving that boat?

[Robert Evans]

Not nearly long enough. And Gwyn is on what Ziz describes as a cocktail of stimulants, mapped out the cognitive effects of each hour they were on them. They get very angry if Ziz interrupts their thoughts at the wrong time. And also Ziz isn't really sleeping, so they're just talking for hours and getting on each other's nerves at the same time. But also like, building these increasingly elaborate fantasies about how they're going to save the cosmos. And it's, you know, it's not great. Through these conversations, they do develop Gwyn's multiple personalities theory, mixing in some of Ziz's own beliefs about good and evil. And I want to quote another passage from that Wired article that summarizes what they come to believe about this. A person's core consisted of two hemispheres, each one intrinsically good or non good. In extremely rare cases, they could be double good, a condition that so happened. Lasota identified in herself. And Ziz is consistently going to identify herself as intrinsically good. So she's. Both sides of her personality are only good, but most people are at best single good, which means part of them is non good or basically evil. And they're at war with this other half of their brain. That's a whole person, that's evil. Which is why other people can't be trusted to make decisions. You know, like, increasingly, Ziz's attitude is going to be like, only intrinsically good people can be trusted to make good decisions.

[David Bourie]

Only the double goods.

[Robert Evans]

Only the double goods. It's such like a, you know, you're making your own, like, Orwell speech. Ziz, this is, this is a bad sign. So Ziz's Google ambitions fall apart. At this time, they don't really give us a good explanation as to why. I kind of think they started bombarding their contact with Google with, like, requests about why the process wasn't going faster. And maybe Google was like, ah, maybe we don't need this person. Ziz concludes, failing at Google was good because she'd gotten $10,000 from unemployment at this point, quote, this means I had some time. If they hired me soon, it would deprive me of at least several months of freedom. In which, of course, she is continuing to work out her theories with Gwyn on the Sailboat also, I don't know if that's freedom. It's really not freedom.

[David Bourie]

Maybe work. I hear the Google campus has a.

[Robert Evans]

Lot of things to do, and it's kind of the what if. I think maybe at this point she still could have pulled out of this tailsp if she'd gotten a job and worked around other people and socialized, not on the sailboat. But also a real consistent thing with Ziz is at this point, she has no willingness to do the kind of compromise, and I'm not just talking about the moral compromise, but if you're going to work a job for a company, you're going to spend a large part of your day doing a thing that you wouldn't be doing otherwise, right? Because that's what a job generally is, work. That's just work. And Ziz feels like she can't handle the idea of doing anything but reading fanfiction and theorizing about how to give herself superpowers. Right? That's the most important thing in the world because the stakes are so high. So she, like, ethically can't square herself with doing anything. She needs to succeed in this industry where she has the skill to succeed. And this is another trait she's got in common with the rest of the rationalist EA subculture. That Bloomberg article interviewed a guy named Quao Chu Yuan, a former rationalist and PhD candidate who dropped out of his PhD program in order to work in AI risk. He stopped saving for retirement and cut off his friends so he could donate all of his money to, you know, EA causes and because his friends were distracting him from saving the world. And these are all. This is all cult stuff, right? Cults want you to cut off from your friends. They want you to give them all your money he's doing, but he's doing it, like, independently. Like, he's not. There's not like a single leader. He's not like, living on a compound with them. It's just once you kind of take these beliefs seriously, the things that you, that you will do to yourself are the things people in cults have done to them. Right? In an interview with Business Insider, Yuan said, you can really manipulate people into doing all kinds of crazy stuff. If you can convince them this is how you can prevent the end of the world. Once you get into that frame, it really distorts your ability to care about anything else. Else, man. Yeah, that's kind of the thing. It's harder to talk about this than, like, could people talk about Ziz as, like, oh, it's a cult leader and she had her, you know, vegan, trans AI death cult or something. And, you know, I feel like that's not close enough to the truth to get what's like to get how this happened. Right. Because what happens with Ziz is very cultish. But. But Ziz is one of a number of different people who have calved off of the rationalism community and had disastrous impacts. But it happens constantly with these people because, like, it's got such an engine for it, right? Yes. It's an engine for making cults.

[David Bourie]

This is a cult factory for sure.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. They created a cult factory. Oh, no.

[David Bourie]

They give you the base ideas and then you can just kind of franchise it how you'd like.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And a lot of prominent rationalists who news is at the time have since gone out of their way to describe her as like, you know, someone on the fringes. Anna Salomon of SEFAR described her as a young person who was hanging around and who I suspect wanted to be important. And Anna claims, is there anyone here.

[David Bourie]

Who doesn't want that within this group? They're all.

[Robert Evans]

No, that's all of them. Right. That's the whole community. And like, Anna was emailing directly, gave Ziz some of the advice that Ziz considered, like, key to her moving to the Bay Area and stuff. Right. Like, these people, like the rationalists, really, really want you to think that this was just like some fringe person. But she's very much tied in to all of this stuff. Right. So for her part, Ziz doesn't deny that failing to convince other rationalists was part of why she pulled away from mainstream rationalism. But she's also going to claim that a big reason for her break is sexual abuse among people leading in the rationalist community. And there's a specific case that she'll cite later that doesn't happen until 2018. But this is a problem people were discussing in 20 when she's living on that boat. The representative story is the case of Sonia Joseph, who was the basis of that Bloomberg News piece I've quoted from a couple of times. And it's a bummer of a story. Sonia was 14 when she first read Yudkowski's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which is set her on the path that led her to moving to the Bay Area in order to get involved in the rationalist EA set. And she's focused on the field of AI risk. And I'm going to read a quote.

[Zone Media]

This week has been so long that I completely erased The Harry Potter part of this story from my brain, it.

[Robert Evans]

Never drops too far below the surface. I cannot overemphasize how important this Harry Potter fan fiction is to all these murders. I mean this is like primary text, women getting abused. Yes, yes. It's a primary text of the movement. I'm gonna read a quote from that Bloomberg article. Sonja was encouraged when she was 22 to have dinner with a 40ish startup founder in the rationalist sphere because he had a close connection to Peter Thiel. At dinner, the man bragged that Yudkowski had modeled a core Harry Potter like professor in that fanfic on him. Joseph says that he also argued that it was normal for a 12 year old girl to have sexual relationships with adult men and that such relationships were a noble way of transferring knowledge to a younger generation. Then she says he followed her home and insisted on staying over. She says he slept on the floor of her living room and that she felt unsafe until he left in the morning. Jesus. So great. You know, bragging about your Harry Potter, how you helped inspire the Harry Potter fanfic, and then explaining how 12 year old girls should have sex with adult men.

[David Bourie]

Good stuff, I gotta say.

[Robert Evans]

Rational.

[David Bourie]

I gotta say that's a crazy brag. To get chicks.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, to get chicks.

[David Bourie]

You know, it was, you know, one of those characters. I'm the snake.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I'm the snape of this. By the way, what do you think about 12 year olds? Also I have a close connection to Peter Thiel.

[David Bourie]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

Cool. Oh man. As that Bloomberg article makes clear, this is not an isolated issue within rationalism. Quote, sexual harassment and abuse are distressingly common. According to interviews with eight women at all levels of the community, many young ambitious women described a similar trajectory. They were initially drawn in by the ideas, then became immersed in the social scene. Often that meant attending parties at EA or Rationalist group houses or getting added to jargon filled Facebook messenger chat groups with hundreds of like minded people. The eight women say casual misogyny threaded through the scene on the low end brick, the rationalist adjacent writer says a prominent rationalist once told her condescendingly that she was a 5 year old in a hot 20 year old's body. Relationships with much older men were common, as was polyamory. Neither was inherently harmful, but several women say those norms became tools to help influential older men get more partners. And this is also isn't just rationalism. That is the California ideology that is the Bay Area tech set, right?

[David Bourie]

Yeah, I would say it feels very techy.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[David Bourie]

Oh man.

[Robert Evans]

And it's all super fucking gross. The whole you're a 5 year old in a hot 20 year old's body thing. What the the fuck, man?

[David Bourie]

No, to say that.

[Robert Evans]

How do you say that? Not hurl yourself off the San Francisco Bay Bridge?

[David Bourie]

That shit's vile.

[Robert Evans]

That's fucked up, dude. That's bad. Speaking of bad to the bone. Our Sponsors 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 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 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 hi, it's Jenny Garth.

[Jenny Garth]

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[Unknown]

Catch the new Hulu original comedy Mid Century Modern from the creators of Will and Grace, executive producer Ryan Murphy and director James Burrows. When three best friends move in together, Palm Springs will never be the same. Bunny, Jerry and Arthur are already close friends, but when they decide to live together, it's a new chapter with a new family. And speaking of family, don't forget Bunny's mom, Sybil, who's along for the ride. Whether it's a trip to Fire island or a local congresswoman with a wild side, these roomies know how to do it with style. They're fun, they're fabulous, and they're turning life's lemons into spiked lemonade. So shake up a batch of cocktails, relax by the pool and get ready for some serious shade. A new comedy with heart, soul and sass. Mid Century Mid Century Modern stars Nathan Lane, Matt Bomer, Nathan Lee Graham and Linda Lavin. Mid century modern premieres March 28th. Streaming on Hulu.

[Robert Evans]

Step into the world of power, loyalty and luck.

[Sophie Lichterman]

I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse.

[Robert Evans]

With family.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Cannolis and spins mean everything. Now you want to get mixed up in the family business.

[Robert Evans]

Introducing the [e-mail] test chop luck in.

[David Bourie]

The shadowy world of the Godfather slots.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Someday I will call upon you to do a service for me. Play the Godfather [e-mail] Welcome to the family.

[Robert Evans]

No purchase necessary.

[Sophie Lichterman]

VGW Group void.

[Robert Evans]

We're prohibited by law 21 + terms and conditions apply. Ah, we're back. So this is important to understand in a series about this very strange person and the strange beliefs that she developed that influenced several murders. Ziz had many of the traits of a cult leader, but again, she's also a victim first of the cult dynamics inherent to rationalism. And what she's doing next is she's. She breaks away with a small, loyal group of friends and she does create a physical situation that much more resembles the kind of cults we're used to dealing with, particularly Scientology. Because next she's going to take. Oh wow. Me and Gwyn living alone on this boat. We kind of hate each other and neither of us is sleeping and our emotional health is terrible. But we've made so many much progress on our ideas. Maybe we should. Maybe we should make this a bigger thing, right? Maybe we should get a bunch of rationalists all living together on boats.

[David Bourie]

She needs a work life balance.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, no, no, what she thinks she needs is. She calls it the rationalist fleet. Which is she wants to get a bunch of community members to buy several boats and live anchored in the bay to avoid high bay area rent so they can spend all their time talking and plotting out ideas for saving the cosmos.

[David Bourie]

Oh man.

[Robert Evans]

Great.

[David Bourie]

And I get it right?

[Robert Evans]

It's too expensive here.

[David Bourie]

I want to get some boats with my friends. It does sound cool.

[Robert Evans]

We won't go insane together, obviously. You know, she buys a 24 foot boat for $600 off of Craigslist and I don't know much about boats, but I know you're not getting a good one for $600.

[David Bourie]

No, no, like a.

[Robert Evans]

Not a good living boat.

[David Bourie]

Like a full boat.

[Robert Evans]

Like a 24 foot boat. Yes, a full boat.

[David Bourie]

Oh, man, that had to be a.

[Robert Evans]

Piece of shit to be a shitty, shitty car.

[David Bourie]

It's a colossal piece of shit.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. She names it the Black Signet. And she starts trying to convince some of her ideal these people who have gathered around her to get in on the project. Eventually, she, Danielson and a third person puts together the money to buy a boat that's gonna be like the center of their fleet. A 70 year old Navy tugboat named the Caleb, which was anchored in Alaska. This is like a 94 foot boat. It's a sizable boat and it is also very old and in terrible shape.

[David Bourie]

She in the center. That's the crown jewel of the fleet, right?

[Robert Evans]

Right. That's our flagship. Oh, man. So she and Danielson sail, they Buy this thing with this third guy, Dan Powell, who's at least a Navy veteran. So, like, you know, that's a good call.

[David Bourie]

He's boat adjacent.

[Robert Evans]

But I get the feeling. Nobody says this, but Powell says that he put tens of thousands of dollars into buying the Caleb. And I just know from what Danielson and Ziz wrote about their finances, neither of them had nearly that much money. So I think by far he invests the most in this project. And I don't want to insult the guy, but he says he did it because he considered buying the boat to be a good investment. Which boats aren't. Boats are never an investment, like comically.

[David Bourie]

So, like, known to be a terror.

[Robert Evans]

Nothing depreciates like fucking raw salmon depreciates slower than a boat. I think his attitude is, I'm gonna become like the slumlord of a bunch of, or at least landlord to a bunch of boat rationalists, but I think slumlord was correct. I don't know how you expect this to pay off. Buying a 70 year old tugboat for a bunch of like poor rationalist punk kids to live in. How is that ever supposed to work? What's the P and L statement you put together here?

[David Bourie]

Oh, man. Oh, man. When. What was the timeline on him getting his money back?

[Robert Evans]

He thought, oh, God, I have no idea. He. He absolutely takes a bath on this shit, right? He claims, and I believe him, that Ziz lied to him about the whole scenario to get his money. I do think this was essentially a con from her. He says, quote, ziz led me to believe that she had established contacts in the bay and that it would be easy for us to at least get a slip, if not one that was approved for overnight use. And as it turns out, when we were coming through the Inside Passage from Alaska, it was revealed that we did not have a place to arrive.

[David Bourie]

Wait, oh, I didn't realize he sailed it down from Alaska.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, they all sail it together, them and a couple other rationalists that they pick up. They make a post on the Internet being like, hey, any rationalists want to sail a boat down from Alaska, Talk about our ideas while we live on a boat?

[David Bourie]

Oh, man. So these people need space.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, Just get a warehouse.

[David Bourie]

Yes, it's Oakland.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, well, just get a warehouse. The ghost ship fire had happened by that point, so I don't think warehouse space was easy to get. Fair, fair, fair, fair. But I think this would have. I think you're right. In an earlier era, they would have just wound up living in like warehouse and Maybe all died in a horrible fire. Cause there were issues with that kind of life too. But they would have been an option besides the boat thing. Anyway, the Caleb is not in good shape. Again, this boat is 70 plus years old. It is only livable by punk standards. And while it was large enough, it is a 94 foot boat. You can keep some people on there. It's also way too big to anchor in most municipal marinas, especially since the boat has 3,000 gallons of incredibly toxic diesel fuel and it's not really seaworthy, which means there's this constant risk of poisoning the waters it sits in that the authorities are just gonna be consistently like, guys, you can't have this here. Guys, you simply can't have this here.

[David Bourie]

So they just gotta operate out in international waters like a cruise ship?

[Robert Evans]

No, they're just kind of illegally anchoring places and hoping that it's fine and periodically getting boarded over it. Another crew member on the ride down from Alaska who is just kind of there. They're just there for the adventure. So they leave and don't come back after they get to the bay. But this person expressed an opinion that Ziz consistently came off as creepy but not scary. At one point, he says that she confronted him and told him he was transgender. And when he's like, no, I'm really not, she pressured him. He was, yes, she does this a lot. Tells people, I know that you're. This, this is. And it works like, that's how a number of her followers get to her. But she also, it doesn't work a lot of time. A lot of people are like, no, I'm not. You know, whatever it is you're saying, she does this to Gwyn too. So I don't doubt his story. She just kind of decides things about people and then tries to brute force them into accepting that about herself. And when there are people who are both desperate for approval and affection and also who are housing insecure and need the boat or wherever to live with her, those people feel, a number of them feel like a significant pull to just kind of accept whatever Ziz is saying about them.

[David Bourie]

Yeah. I mean, when you're desperate in that way, you kind of definitely find yourself bending things to have a roof over your head.

[Robert Evans]

Like, right?

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yep.

[Robert Evans]

And it's a very normal cult thing. Right. Like, this is an aspect of all of that kind of behavior. Now, by this point, a few other people have come to live in the rationalist fleet. One of them is Imma Borhanian, a former Google engineer, and Alex Leatham, a budding mathematician. The flotilla became a sort of marooned aquatic salon. Wired quotes Ziz as emailing to a friend at the time. We've been somewhat isolated from the rationalist community for a while and in the course developed a significant chunk of unique art of rationality and theories of psychology aimed at solving our problems. Excited for this psychology you built on the boat?

[David Bourie]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Wired continues. As Lasota articulated their goals had moved beyond real estate into a more grandiose realm. We are trying to build a cabal, she wrote. The aim was to find abnormally intrinsically good people and turn them all into Gervais sociopaths, creating a fundamentally type of group than I have heard of existing before. Sociopathy, Lasota wrote, would allow the group members to operate unponed by the external world.

[David Bourie]

Yeah. That is because you had said that before, right, that they had been. That's sort of what they're looking to be.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. They're obsessed with this idea of which is initially like kind of a joke about the office. But they're like, no, no, no. It actually is really good to have this sociopath at the top who like moves and manipulates these lesser fools and whatnot and puts them into positions below them. That's how we need what we need to be in order to gain control of the levels of power.

[David Bourie]

Oh, man.

[Robert Evans]

We have to make ourselves into Ricky Gervais sociopaths.

[David Bourie]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Great. What a good ideology.

[David Bourie]

I love that. They still love pop culture though, you.

[Robert Evans]

Know, they're obsessed with it. And again, this is. You can't talk about this kind of shit if you're regularly having conversations with people outside of your bubble.

[David Bourie]

It's the thing. Yeah. If you have somewhere to go.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[David Bourie]

If you have anywhere to go. This can't be.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes. If you've got a friend who's like a nurse or a contractor, they have drinks with once a week and you just talk about your ideas once, they're gonna be like, hey, this is bad, you need to stop. You're going down a bad road. Do you need to stay with me? Are you okay?

[David Bourie]

This is clearly like a cousin.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Someone.

[David Bourie]

This is. Would be so upsetting for someone to just casually talk about it like a paint and sip or whatever.

[Robert Evans]

Like Ricky Gervais.

[David Bourie]

Yeah, Rick.

[Robert Evans]

So by this point, their breaks with mainstream rationalism had gone terminal. Gwyn criticized the rest of the central rationalist community for, quote, not taking heroic responsibility for the outcome of this world. In addition to the definitely accurate claims of sexual abuse within rationalism, they alleged organizations like CFAR were actively transphobic. I don't know how true that is. Some of the articles I've read, there's a lot of trans rationalists who will be like, no, there's a very high population of trans people within the rationalist community. So people disagree about this. It's not my place to come to a conclusion. But this is one of the things that Ziz says about the central rationalist community. Ziz had concluded that transgender people were the best people to build a cabal around because they quote from Ziz's blog, had unusually high life force. Ziz believed that the mental powers locked within the small community of simpatico rationalists they'd gathered together were enough to alter the fate of the cosmos if everyone could be jailbroken into sociopaths.

[David Bourie]

And these are all double goods as well?

[Robert Evans]

Well, no, she's the only double good, actually. She becomes increasingly convinced that they're all just single good. Right? And this is like her beliefs about heroism from the last episode. If you've got the community and the hero, the community's job is to support the hero, right?

[David Bourie]

Like, no matter what. It was like blind support, right?

[Robert Evans]

Blind support, no matter what. And a lot of the language Ziz is using here, in addition to being, you know, rationalist language, this is all like Scientology mixed with gaming and fantasy media. She talks about the need to install new mental tech on she and her friends, which is like, tech is like a Scientology term, right? Like, that's. That's like a big thing that they say. She and her circle start dressing differently. Ziz starts wearing like all black robes and stuff to make her look like a Sith or some sort of wizard. Her community adopts the name vegan anarcho transhumanist and starts unironically referring to themselves as vegan Sith around this man.

[David Bourie]

Imagine being in the boat community when they move in.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, Just like, what the fuck is going on? I just wanted to. I'm just an alcoholic. What's happening? I just wanted to be like Quint from Jaws. Oh, no.

[David Bourie]

I'm just here cause my wife left me, right?

[Robert Evans]

I think I might die a different way than a great white attack. Now this is looking bad.

[David Bourie]

Yikes.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, man. So around this time, Gwyn claims she came up with a tactic for successfully separating and harnessing the power of different hemispheres of someone's brain. The tactic was unihemispheric sleep. And this is a process by which only one half of your brain sleeps at a time. In a critical write up published As a warning before the killings that are to come. A rationalist named Apollo Mohave writes, normally, it is not possible for human beings to sleep with only one hemisphere. However, a weak form of UHS can be achieved by stimulating one half of the body and resting the other. Like hypnosis or fasting. This is a vulnerable psychological state for a person. Entering UHS requires the sleeper to be exhausted. It also has disorienting effects. So they are not quite themselves. And I disagree with them that, like, there's no. They're not just actually sleeping with only one hemisphere. And in fact, I think they may have taken this idea from Warhammer 40,000.

[David Bourie]

That's so funny because it's brains do. Because. Yeah, what are you talking about?

[Robert Evans]

But yeah, that doesn't. That's not a thing. Like, you know that. Like. Yes, if you don't let yourself sleep for long periods of time and like kind of let yourself zone into a meditative state, you'll get a trippy effect. Like, you will become altered. You're altering your state. And you can. In fact, this is why cults deprive people of sleep. You can fuck with people's heads a lot when they're in that space, but this isn't what's happening.

[David Bourie]

I like to think of them on. On the boat, just only using one half of their body.

[Robert Evans]

Like, right, right. Like one eye open y watching the office.

[David Bourie]

Furiously taking notes.

[Robert Evans]

So this is how that write up describes the process of uni hemispheric sleep. One, you need to be tired. Two, you need to be laying down or sitting up. It is important that you stay in a comfortable position that won't require you to move very much. In either case, you want to close one eye and keep the other open. Distract the open eye with some kind of engagement. Eventually you should feel yourself begin to fall asleep on one side. That side will also become numb. The degree of numbness is a good way to track how deep into sleep the side is. Once into uhs, it is supposed to be possible to infer which aspects of your personality are associated with which side of the brain. And the goal of unihemispheric sleep is to jailbreak the mind into psychopathy fully. Right. In ZIZ is. That's how ZIZ describes it.

[David Bourie]

That's the goal.

[Robert Evans]

That's the goal.

[David Bourie]

That's their goal.

[Robert Evans]

Gotta make ourselves into psychopaths so we can save the world. But it also gets used. You can use it to like, I have this thing. I don't like that I react this way in this situation. So get me into this sleep pattern you like, talk me through and we'll figure out why I'm doing it and we'll. They describe it as using tech to upgrade their mental capabilities. Right. So they're just kind of brainwashing each other. They're like fucking around with. With some pretty potentially dangerous stuff. And again, drugs are definitely involved in a lot of aspects of this which. Which is not usually written up. But you could. You just have to infer, given that there's some disagreement or there's some disagreement. Disagreement around all this. But it seems accurate to say that Gwyn is the one who came up with the uni hemispheric sleep idea. But a lot of the language around how this tactic was used and what it was supposed to do came from Ziz. And again, the process is just sleep deprivation. Right. This is cult stuff. It's part of how cults brainwash people. But it also wouldn't have seemed inherently suspicious to rationalists because part of that subculture, being part of that subculture and going to those events had already normalized a slightly less radical version of this behavior. As this piece in Bloomberg explains, at house parties, rationalists spent time debugging each other, engaging in a confrontational style of interrogation that would supposedly yield more rational thoughts sometimes. To probe further, they experimented with psychedelics and tried jailbreaking their minds to crack open their consciousness and make them more influential or agentic. Several people in Taylor, and this is one of the sources sphere, had similar psychotic episodes. One died by suicide in 2018 and another in 2021. So in the mainstream rationalist subculture, they are also trying to like, consciously hack their brains using a mix of like, drugs and meditation and like, social abuse. And people kill themselves as a result of, like, the outcomes of this. This is already a problem in the mainstream subculture.

[David Bourie]

Yeah. Let alone this extremist offshoot, right?

[Robert Evans]

Yep. Interrupt own writings at the time. Ziz describes hideous fights with Gwyn in which Gwyn tries to mentally dominate and mind control Ziz. They both become believers in a new theory Ziz has that's basically like. She uses the term mana, which she is. She describes as like your ability to persuade people, which is if you can convince someone of something, it's evidence that you have an inherent level of like, magical power. And someone with naturally high mana, like Ziz can literally mind control people with low mana. That's what she believes she's doing whenever she like, tries to talk someone into. Into something about themselves. As she's mind controlling them and she and Gwyn have mind control battles. At one point they start having like a one of these arguments where basically Gwyn threatens to mind control Ziz and Ziz threatens Gwyn back and this starts a verbal escalation. And the way Ziz describes this escalation, which is again, these are two sleep deprived, traumatized people fucking with each other's heads on a boat. But the way that Ziz describes the escalation side cycle is going to be important because this is, this has a lot to do with the logic of the murders that are to come. I said that if they were going to defend a right to be attacking me on some level and treat fighting back as a new aggression and cause to escalate, I would not at any point back down. And if our conflicting definitions of the ground state where no further retaliation was necessary, meant that we were consigned to a runaway positive feedback loop of revenge, so be it. And if that was true, we might as well try to kill each other right then and there. There in the darkness of the Caleb's bridge at night, where we were both sitting lying under things in a cramped space, I became intensely worried they could stand up faster. Consider the idea From World War I, mobilization is tantamount to a declaration of war. I stood up still silent, waiting. So you see first off, and there's.

[David Bourie]

Other people there as well. It's not just.

[Robert Evans]

Yes and just like the logic, think of, well, obviously if you attack me, then I'm going to counterattack you and then you're going to counter attack me, which means eventually we'll kill each other. So we should just kill each other now. Like when you are taking your advice on how to handle social conflict from the warring European powers that got into World War I. Maybe not a good positive example.

[David Bourie]

It's just so, like even in understanding how they got there, it still is such a stress. Like even having all this back, it's still like really taking some leaps.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I mean, just having a fight with your friend and then opening your locket which has like Kaiser Wilhelm and the Tsar in it and going, what would you guys do here?

[David Bourie]

Ancestors guide me.

[Robert Evans]

And again, you know, part of what's going on here is this timeless decision theory bullshit. Right? Ziz believes that she makes it clear at this point when they start having a conflict that the stakes will immediately escalate to life or death. Gwyn won't risk fucking with her. Right. But by doing this, she also immediately creates a situation where she feels unsafe. However, in that conflict, Gwyn yields, and Ziz concludes that the technique works. Right.

[David Bourie]

So then her mana must be.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes.

[David Bourie]

What she thinks it is.

[Robert Evans]

Her mana's strong, and this is a good idea for handling all conflicts. Right. So I'm gonna increasingly teach all these people who are listening to me that this is the, like, escalation loop that you handle every conflict with. Right. Great stuff. One of the young people who got drawn to Zizz at this time was Maya Pasek, who blogged under the name Squirrel in Hell. She wrote about mainstream rationalist stuff, citing Gitkowski and Elon Musk. But in her blog, there's like, a pattern of depressive thought. In one 2016 post, she mused about whether or not experiencing joy and awe might be bad because it biases your perception. So this is. This is a young person who I think is probably is dealing with a lot of depression, oppressive issues.

[David Bourie]

Yeah, Classic stinking thinking, as they say.

[Robert Evans]

Right. And maybe the community's not super helpful to her. She was working to create a rationalist community in the Canary Islands. She's kind of trying to do the same thing Ziz did. But, like, in an island where it's cheaper to live, is this a thing.

[David Bourie]

That can exist a lot of places? Like.

[Robert Evans]

Sure, yeah. I mean, yeah, if you got cheap rent, you can get a bunch of, like, weirdos who work online to move into a house with you.

[David Bourie]

Right, Fair.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Like, that's always possible. She found Ziz's blog and she starts commenting on it. She's particularly drawn to Ziz's theories on mana and Zinn's theory and Gwyn's theory about hemispheric personalities. In one of her most direct cult leader moments, Ziz reaches out directly to this to Maya, as she's like, posting on her blog and emails her saying, I see you liked some of my blog posts. Truly a sinister opening.

[David Bourie]

Yeah, no, that's. That's a bad guy.

[Robert Evans]

My. My true companion, Gwyn and I are taking. Taking us somewhat different than Miri. That's the organization. One of the rationalist organization approaches.

[David Bourie]

Is that what they call each other?

[Robert Evans]

That's how they refer to their true companions.

[David Bourie]

True companions.

[Robert Evans]

At this point, we're taking a somewhat different approach than the Miri approach to saving the world. Without much specific technical disagreements. We are running on somewhat pointed to by the approach. As long as you expect the world to burn, then change course. Right. So basically, we still expect the world to burn, so we can't keep doing what the other rationalists are doing. And she lays out to this girl she meets through a blog post. Her plan to find abnormally intrinsically good people and jailbreak them into Gervais sociopaths. She invites Maya to come out and it's I don't think this happened. But they do start separately, journeying into unbucketing. And Maya gets really into this uni hemispheric sleep thing. And Ziz is kind of like coaching her through the process. She tells Maya that one of her hemispheres is female because Maya is a trans woman woman. And Ziz tells her, one of your brain hemispheres, each of which is a separate person, is female, but the other is male and quote, mostly dead. And your suicidal impulses are caused by both the pain of being trans and also the fact that there's this dead man living in your head that's like taking up half of your brain's space. And so you really need to debuck it in order to have a chance of surviving. Right?

[David Bourie]

Okay, so she needs to be jailbroken.

[Robert Evans]

To be free to be free. And Maya will basically replace her sleep entirely with this uni hemispheric sleep crap, which exacerbates not sleeping, exacerbates your depressive swings, and leads to deeper and deeper trials of suicidal ideation. She is believed to have died by suicide. In February of 2018, she posts a what is essentially a suicide note that is very rationalist in its verbiage, literally titled decision theory and suicide side. And this is the first death directly related to Ziz and Gwyn's ideas. But I think it's important to note that like the role mainstream rationalism plays in all of this. Suicide is a common topic at CFAR events and people will argue constantly about whether or not like a low value individual, it's better for them to kill themselves. Right? Is that like of higher net value to the world? And it was also used as like a threat to stop women who were abused by figures in the community from speaking. And this is from that Bloomberg article. One woman in the community who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals says she was sexually abused by a prominent AI researcher After she confronted him, she says she had job offers rescinded and conference speaking gigs canceled and was disinvited from AI events. She said others in the community told her allegations of misconduct harmed the advancement of AI safety. And one person suggested an agentic option would be to kill herself. So there is just within rationalism this discussion of like, it can be agentic, as in like you are taking high agency for your to kill yourself if you're. If your net. If you're going to be a net harm to the cause of AI safety, which you will be by reporting this AI researcher who molested you. Right?

[David Bourie]

Yeah. Because you're taking them, man. Yeah. Shit.

[Robert Evans]

These people are like, all this whole community is playing with a lot of deeply dangerous stuff and a bunch of people are going to have their brains either kill themselves or. Or have suffered severe trauma as a result of all of this. Yeah.

[David Bourie]

Escaping this is even putting yourself back together after living this way. Seems like it would be such a task again.

[Robert Evans]

And like any cult, part of the difficulty is like teaching yourself how to speak normally again, how to not talk about all this stuff. Right.

[David Bourie]

Yeah. Not identify as a vegan Sith, like at work.

[Robert Evans]

Right, Right. Cause like, I gotta say, like, there's. And people who are really in the community will note like a dozen different other concepts and terms in addition to like vegan Sith and Gervais sociopaths and shit that I'm not talking about that are important to Ziz's ideology. But like, you just can't. Like I had to basically learn like the, like the. A different language to do these episodes and I'm not fluent in it. Right. Like you have to triage. Like, what shit do you need to know? You know?

[David Bourie]

Yeah. It's so deep. It's so deep.

[Robert Evans]

Deep and silly. Let's do an ad break and then we'll be done.

[Jenny Garth]

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[Unknown]

Catch the new Hulu original comedy Mid Century Modern from the creators of Will and Grace, executive producer Ryan Murphy and director James Burroughs. When three best friends moved in together, Palm Springs will never be the same. Bunny, Jerry and Arthur are already close friends, but when they decide to live together, it's a new chapter with a new family. And speaking of family, don't forget Bunny's mom, Sybil, who's along for the ride. Whether it's a trip to Fire island or a local congresswoman with a wild side, these roomies know how to do it with style. They're fun, they're fabulous, and they're turning life's lemons into spiked lemonade. So shake up a batch of cocktails, relax by the pool and get ready for some serious shade. A new comedy with heart, soul and sass, Mid Century Modern stars Nathan Lane, Matt Bomer, Nathan Leigh Graham and Linda Lavin. Mid century modern premieres March 28, streaming on Hulu.

[Sophie Lichterman]

You ever get the feeling the city walls closing in the concrete jungle suffocating your soul? You crave wide open spaces, the chance to connect with nature, maybe chase fish, a private stream. Well, listen up. There's a whole world out there, and finding your own piece of it just got easier. Head over to land.com they've got ranches, forest, mountains, you name it. Search by acreage, location, the kind of hunting or fishing you dream of. Land.com it's where the adventure begins.

[Robert Evans]

Honestly, Honestly?

[Unknown]

Honestly, no one wants to think about hiv, but there are things that everyone can do to help prevent it. Things like Prep. Prep stands for Pre Exposure Pro Prophylaxis, and it means routinely taking prescription medicine before you're exposed to HIV to help reduce your chances of getting it. Prep can be about 99% effective when taken as prescribed. It doesn't protect against other STIs, though, so be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices. Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention Options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead.

[Robert Evans]

And we're back. So I'm just gonna conclude this little story and then we'll end the episode for this day. So this person, Maya, has likely killed themselves at the start of 2018. And Ziz reacts to this suicide in her usual manner. She blogs about it. She took from what had happened. Not that like debucketing might be dangerous and unihemispheric sleep might be dangerous, but that explaining hemispheric consciousness to people was an infohazard. She believed that people who were single, good, like Maya, were at elevated risk because learning that one of the whole persons inside them was evil or mostly dead could create irreconcilable conflict leading to depression and suicide. And she comes up with a name for this. She calls this Pasek's Doom. That's what she names the infohazard that kills her friend who she's fucking with their head. So that's nice.

[David Bourie]

Yeah. As nice as anything else in this story has been.

[Robert Evans]

I think you might have been the doom here.

[David Bourie]

Yeah. I think you were the whole problem. But now it's an infohazard. To explain a person's like.

[Robert Evans]

To explain your theories. Yeah, yeah.

[David Bourie]

To a person who can't handle it, I guess.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. She comes to the conclusion it's a particular danger to explain to single good trans women who are the primary group of people that she is going after in terms of trying to recruit folks. So she admits her belief is that this thought thing I've come up with is particularly dangerous to the community I'm recruiting from. But it's the only. It's essential. This information is absolutely essential to saving the world. So you just have to roll the dice. Yeah.

[David Bourie]

It isolates herself within her own group that she's created.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. And it also. She is then consciously taking the choice. I know this is likely to kill or destroy a lot of the people I reach out to, but I think it's so important that it's like worth taking that risk with their lives. Lives. Yep. Good stuff.

[David Bourie]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Anyway, how you feeling? Getting a kick a plug?

[David Bourie]

I am, I am. Okay. You know what? I'M deeply sad for these people who are so lost. And I'm also pretty interested because this is crazy. But I'm okay.

[Robert Evans]

I'll be all right. Great. Happy to, Happy to. Happy to. Happy to see that. Well everybody, this has been behind the Bastards, a podcast about things that you maybe didn't think, maybe didn't need to know about how the Internet breaks people's brains. But also a lot of people surprisingly close to this community are running the government now. So maybe you do need to know about it. Sorry about that. Infohazard.

[Zone Media]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzone media.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.

[Unknown]

Honestly, honestly, honestly, no one wants to think about HIV. But there are things that everyone can do to help prevent prevent it. Things like prep. PREP stands for Pre Exposure Prophylaxis, and it means routinely taking prescription medicine before you're exposed to HIV. To help reduce your chances of getting it. Prep can be about 99% effective when taken as prescribed. It doesn't protect against other STIs, though, so be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices. Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention Options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more.

[Robert Evans]

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[Sophie Lichterman]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Sophie Lichterman]

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[David Bourie]

Clorox, and feels like yay.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, we could be here all day.

[Unknown]

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