The Zizian "death cult"

Summary

Summary of "The Zizian 'Death Cult'" Episode of Today, Explained

Podcast Information:

• Title: Today, Explained
• Host/Author: Vox
• Description: Today, Explained is Vox's daily news explainer podcast. Hosts Sean Rameswaram and Noel King guide listeners through the most important stories of the day.
• Episode: The Zizian "Death Cult"
• Release Date: March 6, 2025

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Introduction

In this gripping episode, Today, Explained delves into the disturbing rise and activities of a group known as the Zizians—a cult-like faction emerging from the Rationalist movement. Hosts Noel King and guest Max Reid explore the origins, beliefs, and violent actions of the Zizians, raising critical questions about their ongoing influence and the dangers they pose.

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Background: The Rationalist Movement

Max Reid begins by contextualizing the Rationalist movement, which primarily resides in Silicon Valley but has followers worldwide. He explains that rationalism emphasizes enhancing human reasoning to achieve better political, economic, philanthropic, and personal outcomes through deep, logical discourse and cognitive improvements.

“Rationalism is a kind of community or movement of people largely based in Silicon Valley... developing reasoning skills to better approach the world...” [02:06]

The movement has significantly impacted the AI research community, particularly concerning the development of superintelligent AI and ensuring its alignment with human values.

“Rationalism has been very influential in the AI research community...” [03:21]

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Emergence of the Zizians

The Zizians originated from within the Rationalist community, led by a charismatic figure named Ziz. Originally from Alaska, Ziz moved to the Bay Area in 2016, where she became deeply involved in rationalist workshops and lectures focused on AI safety and alignment. Facing challenges like finding affordable housing, Ziz proposed a unique solution—a rationalist flotilla of houseboats.

“She is attending these workshops... becomes sort of well known in the community for proposing a rationalist flotilla...” [05:27]

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Key Beliefs of the Zizians

Ziz's ideology forms the core of the Zizians' belief system, characterized by three main pillars:

1. Equal Worth of Animal and Human Lives: Ziz posits that animals deserve the same moral consideration as humans, equating factory farming and carnivorism to genocide. This belief extends moral obligations to preventing animal suffering on par with human atrocities.

   “Animal lives are worth the same as human lives... crimes on the order of genocide...” [07:04]

2. Indefinite Resistance to Compulsion: Ziz advocates for perpetual resistance against authority, suggesting that compliance is never an option, thereby fostering a confrontational stance towards societal norms and laws.

3. Bicameral Theory of Mind: She theorizes that each human brain contains two distinct personalities within its hemispheres. Through techniques like sleep deprivation and hallucinogenic drugs, individuals can separate these personalities, each possessing its own moral compass. This leads to a hierarchy where "double good" individuals, with both brain halves aligned morally, are highly esteemed.

   “Each brain has two hemispheres... techniques like sleep deprivation... can separate out these two halves...” [07:04]

These beliefs establish a social hierarchy and enable Ziz to position herself as a moral and existential leader, attracting followers who aspire to attain "double good" status.

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Conflict with Authorities

Ziz's increasing influence and radical beliefs led to significant conflicts with both the Rationalist establishment and law enforcement. In 2019, amid allegations of sexual misconduct against leaders at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), Ziz and three followers staged a blockade at a rationalist event, donning Guy Fawkes masks and distributing flyers condemning MIRI's leadership.

“They wear Guy Fawkes masks in the manner of anonymous... a SWAT team assaults Ziz and her three followers...” [10:57]

The confrontation resulted in the arrest of all four individuals, who later filed a lawsuit against Sonoma County for civil rights violations. This incident marked a turning point, pushing the Zizians towards more militant actions.

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Escalation to Violence

The plea from Zizians to legal authorities to desist was met with further hostility, escalating their activities into violent confrontations:

1. 2021 Escalation: Ziz and another follower, Gwen Danielson, skipped bail following their arrests and were rumored to have died in a boating accident or committed suicide, respectively. However, their disappearance hinted at continued clandestine operations.

2. Altercation with Carl Lind: In a separate incident, two Zizians, Emma Borhanian and Somni, engaged in a violent altercation with Carl Lind, an elderly landlord. During an eviction attempt, Somni stabbed Lind with a samurai sword, leading to a deadly shootout. Lind survived the attack, but Borhanian was killed.

   “Somni stabs him with a samurai sword... Carl Lind shoots Somni and Emma Borhanian...” [14:50]

3. Double Homicide in Pennsylvania: Ziz was later implicated in the murders of Richard and Rita Zyko, further linking her to a series of violent acts across states.

   “Police in Pennsylvania... Michelle Plum... described Ziz's attempts to pressure her into murdering another rationalist named Alice...” [19:11]

These events underscored the Zizians' transition from ideological dissenters to active perpetrators of violence.

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Recent Arrests and Current Status

By early 2025, the Zizians' activities culminated in a series of arrests:

• January 17, 2025: Carl Lind, the landlord previously attacked, was fatally stabbed.
• January 20, 2025: A shootout in Vermont resulted in the death of a Border Patrol agent and injuries to others involved in the incident.
• Mid-February 2025: Ziz, Michelle Zyko Plum, and Daniel Blank were arrested in connection with various homicides and violent acts.

All key members of the Zizians are now in custody, facing multiple charges ranging from obstruction of justice to double homicide.

“In mid February, Ziz is arrested, so is Michelle Zyko, and so is this person, Daniel Blank... all of them without bail...” [16:09]

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Analysis: Influence and Cult Dynamics

Max Reid examines whether Ziz was the mastermind behind the Zizians' violent actions or if her influence was more subtle. He suggests that Ziz employed a form of charismatic leadership that emphasized moral and existential imperatives, compelling followers to justify extreme actions without issuing direct orders.

“Ziz cultivates a sense of moral or even existential importance... without necessarily needing to create a kind of hierarchical structure of power...” [23:12]

This approach classifies the Zizians as a cult where the leader inspires followers to act based on shared beliefs, rather than through explicit commands. The interplay between Ziz's ideology and contemporary anxieties about AI and societal collapse likely fueled the group's extremism.

“If you have a particular personality and... you're constantly hearing about the dangers posed by AI... someone might end up... willing to buy and draw a gun...” [26:57]

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Conclusion

The rise and fall of the Zizians highlight the potential dangers of ideological extremism within intellectual communities. As the Rationalist movement grapples with internal scandals and external threats, the Zizian saga serves as a cautionary tale about charismatic leadership and the radicalization of fear-driven beliefs. The ongoing legal proceedings will shed more light on the extent of Ziz's influence and the mechanisms that drove her followers to commit heinous acts.

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Notable Quotes

• Max Reid on Rationalism:

  “Rationalism is a kind of community or movement of people largely based in Silicon Valley... developing reasoning skills to better approach the world...” [02:06]

• Max Reid on AI and Rationalism:

  “Rationalism has been very influential in the AI research community...” [03:21]

• Max Reid on Ziz's Beliefs:

  “Animal lives are worth the same as human lives... crimes on the order of genocide...” [07:04]

• Max Reid on Cult Dynamics:

  “Ziz cultivates a sense of moral or even existential importance... without necessarily needing to create a kind of hierarchical structure of power...” [23:12]

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This comprehensive exploration of the Zizians provides listeners with an in-depth understanding of how intellectual movements can sometimes give rise to dangerous factions when combined with charismatic leadership and societal fears.

Transcript

[Noel King]

In late January, Vermont Border Patrol agent David Mayland pulled over a car near the Canadian border while trading fire. Mayland was killed, as was one of the car's occupants. The other was injured. As the days passed, authorities realized that the people in that car had links to what's been described as a cult called the Zizians. Most of the Zizians are now dead or in jail. But do their ideas still have purchase?

[Max Reid]

This isn't like the Manson family driving around every night looking for people to murder. But I do think, you know, it's possible that there are people out there who are influenced by Ziz or who are, who were, in fact, fellow travelers, so to speak, who are, you know, still, still waiting for the final confrontation that they're going to have.

[Noel King]

That's coming up on Today. Expl have you ever spotted McDonald's hot.

[Max Reid]

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[Noel King]

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[Max Reid]

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[Noel King]

Noel It's Today Explained. I'm Noel King. The Zizians emerged out of a movement called the Rationalists. Max Reid has been following this story. He's the owner, operator of the Reid Max newsletter on Substack. And so I asked Max to start by telling us what the Rationalists are.

[Max Reid]

So rationalism is a kind of community or movement of people largely based in Silicon Valley, though there's certainly people who would call themselves rationalists all over the world. You know, this is a big group of people with a lot of different politics and many different sort of attitudes and ideas about what rationalism entails. But I think it's fair to say the sort of main idea is that human beings can and in fact should develop their reasoning skills to better approach the world, to better pursue good political outcomes, economic outcomes, philanthropic outcomes, personal outcomes. So in practice, this means, you know, having very long, very prolix conversations with other rationalists, usually online, like on forums, following chains of logic, sort of deep as far as they possibly go, and even if they come to absurd conclusions, taking those conclusions seriously so long as the logic seems sound, experimenting with sort of cognitive hacks or what they sometimes call Debugging tricks to sort of eliminate bias and think more rationally in their lives.

[Noel King]

Do you yearn to defend your own beliefs, or do you yearn to see the world as clearly as you possibly can?

[Max Reid]

Rationalism has been very influential in the AI research community in part because a sort of original set of concerns among maybe the most prominent rationalist, a man named Eliezer Yudkowsky, is about, you know, the inevitability or likelihood of a coming super intelligence and the need to ensure that this super intelligence is aligned with, with human values and morality. My prediction is that this ends up with us facing down something smarter than us that does not want what we want, that does not want anything we recognize as valuable or meaningful. Just to give a sort of flavor of what rationalist thought. Often the kind of crazy thought experiment that ends up being taken as if not gospel, at least something to take seriously, is a famous thought experiment called Roko's Basilisk. The idea of which is if there is a far future super intelligence that is going to come, it is likely to punish anybody who prevented it from coming into existence, and it will have the power to copy your brain onto its hardware in some kind of simulation and torture you for eternity. So if you spend any time at all thinking about this coming super intelligence but not helping it come into existence, then you may be damning yourself or like a copy of you, which would be functionally equivalent to you to an endless simulated hell, basically.

[Noel King]

Hmm. I like pathotic parents, probably because I don't think it's real. Do you know what I mean?

[Max Reid]

Like, oh yeah, it's a very fun sci fi. Like, you know, if you read that in a sci fi story, you'd get a little chill and you'd be like, that's so cool.

[Noel King]

Exactly. But like, I don't, I wouldn't make life choices based on it. But the folks that we're about to discuss did appear to make some life choices based on things that, you know, were more thought experiment than real. So let's bring this into the real world. Who is Zyzz and how does Ziz become involved with the rationalists?

[Max Reid]

So Ziz is a computer programmer, originally from Alaska, I believe, who moved to the bay area in 2016, a few years after graduating college. Zyz is a trans woman who, based on what I can tell from the record, transitioned during or after college. She was very interested in the rationalist community. So there's two sort of big nonprofit institutions associated with rationalism. One is called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, or Miri and the other is called cifar, the center for Applied Rationality. And these are places where you can attend workshops and lectures about AI alignment, about AI safety, which are sort of the broad terms for talking about, you know, making sure that AI doesn't kill all of us. So she. She's. She's really interested in this stuff. She. She is attending these workshops. She's meeting a bunch of rationalists. She is hard to find housing, affordable housing in the bay. And she moves onto a houseboat in the marina and becomes sort of well known in the community for proposing a rationalist flotilla, where a bunch of rationalists can all come live on houseboats in the marina for relatively che. Our aim, whether or not we thought.

[Noel King]

Success probable, was to make something much larger than the boat that we got to appeal to the entire rationality community. People refer to the Zizians as a cult. Cults believe things. Cult leaders often have a big idea or two that they're very good at getting other people to believe. What is Ziz's big idea?

[Max Reid]

Ziz describes herself as a Sith vegan Sith being, you know, for people who have never watched the Star wars series. God bless you. The evil. The evil Jedis. Destroy the Sith. We must, for the purposes of, like, the basic understanding of Zizianism, there's sort of three important pillars to what Ziz believes. The first is that animal lives are worth the same as human lives. And because of that, factory farming, carnivorism, these are crimes on the order of genocide, that millions of animals, hundreds of millions of animals, are being hurt or killed or enslaved every year. And moreover, you know, once you've sort of entered this thought experiment, you now have a kind of moral. The same moral obligation you would have to prevent a genocide, you now also have to prevent the killing and the death of animals. So, so far, so good. This is kind of. This is not that far from what somebody who belongs to PETA might believe, but because of Ziz's and the sort of rationalist general commitment to their principles, no matter how kind of out of the mainstream those principles might take you, it suggests that violence, often extreme violence, is a necessary or allowable response to what you see as this enormous crime. The second and sort of related part, Ziz seems to believe that you can kind of indefinitely just say no, that you can kind of. That you can avoid compulsion and arrest and surrender simply by resisting at all times. And then the third part is that ZIZ has a, what I suppose you would call a bicameral theory. Of mind that she believes that every brain has two hemispheres. I mean, every brain, in fact does have two hemispheres. She's not wrong about that. But that each hemisphere contains a different person or a different personality that has been sort of melded together in most people. But that through techniques like sleep deprivation, judicious application of hallucinogenic drugs, you can separate out these two halves of your brain, these two personalities. She believes that each brain has a sort of independent moral quality. And that again, I can't believe how many times I have to say this is a blanket non endorsement of all of Ziza's beliefs. But I do want to establish that as I describe this, it's not necessarily that we should take it at face value, but she basically believes that something like 1 in 20 people, 1 part of their brain, one half of their brain, has an intuitive understanding of animal lives as being worth the same as human lives. So that person is called single good. One of the two halves of their brain has this goodness, this understanding. In 1 in 400 people, both parts of their brain have this intuitive moral understanding. Those people are called double good. So I bring up this schema both to establish that Ziz is encouraging her followers to sort of pursued the sleep deprivation, the hallucinogenic drugs in pursuit of a genuinely pretty out there and strange vision of human consciousness. But she's also established this kind of hierarchy of moral worth that she is double good. She's looking for other double good people. And if you are only single good, well, you're just not as good as Ziz, basically. So you can kind of, you know, you can begin to see a sort of social dynamic emerge that allows her to take control of a group of people, to establish herself as the leader, to establish herself as the sort of moral exemplar.

[Noel King]

Okay, so the Zizians have some strange ideas. They have a charismatic leader. That doesn't necessarily mean trouble has to happen. When do the Zizians first have trouble with the law?

[Max Reid]

Ziz starts to become disillusioned with the rationalist community around 2019. And around the same time, a set of accusations becomes public against some of the higher ups at Miri. That's remember the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, one of the prominent nonprofits involved in AI safety and rationalism. These accusations, which are made on an anonymous website, are essentially that some of the higher ups at this, at Miri have sexually assaulted minors. And, you know, these accusations have never been sort of specifically elaborated in court. You know, these are accusations about not just sexual assault, but Also cover ups. But there has been some really important and significant and really well documented reporting about sexual harassment, sexual assault, if not with minors, with adult members of the. So to be fair, it is. It's not like she's inventing these charges. She is, I think, maybe picking up on some real messed up power dynamics. I should note that this is not necessarily her crusade here is not necessarily a sort of moral, like, you know, for the sake of the victims of this harassment or assault. It's that she thinks that if the messengers of rationalism are imperfect in this way, that it will damage their ability to pursue the goals of AI safety, of AI alignment. And so in 2019, she and three of her followers, I suppose at this point we can say, go to a Seafar reunion and they blockade the entrance. They wear Guy Fawkes masks in the manner of anonymous, and they pass out flyers basically elaborating that Elisa Yudkowsky does not deserve to be leading the rationalist movement. This obviously freaks out the people at SEFAR who call the cops. Sonoma county sends in a SWAT team who by basically, by all accounts, assaults Ziz and her three followers, and they get arrested and thrown in jail in Sonoma County. And this on both sides represents a kind of escalation for the rationalists, the establishment rationalists, such as they are. They realize that this Zizian group is maybe potentially dangerous. So a website gets created called zizians.info that's a sort of warning website about interacting with Ziz, about Ziz as a potential cult leader, what they call an infohazard, which is like somebody who has knowledge that if you know it, it might drive you insane or compel you to do bad things. On the side of the Zizians, this is an escalation in the sense that they seem to not have expected to get the cops called on them. And certainly they didn't expect to have like a full militarized police force come through and beat them up. So all four of the Zizians are eventually able to post bail, but almost immediately they file a lawsuit against Sonoma county for civil rights violations. From this point on, I think you can see a more militant, if I can use that word, a more militant Zizianism.

[Noel King]

Coming up after the break, Max returns to tell us what a more militant Zizianism led to. Your data is like gold to hackers. They're selling your passwords, bank details and private messages. McAfee helps stop them. Secure VPN keeps your online activity private. AI powered text scam detector spots phishing attempts instantly, and with award winning antivirus, you get top tier hacker protection. Plus you'll get up to $2 million in identity theft coverage, all for just $39.99 for your first year. Visit McAfee.com, cancel anytime terms apply.

[Max Reid]

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[Noel King]

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[Max Reid]

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[Noel King]

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[Noel King]

See full [e-mail] this is today Explained. We're back with Max Reed of the Reid Max substack. Max, you said in 2019, this altercation in Sonoma and some arrests turn the Zizians more militant. What happens next?

[Max Reid]

We're in the pandemic at this point. People aren't really gathering in person. Things are moving slowly. Zyzz and the three people she was arrested with have court hearings, but they're slipping by. We don't hear a lot about them. There's not a lot of record in the sense of blog posts or message board posts. But in 2021, Ziz and one of the other arrestees, a woman named Gwen Danielson, skip bail and fail to show up to the court dates that have been assigned to them. A few months later, their lawyer attests in a filing that Ziz has died in a boating accident, which is not, in the end, surprising, given what we know, that she lived on a houseboat. He also writes that Danielson seems to have disappeared and was rumored to have killed herself at the age of 28. So for some people who were paying attention from the sidelines, interested rationalists, this was sort of the tragic end of the story. But around the same time, two of the other people who'd been arrested at the CIFAR protests, a woman named Emma Borhanian and another person who goes under the name Somni, were involved in an altercation with an 80 year old man named Carl Lind. Lind was a landlord, though a sort of very Bay Area situation where he had a chunk of property and he was letting people camp or park RVs on it and live there. You know, artists and people who were otherwise having a trouble finding housing. So a bunch of Zizians, including Emma Samni, another person named Suri Dao, had been living there for the last few years, but were supposedly in deep arrears and were also, from what we understand, kind of strange and difficult to deal with. They would rock around naked all the time and otherwise just sort of not be productive members of the community. So Lind, who again is 80, has called the police to finally evict the Zizians when Somni stabs him with a samurai sword. Lind, who has a gun, shoots Somni and Emma Borhanian. Lind and Somni both manage to survive this assault. Borhanian unfortunately dies. And what's particularly interesting about this, beyond the fact that an 80 year old man was stabbed with a samurai sword by an avowed Zizian, is that based on statements from the police, both Ziz and Gwen Danielson, who we've been told are dead, are alive. According to a write up by a blogger named Sefa Shapiro, police in Solano county encountered Ziz at the scene. They knew that she'd skipped bail. They knew there was a warrant out for her arrest, but they didn't arrest her. She went to the hospital, they didn't want to wait for her to be discharged, and she disappears again. A few weeks later, Ziz is arrested again in Pennsylvania, this time for obstruction of justice and disorderly conduct in connection with a double homicide of senior citizens Richard Zayko and Rita Zyko. Quiet neighborhood in Delaware county has been turned upside down tonight. Investigators in Chester Heights have ruled two suspicious deaths as homicides, and investigators said.

[Noel King]

They did not believe it was random. Court records detail surveillance video where mom.

[Max Reid]

Could be heard around the time of the murder. This is interesting because the Zyko's daughter is a woman named Michelle, who went by the name Plum online, who was known to be a friend of Zis. And Plum once wrote a blog post describing Ziz's attempts to pressure her into murdering another rationalist named Alice.

[Noel King]

Hmm.

[Max Reid]

Ziz has got this whole Sith thing.

[Noel King]

Going on where she thinks Alice was her mentor.

[Max Reid]

And guess what Siths do to their mentors. Police in Pennsylvania said that Zy and Michelle Plum and a third person, Daniel Blank, were very plausibly involved in this double homicide. But again, nothing seems to happen. Zyzz is again released. At this point it's mid 2023 and once again we have another 18 month. We don't hear much from the Zizians. Nobody's in custody. There's not clear what the progression of this civil rights lawsuit they filed is. It's not clear what the progression of the charges in Pennsylvania or in California are. But then in January 17th of this year, Carl Lind appears in the news again because he's stabbed to death in the Bay Area.

[Noel King]

This is the landlord.

[Max Reid]

Yes. Who had survived the previous stabbing. That's January 17th. On January 20th, which is the day of the Trump inauguration, we have a shootout in Vermont. Back here tonight, new developments in the deadly shooting of a border patrol agent in Vermont. The agent shot and killed during a traffic stop near the Canadian border. An exchange of gunfire occurred. The agent was killed along with one suspect. The FBI says a second. The second suspect was injured. The two people in the car were computer scientists, one of whom went by the name Ophelia online, and the other was a computer science student named Theresa Youngblood. People online start to pick up that these are people who they've interacted with before who are members of the rationalist community who are potentially affiliated with Ziz. And then some dots start to get connected. So a few days after the shootout, a data scientist, 22 year old data scientist named Maximilian Snyder is arrested for the stabbing of Lind in California. And it turns out that Snyder and Teresa Youngblock, the survivor of the border shootout, had applied for a marriage license in Washington state. Meanwhile, Michelle Zyko Plum, whose parents had been murdered in a double homicide for which ZYZ was briefly detained, is revealed to own property in Vermont not far from the location of the shootout. And then based on some filings by prosecutors in Vermont, she appears to be the person who purchased the guns that Ophelia and Teresa Youngblood used in the shootout. And she's named as a person of interest. So at this point, you know, we're looking at a kind of bi, coastal cross country. You don't want to call it a killing spree because we're talking about over the course of three or four years, but a set of murders that seem to be very clearly connected effectively in the person of Ziz, who is friends and perhaps even a leader of this sort of loose group of suspicious people. I suppose we'd say eventually, in mid February, Ziz is arrested, so is Michelle Zyko, and so is this person, Daniel Blank. So at this point, I believe all of the Zizians are in custody, almost all of them without bail, awaiting trial on a number of these different crimes. That's where we are right now. That's where we're leaving off with the Zizians.

[Noel King]

Everybody, everybody involved here will get a trial. Everybody involved here who wants a lawyer will get a lawyer. These folks will go through the justice system. But I wonder, given your reporting, if you have a sense of how much of this is Ziz. Was Ziz calling the shots? Was Ziz ordering her followers to do these things?

[Max Reid]

That's a great question. I mean, it's something that I think is going to be incredibly interesting to follow in court. Based on chat transcripts and blog posts that we've seen, I think Ziz has a particular style of pressure that isn't precisely orders. This is not a cult in the sense of it's not like the Mafia, right, where there's a boss who's. Who's giving direct commands. It's more, I think that Ziz cultivates a sense of moral or even existential importance to the beliefs of the group and then puts people in a position to feel obligated to commit crimes. But, you know, I think cult is a fair word to describe the Zizians as we're talking about them. But by all accounts, it's not really a sort of Jim Jones type. This person is a savior who we need to respect and follow and whose teachings are sort of divinely inspired. It's much more a case of an extremely charismatic person who is able to talk people into things without necessarily needing to create a kind of church or, again, hierarchical structure of power that people would follow, if that distinction makes sense.

[Noel King]

So let's position these people, the Zizians, within the times in which we live. Because, yes, every age has its cults, and every cult has its reasons. And some of those reasons are genuinely interesting. And they often fit the times in which they live. Even five years ago, these worries about artificial intelligence seemed very far away. When the rationalists got started with their thought experiments. You could look at this and say, oh, my God, you guys, it's years in the future. Stop freaking out. But in the last 30 months, we've seen major developments and improvements in AI, and we now appear to be barreling toward a future that these folks were really worried about. Do you think it was the times in which we live that made the Zizians?

[Max Reid]

Yeah, you know, we've been cultivating a sense of danger about AI for the last Two or three decades, the rationalists themselves have been cultivating this sense. AI researchers, whether or not they're influenced by rationalists, have been cultivating this sense of danger. And, you know, journalists who cover AI, captivated by the sort of dramatic apocalyptic stories told about the coming AI future, have that same sense. And I think there's a real feedback loop that gets created in discourse about artificial intelligence where it's flashier to say that so called AGI or artificial general intelligence is just around the corner. It's more compelling to say that it's going to be a huge existential danger to the labor market, to the world, to humanity as we know it. In that way, if you have a particular personality and if you are in a position where you are constantly hearing about the dangers posed by AI, it's not hard to see how somebody might end up in a position where they're willing to buy and draw a gun on behalf of a set of beliefs about artificial intelligence that maybe, you know, to use the word in its original sense, that maybe a more rational person probably wouldn't pursue.

[Noel King]

Max Reed. His substack is read Max, if you found this interesting and you want to hear more about the rationalists and some of these risks and fears around AI, Vox has got a new series coming out on March 12th called Good Robot and you can hear it in the unexplainable feed. Today's show was produced by Amanda Llewellyn with help from Travis Larchuk. It was edited by Amina Elsadi and fact checked in how by Laura Bullard. It was mixed by Andrea Christensdotter and Patrick Boyd. I'm Noel King. It's Today Explained Foreign.

[Max Reid]

You can do this promo talking about all the great Vox Media podcasts that are going to be on stage live at south by Southwest this March. You just need a big idea to get people's attention, to help them, you know, keep them from hitting the skip button. I don't know. I'm gonna throw it out to the group. Chat. Kara, do you have any ideas?

[Noel King]

In these challenging times, we're a group of mighty hosts who have banded together to fight disinformation by speaking truth to power. Like the Avengers, but with more spandex. What do you think, Scott?

[Max Reid]

I'm more of an X Men fan myself. Call me Professor. Could I read minds? I can't really read minds, but I can empathize with anyone having a midlife crisis, which is essentially any tech leader. So minds are important, Scott, but we're more than that. I think that you can't really separate minds from feelings. And we need to talk about our emotions and explore the layers of our relationships with our partners, co workers, our families, neighbors, and our adjacent communities.

[Noel King]

I just want to add a touch more. From sports and culture to tech and politics, Vox Media has an all star lineup of podcasts that's great in your feeds, but even better live.

[Max Reid]

That's it. All Stars. Get your game on, Go play. Come see a bunch of Vox Media All Stars and also me at south by Southwest on the Vox Media Podcast stage presented by Smartsheet and Intuit, March 8th through 10th in Austin, Texas. Go to VoxMedia.coms SXSW. You'll never know if you don't go? You'll never shine if you don't glow.