Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader

Robert tells David Gborie about the early life of Ziz LaSota, a bright young girl from Alaska who came to the Bay Area with dreams of saving the cosmos or destroying it, all based on her obsession with Rationalist blogs and fanfic. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Oh my goodness. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is be interested to see how the audience reacts to this one, talking about some of the most obscure, frustrating internet arcana that has ever occurred and recently led to the deaths of like six people.

• 0:27Robert Evans?

  My guest today, as in last episode, David Boree. David, how you doing, man?

• 0:33Speaker 01

  I'm doing great. I really can't wait to see where this goes.

• 0:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  I feel like anything could happen at this point.

• 0:44Robert Evans?

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

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• 0:57Robert Evans?

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• 2:01Robert Evans?

  So we had kind of left off by setting up the rationalists, where they came from, some of the different strains of thought and beliefs that come out of their weird thought experiments. And now we are talking about a person who falls into this movement fairly early on and is going to be the leader of this quote unquote group, the Zizians, who were responsible for these murders that just happened. Ziz La Sota was born in 1990 or 1991. I don't have an exact birth date. She's known to be 34 years old as of 2025. So it was somewhere in that field. She was born in Fairbanks, Alaska and grew up there as her father worked for the University of Alaska as an AI researcher. We know very

• 2:44Robert Evans?

  little of the specifics of her childhood or upbringing, but in more than 100,000 words of blog posts, she did make some references to her early years. She claims to have been talented in engineering and computer science from a young age, and there's no real reason to doubt this. The best single article on all of this is a piece in Wired by Evan Ratliff. He found a 2014 blog post by Ziz where she wrote, "My friends and family, even if they think I'm weird, don't really seem to be bothered by the fact that I'm weird. But one thing I can tell you is that I used to de-emphasize my weirdness around them, and then I stopped and found that being unapologetically weird is a lot more fun." Now, it's important you know, Ziz is not the name this person is born under. She's

• 3:26Robert Evans?

  a trans woman, and so I'm like using the name that she adopts later, but she is not transitioned at this point. Like, this is, this is when she's a kid, right? And she's not going to transition until fairly late in the story after coming to San Francisco. So you just keep that in mind as this is going on here. Hey, everyone. Robert here. Just a little additional context. As best as I think anyone can tell, if you're curious about where the names is came from, there's another piece of serial released online fiction that's not like a rationalist story, but it's very popular with rationalists. It's called Worm. Ziz is a character in that that's effectively like an angel-like being who can like manipulate the future,

• 4:12Robert Evans?

  usually in order to do very bad things. Anyway, that's where the name comes from. So, smart kid, really good with computers, kind of weird, and embraces being unapologetically weird at a certain point in her childhood. Hey, everybody, Robert here. Did not have this piece of information when I first put the episode together, but I came across a quote in an article from the Boston Globe that provides additional context on Ziz's childhood. Quote, "In middle school, the teen was among a group of students who managed to infiltrate the school district's payroll system and award huge paychecks to teachers they admired while slashing the salaries of those they despised, according to one teacher.

• 4:56Robert Evans?

  Ziz, the teacher said, struggled to regulate strong emotions, often erupting in tantrums." I wish I'd had this when David was on, but definitely sets up some of the things that are coming. She goes to the U of Alaska for her undergraduate degree in computer engineering. In February of 2009, which is when Eliza Yudkowski started Less Wrong, Ziz starts kind of getting drawn into some of the the people who are around this growing subculture, right? And she's drawn in initially by veganism. So, Ziz becomes a vegan at a fairly young age. Her family are not vegans, and she's obsessed with the concept of animal sentience, right?

• 5:41Robert Evans?

  Of the fact that like animals are thinking and feeling beings just like human beings. And a lot of this is based in her interest in kind of foundational rationalist. A lot of this is based in her interest of a foundational rationalist and EA figure, a guy named Brian Tomasik. Brian is a writer and a software engineer, as well as an animal rights activist. And as a thinker, he's what you'd call a long-termist, right? Which is, you know... Pretty tied to the EA guys. These are all the same people using like kind of different words to describe the aspects of what they believe. His organization is the Center on Long-Term Risk, which is a think tank he establishes that's at the ground floor of

• 6:26Robert Evans?

  these effective altruism discussions. And the goal for the Center of Long-Term Risk is to find ways to reduce suffering on a long timeline. Thomas Saeck is obsessed with the concept of suffering and specifically obsessed with concept suffering as a mathematical concept. So when I say to you, I want to end suffering, you probably think like, oh, you want to like, you know, go help people who don't have like access to clean water or like who have like worms and stuff that they're dealing with, have access to medicine. That's what normal people think of, right? You know, maybe try to improve access to medical care, that sort of stuff. Thomas Saeck thinks of suffering as like a mass, like an aggregate mass that he wants to

• 7:11Robert Evans?

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

• 7:55Robert Evans?

  us. We can do whatever we want to them.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  They're here to eat.

• 7:58Robert Evans?

  And to be fair, this is an extremely common way for that people in Japan feel about like fish, even whales and dolphins, like the much more intelligent, they're not fish, but like the much more intelligent ocean-going creatures is like, they're fish. They don't think you do whatever to them, you know? This is a reason for a lot of like the really fucked up stuff with like whaling fleets in that part of the world. So this is a thing all over the planet. People are very good at deciding certain things we want to eat are are machines that don't feel anything, you know? Right. It's just much more comfortable that way. Um, now this is a, obviously like you go into like pag, the pagans would have been like, what do you mean? Animals don't think or have

• 8:38Robert Evans?

  souls. Animals, animals think, you know, like they're, they're like, you're telling me like my horse that I love, it doesn't think, you know? Um, that's nonsense. But, uh, it's this thing that in modern, in like early modernity especially gets more common. But they're also, this is when we start to have debates about like, what is sentience and what is thinking? And a lot of them are centered around trying to answer like, are animals sentient? Um, and the initial definition of sentience that most of these people are using is can it reason? Can it speak? If, if we can't prove that like a dog or a, or a cow can reason, and if it can't speak to us, right? Then

• 9:21Robert Evans?

  it's not sentient. That's how a lot of people feel. It's an English philosopher named Jeremy Bentham, who first argues, I think that what matters isn't can it reason or can it speak? But can it suffer? Because a machine can't suffer. If these are machines with meat, they can't suffer. If these can suffer, they're not machine with meat, right? And this is the kind of thing, our, how we define sentience is, is a moving thing. Like you can find different definitions of it. But the last couple of decades in particular of, of actually very good data has made it clear, I think inarguably, that basically every living thing on this planet has a degree of what you would call sentience. If you are describing sentience

• 10:05Robert Evans?

  the way it generally is now, which is a creature has the capacity for subjective experience with a positive or negative, negative valence, i.e. can feel pain or pleasure and also is, it can feel it as an individual, right? Um, it doesn't mean, you know, sometimes people We use the term effective sentience to refer to this to differentiate it from like being able to reason and make moral decisions. You know, for example, ants, I don't think can make moral decisions, you know, in any way that we would recognize. They certainly don't think about stuff that way. But 2025 research published by Dr. Volker Naring

• 10:47Robert Evans?

  found evidence that ants are capable of remembering for long periods of time violent encounters they have with other individual ants and holding grudges against those ants.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Right? Just like us.

• 10:58Robert Evans?

  They're just like us. And there's strong evidence that ants do feel pain, right? We're now, we're now pretty sure of that. And in fact, again, this is an argument that a number of researchers in this space will make. Sentience is probably some kind, something like this kind of sentience, the ability to have subjective, positive and negative experiences is universal to living things or very close to it, right?

• 11:20Robert Evans?

  It's an interesting body of research, but it, there's a, it's, it's fairly solid at this point. And again, I say this as somebody who like hunts and raises livestock. I don't, I don't think there's any, any solid reason to disagree with this. So you can see there's a basis to a lot of what Thomasic is saying, right? Which is that you should, if you're, what matters is reducing the overall amount of suffering in the world. And if you're looking at suffering as a mass, if you're just adding up all of the bad things experienced by all of the living things, animal suffering is a lot of the suffering. So if our goal is to reduce suffering, animal welfare is hugely important, right?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  It's a great place to start.

• 11:59Robert Evans?

  Great, fine enough, you know? A little bit of a weird way to phrase it, but fine.

• 12:06Robert Evans?

  So here's the way, problem though. Thomasic, like all these guys, spends too much time. None of them can be like, hey, had a good thought. We're done setting that thought down, moving on. So he keeps thinking about shit like this and it leads him to some very irrational takes. For example, in 2014, Thomasic starts arguing that it might be immoral to kill characters in video games. And I'm going to quote from an article in Vox. He argues that while NPCs do not have anywhere near the mental complexity of animals, the difference is one of degree rather than kind, and we should care at least a tiny amount about their suffering, especially if they grow more complex.

• 12:50Robert Evans?

  And his argument is that like, yeah, most, it doesn't matter like individually killing a Goomba or a bat or a guy in GTA V, but like because they're getting more complicated and able to like try to avoid injury and stuff, there's evidence that there's some sort of suffering there. And thus the sheer mass of NPCs being killed, that might be like enough that it's ethically relevant to consider. And I think that's silly.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:14Robert Evans?

  I think that's ridiculous.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Come on, man.

• 13:17Robert Evans?

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

• 13:22Speaker 01

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

• 13:26Robert Evans?

  You tell, you tell, if you're telling me like, we need to be deeply concerned about the welfare of like cows that we lock into factory farms. You got me. Absolutely. For sure. If you're telling me I should feel bad about running down a bunch of cops in Grand Theft Auto.

• 13:43Robert Evans?

  No.

• 13:43Speaker 01

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

• 13:48Robert Evans?

  There's, there's like, there's like, this is, this is the, I mean, and he does say like, I don't consider this a main problem, but like the fact that you think this is a problem is, it means that you believe silly things about consciousness. Um, yeah, I, anyway. Um, so this is, I think the fact that he gets, he leads himself here is kind of evidence of the sort of logical fractures that are very common in this community. But this is the guy that young Ziz is drawn to. She loves this dude, right? He is kind of her first intellectual heartthrob. Uh, and she writes, quote, "My primary concern upon learning about the singularity was how do I make this benefit all sentient life, not just humans?" So she gets interested in this idea of the singularity. It's inevitable

• 14:32Robert Evans?

  that an AI god is going to arise. And she gets into the, you know, the rationalist thing of we have to make sure that this is a nice AI rather than a mean one. But she has this other thing to it, which is this AI has to care as much as I do about animal life, right? Otherwise, we're not really making the world better, you know?

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:55Robert Evans?

  Now, Thomasic advises her to check out Less Wrong, which is how Ziz starts reading Eliza Yudkowsky's work. From there, in 2012, she starts reading up on effective altruism and existential risk, which is a term that means the risk that a superintelligent AI will kill us all. She starts believing in, you know, all of this kind of stuff. And her particular belief is that like the singularity, when it happens, is going to occur in a flash, kind of like the rapture, and almost immediately lead to the creation of either a hell or a heaven. Right? And this will be done by, the term they use for this inevitable AI is the singleton. Right? That's, that's what they call the AI god that's going to come about.

• 15:40Robert Evans?

  Right? And so her obsession is that she has to find a way to make the singleton a nice AI that cares about animals as much as it cares about people. Right? That's her initial big motivation. So she starts emailing Thomasic with her concerns because she's worried that the other rationalists aren't vegans. Right? And they don't feel like animal welfare is like the top priority for making sure this AI is good. And she really wants to convert this whole community to veganism in order to ensure that the singleton is as focused on insect and animal welfare as human welfare. And Thomasic does care about animal rights, but he disagrees with her because he's like, no, what matters is maximizing the reduction of suffering. And like, a good singleton will solve climate change and shit,

• 16:25Robert Evans?

  which will be better for the animals. And if we focus on trying to convert everybody in this, the rationalist space to veganism, it's going to stop us from accomplishing these bigger goals. Right? This is shattering to Ziz. Right? She decides that he doesn't, Thomasic doesn't care about good things. And she decides that she's basically alone in her values. And so her first move-

• 16:47Speaker 01

  It's like the time to start a smaller subculture.

• 16:50Robert Evans?

  That sounds like we're on our way. She she first considers embracing what she calls negative utilitarianism. And this is an example of the fact that from the jump, this is a a young woman who's not well. Right? Because her once her hero is like, I don't know if veganism is necessarily our the priority. We have to embrace right now. Her immediate goal is to jump to, well, maybe what I should do is optimize myself to cause as much harm to humanity and quote, destroy the world to prevent it from becoming hell for mostly everyone. So that's a jump, you know? That's not somebody who's doing well, who think is healthy, right?

• 17:34Speaker 01

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

• 17:37Robert Evans?

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

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 17:56Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. And it's ironic.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Large group.

• 17:59Robert Evans?

  It's ironic because like, if you're if you're, she really wants to be in the tech industry. She's trying to get in all these people in the tech industry. That's a pretty good description of a lot of the tech industry.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:09Robert Evans?

  They are in fact flesh eating monsters who have created hell on earth for more people than they've helped. But she means that for like, I don't know, your your aunt who has a hamburger once a week. And look, again, factory farming, evil. I just don't think that's how morality works.

• 18:27Robert Evans?

  I think you're going a little far.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  No, she's making big jumps.

• 18:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you're making.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Bold thinker.

• 18:32Robert Evans?

  Bold thinker, bold thinker. Yeah. Now, what you see here with this logic is that Ziz has taken this, she has a massive case of main character syndrome, right? All of this is based in her attitude that I have to save the universe by creating, by helping to or figuring out how to create an AI that can end the eternal Holocaust of all animal life and also save humanity. Right?

• 18:59Speaker 01

  It's a lot on our shoulders.

• 19:00Robert Evans?

  That's me, you know?

• 19:01Speaker 01

  It's a lot on our shoulders.

• 19:02Robert Evans?

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

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:26Robert Evans?

  And real life doesn't work that way very often, right? The Nazis, there was no special boy who stopped the Nazis. There were a lot of farm boys who were just like, I guess I'll go run in a machine gun nest until this is done.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 19:41Robert Evans?

  There were a lot of 16-year-old Russians who were like, I guess I'm gonna walk at a bullet, you know? Like, that's, that's how evil gets fought, usually, unfortunately.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  A lot of reluctant, like, ah, yes.

• 19:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, or a shitload of guys in a lab figuring out how to make corn that has higher yields so people don't starve, right? These are, these are really like how world cla- like huge world problems get solved.

• 20:06Speaker 01

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

• 20:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's not people who have been touched, and it's certainly not people who have entirely based their understanding on the world of, from quotes from Star Wars and Harry Potter. So, some of this comes from just like, this is a normal deranged way of thinking that happens to a lot of people in just Western. I think a lot of this leads to why you get very comfortable middle-class people joining these very aggressive fascist movements in the West, like in Germany, it's like middle-class people, mostly like middle-class and upper-middle-class people in the US, especially among like these street fighting, you know, Proud Boy types. It's because, it's not because they're like suffering and desperate, they're not starving

• 20:53Robert Evans?

  in the streets, it's because they're bored and they wanna feel like they're fighting an epic war against evil.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you wanna fill your time with importance, right?

• 21:03Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Regardless of what you do, you wanna, you, and you wanna feel like you have a cause worthy of fighting for, so in that, I guess I see how you got here.

• 21:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so there's a piece, I mean, I think there's a piece of this that originally it's just from This Is Something in our culture, but there's also a major, a major chunk of this gets supercharged by the kind of thinking that's common in EA and rationalist spaces. Because so rationalists and effective altruists are not ever thinking like, hey, how do we as a species fix these major problems? Right? They're thinking, how do I make myself better, optimize myself to be incredible? And how do I like fix the major problems of the world alongside my mentally superpowered friends? Right? These are very individual focused

• 21:53Robert Evans?

  philosophies and attitudes. Right? And so they do lend themselves to people who think that like we are heroes who are uniquely empowered to save the world. Ziz writes, I did not trust most humans in difference to build a net positive cosmos, even in the absence of a technological convenience to prey on animals. So like, I'm the only one who has the the mental capability to actually create the net positive cosmos that needs to come into being. All of her discussion is talking in like terms of I'm saving the universe. Right? And a lot of that does come out of the way many of these people talk on the internet about the stakes of AI and just like the importance of rationality. Again, this is something Scientology does. L. Ron Hubbard

• 22:38Robert Evans?

  always couched getting people on Dianetics in terms of we are going to save the world and end war. Right? Like this is, you know, it's very normal for cold stuff. She starts reading around this time when she's in college, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. This helps to solidify her feelings of her own centrality as a hero figure. In a blog post where she lays out her intellectual journey, she quotes a line from that fanfic of Yudkowsky's that is, it's essentially about what Yudkowsky calls the hero contract. Right? Or sorry, it's essentially about this concept called the hero contract. Right? And there's this, there's this, um,

• 23:20Robert Evans?

  This is a psychological concept among academics, right? Where, and it's about like, it's about analyzing how we as a, how we should look at the people who societies declare heroes and the communities that declare them heroes, and see them as in a dialogue, right? As in, when, when, when you're in a country decides this guy's a hero, he is, through his actions, kind of conversing to them and they are kind of telling him what they expect from him, right? But Yedkowski wrestles with this concept, right? And he comes to some very weird conclusions about it in one of the worst articles that I've ever read.

• 24:02Robert Evans?

  He, he frames it as hero licensing to refer to the fact that people get angry at you if they don't think you have, if you're trying to do something and they don't think you have a hero license to do it. In other words, if you're trying to do something like, that they don't think you're qualified to do, he'll, he'll describe that as them not thinking you have like a hero license. And he like writes this annoying article that's like a conversation between him and a person who's supposed to embody the community of people who don't think he should write Harry Potter fanfiction. It's all very silly. Again, all this is ridiculous, but Ziz is very interested in the idea of the hero contract, right? But she comes up with her own spin on it, which she calls the true hero contract, right?

• 24:47Robert Evans?

  And instead of, again, the academic term is, the hero contract means societies and communities pick heroes and those heroes in the community that they're in are in a constant dialogue with each other about what is heroic and what is expected, right? What the hero needs from the community and vice versa, you know? That's all that that's saying. Ziz says, no, no, no, that's bullshit. The real hero contract is, quote, "Pour free energy at my direction and it will go into the optimization for good." Classic Ziz. In other words, classic Ziz. It's not a dialogue. If you're the hero... The community has to give you their energy and time and power.

• 25:32Robert Evans?

  And you will use it to optimize them for good because they don't know what to do with themselves. Because they're not really able to think, you know?

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Because they're not the hero.

• 25:40Robert Evans?

  Because they're not the hero, right?

• 25:41Speaker 01

  You are.

• 25:42Robert Evans?

  You are.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  You are the all powerful hero.

• 25:45Robert Evans?

  Hmm. Now, this is a fancy way of describing how cult leaders think, right?

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:51Robert Evans?

  Everyone exists to pour energy into me and I'll use it to do what's right, you know? So this is where her mind is in 2012. But again, she's just a student posting on the internet and chatting with other members of the subculture at this point. That year, she starts donating money to Miri, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which is a nonprofit devoted to studying how to create friendly AI. Yedkowski founded Miri in 2000, right? So this is his like nonprofit think tank. In 2013, she finished an internship at NASA. So again, she's a very smart young woman, right? She gets an internship at NASA and she builds a tool for space weather analysis. So wow, she's a person with a lot of potential, very, very, as all of the stuff she's writing

• 26:36Robert Evans?

  is like dumb as shit. But again, intelligence isn't an absolute. People can be brilliant at coding and have terrible ideas about everything else.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 26:44Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 26:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  I wonder if she's telling, you think she's telling people at work?

• 26:51Robert Evans?

  Um, I don't, I don't think at this point she is because she's super insular, right? She's very uncomfortable talking to people, right?

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:00Robert Evans?

  She's going to kind of break out of her shell once she gets to San Francisco. Now, I don't know, she may have talked to some of them about this stuff, but I really don't think she is at this point. I don't think she's comfortable enough doing that. Um, yeah. So she also does an internship at the software giant Oracle. So at this point, you've got this young lady who's got a lot of potential, you know?

• 27:21Speaker 01

  A real career as well.

• 27:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah. A very, the start of a very real career. That's a great starting resume for like a 22 year old.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:29Robert Evans?

  Um, now at this point, she's torn. Should she go get a graduate degree, right? Or should she jump right into the tech industry, you know? And she worries that like, if she waits to get a graduate degree, this will delay her making a positive impact on the existential risk caused by AI and it'll be too late. The singularity will happen already, you know? At this point, she's still a big, a fawning fan of Eliza Yudkowski. And the highest ranking woman at Yudkowski's organization, Miri, is a lady named Susan Salamon. Susan gives a public invitation to the online community to pitch ideas for the best way to improve the ultimate quality of the singleton that these people believe is inevitable.

• 28:11Robert Evans?

  In other, in other words, hey, give us your ideas for how to make the inevitable AI god nice, right? Here's what Ziz writes about her response to that. "I asked her whether I should try and alter course and do research, or continue a fork of my pre-existing life plan, earn to give as a computer engineer, but retrain and try to do research directly instead. At the time, I was planning to go to grad school, and I had a rational attachment to the idea. She sort of compromised and said I should go to grad school, find a startup co-founder, drop out, and earn to give via startups instead."

• 28:45Robert Evans?

  First off, bad advice, Susan. Bad advice. Just be Steve Jobs. Being Steve Jobs, worked for Steve Jobs, well, and, and Bill Gates, I guess, to an extent. It doesn't work for most people.

• 28:59Speaker 01

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

• 29:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and most people, these people aren't very original thinkers. Like, yeah, she's just saying, like, yeah, go, go do a Steve Jobs. So, Ziz does go to grad school, and somewhere around that time in 2014, she attends a lecture by Eliza Yudkowski on the subject of inadequate equilibria, which is the title of a book that Yudkowski had wrote about the time, and the book is about where and how civilizations get stuck. One reviewer, Brian Kaplan, who despite being a professor of economics, must have a brain as smooth as a pearl, wrote this about it. "Every society is screwed up. Eliza Yudkowski is one of the few thinkers on earth who are trying, at the most general level, to understand why." And this is like-

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Wow, that's-

• 29:50Robert Evans?

  Please study the humanities a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. I mean, fuck, man, the first and most, like, one of the first influential works of his modern historic scholarship is The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It's a whole book about why a society fell apart. And, like, motherfucker, more recently, Mike Davis existed. Like, like, Jesus Christ.

• 30:17Speaker 01

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

• 30:20Robert Evans?

  Nobody else is thinking about why society is screwed up, but Elizor Yudkowski.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  This man.

• 30:25Robert Evans?

  This guy.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  This man who wrote this Harry Potter novels.

• 30:30Robert Evans?

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

• 30:39Robert Evans?

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

• 30:51Speaker 01

  On all levels, by the way.

• 30:52Robert Evans?

  On all levels.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Thinking about it.

• 30:54Robert Evans?

  Everybody's thinking about this.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  About it.

• 30:56Robert Evans?

  This is such a common subject of scholarship and discussion.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  What everyone's talking about always.

• 31:07Robert Evans?

  It would be like if if I got really into like reading medical textbooks and was like, you know what? Nobody's ever tried to figure out how to transplant a heart. I'm gonna write a book about how that might work.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  I think I got it.

• 31:26Robert Evans?

  Oh, these fucking people.

• 31:31Robert Evans?

  So, yeah, speaking of these fucking people.

• 31:36Robert Evans?

  Have sex with, uh. Nope. Well, that's not something. No, no, I don't know. I don't know. Uh, don't fuck. Listen to ads.

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• 32:50Robert Evans?

  We're back. Um, so Ziz is at this speech where Yudkowsky is shilling his book. And he, most of what he seems to be talking about in this speech, about this book, about why societies fall apart, is how to make a tech startup. Uh, she says, quote, "He gave a recipe for finding startup ideas." He said Paul Graham's idea, "Only filter on people, ignore startup ideas, was partial epistemic learned helplessness." That means Paul Graham is saying, "Focus on finding good people that you'd start a company with, having an idea for a company doesn't matter." Yudkowsky says, "Of course startup ideas mattered. You needed a good startup idea. So look for a way in the world is broken. Then compare against a checklist of things you couldn't fix." You know, right?

• 33:33Robert Evans?

  Like, that's, that's, that's what this speech is largely about, is him being like, "Here's how to find startup ideas." So she starts thinking. She starts thinking as hard as she can. And, you know, being a, a person who is very much of the tech brain industry rot at this point, she comes up with a brilliant idea. It's a genius idea. "Oh, you're gonna, you're gonna love this idea, David."

• 33:58Robert Evans?

  Uber for prostitutes.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  You're fucking with me.

• 34:04Robert Evans?

  No, no. It's, it's.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  That's where she landed?

• 34:10Robert Evans?

  She lands on the idea of, look.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 34:13Robert Evans?

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

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Isn't that not just the bang bus?

• 34:35Robert Evans?

  She makes the bang bus the gig economy?

• 34:44Robert Evans?

  It is really like Don Draper moment. What about Uber but a pimp? It's, it's so funny. These people.

• 34:55Robert Evans?

  You gotta love it. You gotta love it.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  Wow. It's wow. Wow. What a place to end up.

• 35:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  I would love to see the other drafts.

• 35:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  What came first?

• 35:07Robert Evans?

  Oh, God.

• 35:11Robert Evans?

  Man, that's, that's, that is the good stuff, isn't it?

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Wow. Wow.

• 35:19Robert Evans?

  We, special minds at work here.

• 35:21Speaker 01

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

• 35:25Robert Evans?

  I have to make pimp Uber.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  That's so wild.

• 35:31Robert Evans?

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

• 35:47Speaker 01

  I don't know if that's an investor you need to.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Give their money to.

• 35:52Robert Evans?

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

• 36:08Speaker 01

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

• 36:12Robert Evans?

  And at this point, she hasn't done anything bad, so I feel bad for her. This is a person who is very lonely, is very confused. She has by this point realized that she's trans, but not transitioned. She's in like, this is, this is like a tough place to be.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Right. That's a hard, that's a hard time.

• 36:27Robert Evans?

  That's, that's, that's hard. And nothing about her inherent personality makes it, is going to make this easier for her, right? Who she is makes all of this much harder because.

• 36:39Robert Evans?

  She also makes some comments about dropping out because her thesis advisor was abusive. I don't fully know what this means, and here's why. Ziz encounters some behavior I will describe later that is abusive from other people, but also regularly defines abuse as people who disagree with her about the only thing that matters being creating an AI god to protect the animals. So I don't know if her thesis advisor was abusive or was just like, maybe drop the alien god idea for a second.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, hey, you gotta chill.

• 37:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, but maybe, maybe focus on like finding a job, you know, making some friends.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, go on a couple of dates.

• 37:20Robert Evans?

  Go on a couple of dates, something like that, maybe, maybe, maybe like, maybe make god on the back burner here for a second. Whatever happened here, she decides it's time to move to the bay. This is like 2016. She's gonna find a big tech job. She's gonna make that big tech money while she figures out a startup idea and finds a co-founder who will let her make enough money to change and save the world. Well, the whole universe. Her first plan is to give the money to Miri Yudkowski's organization so it can continue its important work imagining a nice AI. Her parents, she's got enough family money that her parents are able to pay for like, I think like six months or more of rent in the bay, which is not nothing.

• 38:03Robert Evans?

  Not a cheap place to live. I don't know exactly how long her parents are paying, but like that implies a degree of financial comfort, right? So she gets hired by a startup very quickly because again, very gifted.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, with a resume, yeah.

• 38:20Robert Evans?

  Right, yes. It's some sort of gaming company, but at this point, she's made another change in her ethics system based on the Lizer Yudkowski's writings. One of Yudkowski's writings argues that it is talking about the difference between consequentialists and virtue ethics, right? Consequentialists are people who focus entirely on what will the outcome of my actions be? And it kind of doesn't matter what I'm doing, or even if it's sometimes a little fucked up, if the end result is good. Virtue ethics people folk have a code and stick to it, right? And actually, and I kind of am surprised that he came to this.

• 39:00Robert Evans?

  Yekas' conclusion is that like, while logically, you're more likely to succeed, like on paper, you're more likely to succeed as a consequentialist. His opinion is that virtue ethics has the best outcome. People tend to do well when they stick to a code and they try to, rather than like, anything goes as long as I succeed, right? And I, I think that's actually a pretty decent way to live your life.

• 39:22Speaker 01

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

• 39:26Robert Evans?

  It's a reasonable conclusion for him, so I don't blame him on this part. But here's the problem. Ziz is trying to break into and succeed in the tech industry. And you can't, you, you are very unlikely to succeed at a high level in the tech industry. If you are unwilling to do things and, and be, have things done to you that are unethical and fucked up. I'm not saying this is good. And this is the reality of the entertainment industry too, right? I experienced, when I started in, I started with an unpaid internship. Unpaid internships are bad, right? It's bad that those exist. They inherently favor people who have money and people who have family connections. You know, I had like a small savings account for my job in special ed.

• 40:11Robert Evans?

  But that was the standard is like, there were a lot of unpaid internships. It got me, my foot in the door. It worked for me. I also worked a lot of overtime that I didn't get paid for. I did a lot of shit that wasn't a part of my job to impress my bosses, to make myself indispensable so that they would decide like, we have to keep this guy on and pay him. And it worked for me. And I just wanted to add, because this is not in the original thing. A big part of why it worked for me is that, I'm talking about a few different companies here, but particularly at Cracked where I had the internship. Like my bosses, you know, made a choice to mentor me and, you know, to get me, you know, to work overtime on their own behalf to like, make sure I got a paying job, which

• 40:53Robert Evans?

  is a big part of like, the luck that I encountered that a lot of people don't. So that's another major part of like, why things worked out for me is that I just got incredibly lucky with the people I was working for and with. That's bad. It's not good that things work that way, right? It's not healthy.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Set up for you either. Like you, you kind of defied the odds. It's, it's for, like you said, the rich people who get the job or.

• 41:20Robert Evans?

  Exactly.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  It's not even.

• 41:21Robert Evans?

  Yes. That said, if I am giving someone, if someone wants, what are the, what is the most likely path to succeeding? You know, I've, I've just got this job working, you know, on this production company or a music steer. I, I would, I would say, well, your best odds are to like, make yourself completely indispensable. And become obsessively devoted to that task, right? That's, I don't tend to give that advice anymore. I have, and I have had several other friends succeed as a result of it. And all of us also burnt ourselves out and did huge amounts of damage to ourselves. Like I, I am permanently broken.

• 42:01Robert Evans?

  As a result of, of, you know, the 10 years that I did 80 hour weeks and shit, you know?

• 42:07Speaker 01

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

• 42:10Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. And it, it worked for me, right? I got up, I got a, I succeeded. I got a great job. I got money. Most people it doesn't, and it's bad that it works this way. Ziz, unlike me, is not willing to do that, right? She thinks it's wrong to be asked to work overtime and not get paid for it. And so on her first day at the job, she leaves after eight hours and her boss is like, what the fuck are you doing? And she's like, I'm, I'm here to, supposed to be here eight hours. Eight hours is up. I'm going home. And he calls her a half an hour later and fires her, right? And this is because the tech industry is evil, you know? Like, like this is bad. She's not bad here. She is, it is like a thing where

• 42:56Robert Evans?

  it's, she's not doing by her standards, what I would say is the rational thing, which would be if all that matters is optimizing your earning power, right?

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:04Robert Evans?

  Well, then you do this, then you do do whatever it takes, right? So it's kind of interesting to me like that, that she is so devoted to this like virtue ethics thing at this point, that she fucks over her career in, in the tech industry. Cause she's not willing to do the things that you kind of need to do to, to succeed, you know, in the place that she is.

• 43:25Robert Evans?

  But it's interesting. I don't like give her any shit for that. So she asks your parents more for more runway to extend her time in the Bay. And then she finds work at another startup, but the same problems persist. Quote, "They kept demanding that I work unpaid overtime, talking about how other employees just always put 40 hours on their time sheet no matter what. And this exemplary employee over there worked 12 hours a day, and he really went the extra mile and got the job done. And they needed me to really go the extra mile and get the job done." She's not willing to do that. And again, I hate that this is part of what drives her to the madness that leads to the cult, to the killings. Because it's like, "Oh, honey, you're in the right. It's an evil industry."

• 44:03Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, you see a flash of where it could have gone well. It really, there were chances for this to work out.

• 44:09Robert Evans?

  No, you're 100% right. Like, this is fucked up.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  And you stuck to it? You know what I mean?

• 44:15Robert Evans?

  And that's super hard. I really respect that part of you.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, to go against the grain and within that culture?

• 44:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. I'm so sad that this is part of what shatters your brain. Like, that really bums me out. So, first off, she's kind of starts spiraling, and she concludes that she hates virtue ethics. This is where she starts hating Yankowski, right? This is, she doesn't come break entirely on him yet, but she gets really angry at this point because she's like, "Well, obviously virtue ethics don't work."

• 44:45Speaker 01

  And she's been following this man at this point for years, right?

• 44:49Robert Evans?

  Exactly, exactly. So this is a very, like, damaging thing to her that this happens. And, you know, and again, as much as I'm blaming Yankowski, the culture of the Bay Area tech industry, that's a big part of what drives this person, you know, to where she ends up, right? So, that said, some of her issues are also rooted in a kind of rigid and unforgiving internal rule set. At one point, she negotiates work with a professor and their undergraduate helper. She doesn't want to take an hourly job, and she tries to negotiate a flat rate of 7K. And they're like, "Yeah, okay, that sounds fair, but the school doesn't do stuff like that, so you will have to fake some paperwork with

• 45:30Robert Evans?

  me for me to be able to get them to pay you $7,000." And she isn't willing To do that. And that's the thing where it's like, ah, no, I've had some shit where this was the like, there was a stupid rule. And like in order for the people meet or other people to get paid, we had to like, tell something else to the company.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:48Robert Evans?

  That's just, that's just no, knowing how to get by.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's living in the world. You got, you did the hard part.

• 45:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  They said they were gonna do it.

• 45:57Robert Evans?

  They said they'd do it.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's like, they already said, we don't do this. That's where you're like, alright.

• 46:02Robert Evans?

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

• 46:08Speaker 01

  That's the game.

• 46:09Robert Evans?

  Our president does all the fucking time. He's the king of that shit.

• 46:17Robert Evans?

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

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 46:36Robert Evans?

  I know, I know. Worst thing for her to read.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  Come on. What they call it, info hazard?

• 46:43Robert Evans?

  An info hazard.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  She should have heeded the warnings.

• 46:45Robert Evans?

  Yep. And a lot of the smarter rationalists are just annoyed by it. Again, Yankowski immediately is like, this is very quickly decides it's bullshit and bans discussion of it. He argues, there's no incentive for a future agent to follow through with that threat. Because it, by doing so, it just expends resources at no gain to itself. Which is like, yeah, man, a hyper logical AI would not immediately jump to, I must make hell for everybody who didn't code me. Like, that's just crazy.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  There's some step skips.

• 47:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Only humans are like ill in that way.

• 47:20Speaker 01

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

• 47:23Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Now, when she encounters the concept of Rocco's basilisk at first, Ziz thinks that it's silly, right? She kind of rejects it and moves on. But once she gets to the bay, she starts going to in-person rationalist meetups and having long conversations with other believers who are still talking about Rocco's basilisk. She writes, I started encountering people. People who were freaked out by it, freaked out that they had discovered an improvement to the info hazard that made it function, got around to Lisa's objection. Her ultimate conclusion is this, if I persisted in trying to save the world, I would be tortured until the end of the universe by a coalition of all unfriendly AIs.

• 48:03Robert Evans?

  In order to increase the amount of measure they got by demoralizing me, even if my system two had good decision theory, my system one did not. And that would damage my effectiveness. And like, I can't explain all of the terms in that without taking more time than we need to, but like, you can hear, like, that is not the writing of a person who is thinking in logical terms.

• 48:22Speaker 01

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

• 48:27Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, it's very scary stuff.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  It's so scary to be like, oh, that's where she was operating, those are the stakes.

• 48:34Robert Evans?

  This is where your head is.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  She's dealing with, that's, that's.

• 48:38Robert Evans?

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

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. She can't win. There's no winning.

• 49:02Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. And again, I say this a lot, we need to put lithium back in the drinking water. We, we, we gotta put lithium back in the water, maybe Xanax too.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  She needed, she could have taken a combo. Uh, yes.

• 49:18Robert Evans?

  Getting rid of Xan.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Before it gets to where it gets, at this point, you really, you really feel for her and like, just living in this, living like that every day. She's so scared that this is what she's doing. It's, it's.

• 49:33Robert Evans?

  This, this is, she is the therapy needingest woman I have ever heard of at this point. Oh my God.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  She just needs to talk to, she needs to talk to a lot of people.

• 49:42Robert Evans?

  Again, you know, the cult, the thing that happens to cult members has happened to her. Where her, she heard the whole language she uses is incomprehensible to people. I had to talk to you for an hour and 15 minutes. So you would understand parts of what this lady says, right?

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 49:59Robert Evans?

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

• 50:02Speaker 01

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

• 50:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  How do you even get back?

• 50:09Robert Evans?

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

• 50:18Speaker 01

  She's very heroic.

• 50:20Robert Evans?

  She, she had, and she sees herself that way, right?

• 50:23Speaker 01

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

• 50:30Robert Evans?

  She's a woman of conviction. You really can't take that away from her. Those convictions are nonsense.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  No, that's the.

• 50:39Robert Evans?

  But they're there. Yeah.

• 50:40Speaker 01

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

• 50:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's like David Icke, the guy who believes in like literal lizard people. And everyone thinks he's like talking about the Jews, but like, no, no, no, no. He does, it's just lizards.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  It's exactly that, where it's just like, you, you want to draw, you want to draw something so it's not nonsense. And then you realize, no, that's.

• 51:00Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, no. And like David, he went out, he's made like a big rant against how Elon Musk is like evil for what all these people. He's hurt by firing the whole federal government and people were shocked and it's like, no, no, no. David Icke believes in a thing. It's just crazy.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 51:17Robert Evans?

  There, those people do exist.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Here we are talking about.

• 51:21Robert Evans?

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

• 51:28Speaker 01

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

• 51:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of people who believe in something, our sponsors believe in getting your money.

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• 52:44Robert Evans?

  We're back. So, uh, she is at this point suffering from delusions of grandeur, and those are going to rapidly lead her to danger. But she concludes that since the fate of the universe is at stake in her actions, she would make a timeless choice to not believe in the basilisk, right? And that that will protect her in the future, because that's how these people talk about stuff like that. So, she gets over her fear of the basilisk for a little while. But even it, like, when she claims to have rejected the theory, whenever she references it in her blog, she, like, locks it away under a spoiler with, like, an info hazard warning. "Rocco's Basilisk Family: Skip-able."

• 53:26Robert Evans?

  So you don't, like, have to see it and have it destroy your psyche.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  That's the power of it.

• 53:32Robert Evans?

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

• 53:52Speaker 01

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

• 53:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yes.

• 54:02Robert Evans?

  So what she means here is that she is now making the timeless decision that when she is in a position of ultimate influence and helps bring this all powerful vegan AI into existence, she's promising now ahead of time to create a perfect hell, a digital hell, to like punish all of the people who don't like eat meat ever. She wants to make a hell for people who eat meat. And that's the, yeah, that's the conclusion that she makes, right? So this becomes an intrusive thought in her head, primarily the idea that like, everyone isn't going along with her, right? Like, she doesn't want to create this hell. She just thinks that she has to. So she's like very focused on like trying to convince these other people in the rationalist

• 54:47Robert Evans?

  culture to become vegan. Anyway, she writes this quote, "I thought it had to be subconsciously influencing me, damaging me at my effectiveness, that I had done more harm than I could imagine by thinking these things, because I had the hubris to think info hazards didn't exist and worse, to feel resigned to grim sort of pride in my previous choice to fight for sentient life, although it damned me, and the gaps between 'do not think about that, you moron', 'do not think about that, you moron', pride which may have led to intrusive thoughts to resurface and progress to resume. In other words, my ego had perhaps damned the universe." So, I don't fully get all of what she's saying here, but it's also because she's like just spun out into madness at this point.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's, she, that's, she lives in it now. It's so, it's so far for, we've been talking about it however long, she's all, she's so far away from us even.

• 55:41Robert Evans?

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

• 55:48Speaker 01

  Man, but she is at war with herself clearly.

• 55:51Robert Evans?

  She is for sure at war with herself. Now- Ziz is at this point attending rationalist events by the bay and a lot of the people at those events are older, more influential men, some of whom are influential in the tech industry, all of whom have a lot more money than her. And some of these people are members of an organization called CFAR, the Center for Applied Rationality, which is a nonprofit founded to help people get better at pursuing their goals. It's a self-help company, right? It runs self-help seminars. This is the same as like a Tony Robbins thing, right? We're all just trying to get you to sign up and then get you to sign up for the next workshop and the next workshop and the next workshop, like all self-help people do. Yeah, there's

• 56:35Robert Evans?

  no difference between this and Tony Robbins. So Ziz goes to this event and she has a long conversation with several members of CFAR who I think are clearly kind of, my interpretation of this is that they're trying to groom her to get a new, because they think, yeah, this chick's clearly brilliant, she'll find her way in the industry and we want her money, right? You know, maybe we want her to do some free work for us too, but like, let's, let's, you know, we gotta reel this fish in, right? So this is described as an academic conference by people who are in the AI risk field and rationalism, you know, thinking of ways to save the universe because only the true, the super geniuses

• 57:17Robert Evans?

  can do that. The actual, why I'm really glad that I read Ziz's account here is I've been reading about these people for a long time. I've been reading about their beliefs. I felt there's some cult stuff here. When Ziz laid out what happened at this seminar, this self-help seminar put on by these people very close to Yudkowsky, it, this is, it's almost exactly the same as a Synanon meeting. Like, it's the same stuff. It's exact, and it's the same shit. It's the same as accounts of like big, like self-help movement things from like the 70s and stuff that I've read. That's, that, that's when it really clicked to me, right? Quote, here's a description of one of the, because they have, you know,

• 58:01Robert Evans?

  speeches and they break out into groups to do different exercises, right? There were hamming circles, per person, take turns having everyone else spend 20 minutes trying to solve the most important problem about your life to you. I didn't pick the most important problem in my life, because secrets. I think I used my turn on a problem I thought they might actually be able to help with. The fact that it did, although it didn't seem to affect my productivity or willpower at all, i.e. I was inhumanly determined basically all the time, I still felt terrible all the time, that I was hurting from some, to some degree relinquishing my humanity. I was sort of vaging about the pain of being trans and having decided not to transition. And so like, this is a, you know, part of the thing, you, you build a connection between

• 58:44Robert Evans?

  other people in this group by getting people to like spill their secrets to each other. It's a thing Scientology does, it's a thing they did at Synanon, tell me your darkest secret, right?

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 58:53Robert Evans?

  And she's not fully willing to, because she doesn't want to come out to this group of people yet. And, you know, part of what-

• 59:01Speaker 01

  I forget that she's also dealing with that entire-

• 59:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yes.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Wow, yeah.

• 59:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And the, the hamming circle doesn't sound so bad. If you'll recall, and as you mentioned this, it was really good, it didn't in part one, Synanon would have people break into circles where they would insult and attack each other in order to create a traumatic experience that would bond them together and with the cult. These hamming circles are weird, but they're not that. But there's another exercise they did next called doom circles. Quote, "There were doom circles where each person, including themself, took turns having everyone else bluntly but compassionately say why they were doomed, using blindsight. Someone decided and set a precedent of starting these off with a sort of ritual incantation. We now invoke and bow to the doom gods and waving their hands, saying doom.

• 59:50Robert Evans?

  I said I'd never bow to the doom gods, and while everyone else said that, I flipped the double bird to the heavens and said fuck you instead. Person A, that's this member of Seafar that she is, admires, found this agreeable and joined in. Some people brought up that they felt like they were only as morally valuable as half a person. This irked me. I said they were whole persons, and don't be stupid like that. Like if they wanted to sacrifice themselves, they- could weigh one versus seven billion. They didn't have to falsely denigrate themselves as less than one person. They didn't listen. When it was my turn concerning myself, I said my doom was that I could succeed at the things I tried, succeed exceptionally well, like I bet I could in 10 years have earned to give like $10 million through startups and it would still be too little

• 1:00:34Robert Evans?

  too late. Like I came into this game too late. The world would still burn.

• 1:00:40Robert Evans?

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

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 1:01:11Robert Evans?

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

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  Were there people who did that?

• 1:01:38Robert Evans?

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

• 1:02:22Robert Evans?

  you're creating a net positive benefit to the world in the way they define it. And so a lot of these people are, yes, there are people who are depressed and there are people who kill themselves because they come to the conclusion that they're a net negative person, right? Like, that is, that is a thing at the edge of all of this shit that's really fucked up. And that's, that's what this doom circle is about, is everybody like flipping out over I'm like, and telling each other, I think you might know be as only be as morally valuable as half a person, right? Like that's people are saying that, right? Like, that's what's going on here, you know? Like, it's not the synonym thing of like screaming like, you're a, you know, using the F slur a million times or whatever, but it's very bad.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

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

• 1:03:08Robert Evans?

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

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great place to start.

• 1:03:17Robert Evans?

  You know?

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  This is also leading people to destroy themselves. Like, it's not even.

• 1:03:22Robert Evans?

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

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  It's so crazy, too. Where were these me? I just, in my head, I'm like, this is just happening in like, a ballroom at a Radisson?

• 1:03:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I think it is. Or a convention center, you know, there's different kind of public spaces. I don't know. Like, honestly, if you've been to like, a fucking anime convention or a Magic the Gathering convention somewhere in the Bay, you may have been in one of the rooms they did these in. I don't know exactly where they hold this. So, the person A mentioned above, this like, person who's like affiliated with the organization, that I think is a recruiter, looking for young people who can be cultivated to pay for classes, right? This person, it's very clear to them that Ziz is at the height of her vulnerability. And so, he tries to take advantage of that. So, he and another person from the organization engages Ziz during

• 1:04:12Robert Evans?

  a break. Ziz, who's extremely insecure, asks them point blank, "What do you think my net value ultimately will be in life?" Right? And, again, there's like, an element of this, it's almost like rationalist Calvinism, where it's like, it's actually decided ahead of time by your inherent immutable characteristics, you know, if you are a person who can do good. Quote, "I asked person A if they expected me to be net negative. They said yes. After a moment, they asked me what I was feeling," or something like that. I said something like, "dazed and sad." They asked, "Why sad?" I said, "I might leave the field as a consequence, and maybe something else." I said, "I needed time to process or think." And so, she like, she goes home, after this guy's saying like, "Yeah, I think your life's probably net negative

• 1:04:55Robert Evans?

  value," and sleeps the rest of the day. And she wakes up the next morning, and comes back to the second day of this thing. And- Yeah, Ziz goes back and she tells this person, "Okay, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna pick a group of three people at the event I respect, including you. And if two of them vote that they think I have a net negative value. Quote, "I'll leave EA and existential risk and the rationalist community and so on forever. I'd transition and move probably to Seattle. I heard it was relatively nice for trans people. And there do what I could to be a normie. Retool my mind as much as possible to be stable, unchanging and a normie. Gradually abandon my Facebook account and email.

• 1:05:40Robert Evans?

  Use a name change as a story for that." And, God, that would have been the best thing for her.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  That's what I'm... You see like the sliver of hope, like, oh, man.

• 1:05:50Robert Evans?

  She sees this as a nightmare, right? This is the worst-case scenario for her, right? Because you're not part of...

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  Because she's so spun out, right?

• 1:05:59Robert Evans?

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

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  That's its own kind of hell, though, right? To think that you have this enlightenment and that you weren't good enough to participate...

• 1:06:16Robert Evans?

  Exactly.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  Despite your best efforts.

• 1:06:18Robert Evans?

  And she talks a lot about how I'd probably just kill myself, you know? That's the logical thing to do.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  Fuck!

• 1:06:23Robert Evans?

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

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  Right. Because that's also looming.

• 1:06:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  After every... For every decision, right?

• 1:06:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and the thing here, she expressed... She tells these guys a story, and it really shows both in this community and among her how little value they actually have for like human life. I told a story about a time I had killed four ants in a bathtub where I wanted to take a shower before going to work. I'd considered, can I just not take a shower? And presumed me smelling bad at work would, because of big numbers and the fate of the world and stuff, make the world worse than the deaths of four basically causally isolated people. I considered getting paper in a cup and taking them elsewhere, and I figured there were decent odds if I did, I'd be late to work and it would probably make the world worse in the long run. So again, she considers ants identical to human beings.

• 1:07:31Robert Evans?

  And she is also saying it was worth killing four of them because they're causally isolated, so that I could get to work in time, because I'm working for the cause.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  It's also such-

• 1:07:43Robert Evans?

  So we're in a bad place here?

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

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

• 1:08:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Every, every action is so loaded.

• 1:08:04Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  The weight of that must be-

• 1:08:07Robert Evans?

  It's so, it's, it's wild to me, both, this, like, mix of, like, fucking Jane Buddhist compassion of, like, an ant is no less than I, or an ant is no less than a human being, right? We are all, these are all lives. And then, but also, it's fine for me to kill a bunch of them to go to work on time, because, like, they're causally isolated, so they're basically not people. Like, it's, it's so weird. Like, um, and, and again, it's getting a lot clearer here why this lady and her ideas end in a bunch of people getting shot.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:41Robert Evans?

  And stabbed.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:08:45Robert Evans?

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

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  That's the one thing this has been missing.

• 1:08:50Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. So they continue, these guys, to have a very abusive conversation with this young person. And she clearly, she trusts them enough that she tells them-

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  This is the conversation where she asked for the two-

• 1:09:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:09:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And she tells them she's trans, right? And this gives you an idea of like, how kind of predatory some of the stuff going on in this community is. "They asked what I'd do with a female body." They were trying to get me to admit what I actually wanted to do as the first thing in heaven. Heaven being, there's this idea, especially amongst like, some trans members of the rationalist community, that like, every, all of them basically believe a robot's gonna make heaven, right? And obviously, like, there's a number of the folks who are in this who are trans are like, and in heaven, like, you just kind of get the body you want immediately, right?

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:34Robert Evans?

  So, these, they were trying to get me to admit that what I actually wanted to do as the first thing in heaven was masturbate in a female body. And they follow this up by sitting really close to her, close enough that she gets uncomfortable. And then a really, really rationalist conversation follows. "They asked if I felt trapped. I may have clarified, physically, they may have said, sure. Afterward, I answered no to that question, under the likely justified belief that it was framed that way. They asked why not. I said I was pretty sure I could take them in a fight. They prodded for details, why I thought so, and then how I thought a fight between us would go. I asked what kind of fight, like a physical unarmed fight to the death right now? And why? What were my payouts? This was

• 1:10:18Robert Evans?

  over the fate of the multiverse, triggering actions by other people, i.e. imprisonment or murder was not relevant?" So they decide that, they make this into, again, these people are all addicted to dumb game theory stuff, right?

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:29Robert Evans?

  Okay, so what is this fight? Is this fight over the fate of the multiverse? Are we in, you know, an alternate reality where like, no one will come and intervene, and there's no cops? We're the only people in the world, or whatever? So they tell her, like, yeah, imagine there's no consequences legally, whatever, to you do, and we're fighting over the fate of the multiverse. And so, she proceeds to give an extremely elaborate discussion of how she'll gouge out their eyes and try to destroy their prefrontal lobes, and then stomp on their skulls until they die. And it's both, it's like- It's nonsense. It's like how 10 year olds thinks fights work. It's also, it's based on this game theory attitude of fighting that they have, which is like, it's, you have to make this kind of timeless decision that any fight is, you're, you're just gonna murder.

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  You have to go to the hardest confrontation, right?

• 1:11:11Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  So it would have to be the most violent.

• 1:11:14Robert Evans?

  Yes. Yes. Cause that will make other people not want to attack you as opposed to like what normal people understand about like real fights, which is if you have to do one, if you have to, you like try to just like hit them in the, hit them somewhere that's going to shock them and then run like a motherfucker, right?

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  You get the piss out of there. As fast as possible.

• 1:11:33Robert Evans?

  Like, if you have to, like ideally just run like a motherfucker, but if you have to strike somebody, you know, yeah, go for the eye and then run like a son of a bitch, you know, like, but there's no run like a son of a bitch here because the point in part is this like timeless decision to, anyway, this gives, tells you a lot about the rationalist community. So she tells these people, she explains in detail how she would murder them if they had a fight right now.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  As they're like scooted in next to her.

• 1:12:00Robert Evans?

  Sitting super close, having just asked her about masturbation. Here's their first question, quote, "They asked if I'd rape their corpse. Part of me insisted this was not going as it was supposed to, but I'd decided, I decided inflicting discomfort in order to get reliable information was a valid tactic. In other words, them trying to make her just uncomfortable to get info from her, she decides is fine. Also, the whole discussion about raping their corpses is like, well, if you rape, obviously like if you want to have the most extreme response possible that would like make other people unlikely to fuck with you, knowing that you'll violate their corpse if you kill them is clearly the like, and like.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  That really is that.

• 1:12:36Robert Evans?

  Okay, sure. I love rational thought.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Man, this is crazy. Sorry. This is, this is so crazy.

• 1:12:47Robert Evans?

  It's so nuts. So then they talk about psychopathy. One of these guys had earlier told Ziz that they thought she was a psychopath. But here's the thing.

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  He told her that.

• 1:12:59Robert Evans?

  He told her that doesn't mean what it means both to actual like clinicians, because psychopathy is a diagnostic. Or like what normal people mean to rationalists, a lot of them think psychopathy is a state you can put yourself into in order to maximize your performance in certain situations. Because they they've again, there's some like popular books that are about like the psychopath way, the dark triad and like, well, you know, these are the people who led societies in the toughest times. And so like you could, you need to optimize and engage in some of those behaviors if you want to win in these situations. Based on all of this, Ziz brings up what rationalists call the Gervais Principle. Now, this started as a tongue in cheek joke describing a rule of office dynamics

• 1:13:44Robert Evans?

  based on the TV show The Office. When you said it, I was like, there's no way. Yes, it's Ricky Gervais. Yes. And the idea is that in office environments, psychos always rise to the top. This is supposed to be like a negative observation. Like, the person who wrote this initially is like, yeah, this is how offices work. And it's like, why they're bad, you know? It's an extension of the Peter Principle. And and the psychopaths put bad, like dumb and incompetent people in like, in positions below them. For a variety, it's trying to kind of work out and why and which like offices are often dysfunctional, right? It's not like the original Gervais Principle thing is like, not a bad piece of writing or whatever. But Ziz takes something insane out of

• 1:14:25Robert Evans?

  it. I described how the Gervais Principle said sociopaths give up empathy as in a certain chunk of social software, not literally all hardware accelerated modeling of people, not necessarily compassion, and with it happiness, destroying meaning to create power, meaning too, I did not care about, I wanted this world to live on. So she tells them she's come to the conclusion, I need to make myself into a psychopath in order to have the kind of mental power necessary to do the things that I want to do. And she largely justifies this by describing the beliefs of the Sith from Star Wars. Because she thinks she needs to remake herself as a psychopathic evil warrior monk in order to save all of creation.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, of course.

• 1:15:11Robert Evans?

  Yep. So this is her hitting her final form. And true to fact, these guys are like, they don't say it's a good idea, but they're like, okay, yeah, that's not the worst thing you could do. Sure. You know, like, I think the Sith stuff kind of weird, but making yourself a psychopath makes sense. Sure. Yeah, of course. I know a lot of guys who did that. Um, that's literally what they say, right? And then they say that also, I don't even think that's what they really, they say that because the next thing they say, this guy, person A is like, look, the best way to turn yourself from a net negative to a net positive value, I really believe you could do it. But to do it, you need to come to 10 more of these seminars and keep taking classes here. Right? Right?

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:15:52Robert Evans?

  Right? Here's a quote from them, or from Ziz. She's conditional on me going to a long course of circling like these two organizations offered, particularly a 10 weekend one, then I probably would not be net negative. So things are going good. This is, this is, you know.

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 1:16:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Great.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  How much does 10 weekends cost?

• 1:16:21Robert Evans?

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

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  That's what I was thinking. It seems like they're investing into her more than...

• 1:16:42Robert Evans?

  Of your income, right?

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  More than they're like worried about this money at the top.

• 1:16:44Speaker 06

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

• 1:16:53Robert Evans?

  She is. She is. She gets actually really uncomfortable. They have an exercise where they're basically doing, you know, they're playing with love bombing, right? Where everyone's like hugging and telling each other they love each other. And she's like, I don't really believe it. I just met these people. So she, she is starting to, and she is going to break away from these organizations pretty quickly. But this conversation she have with, with these guys is a critical part of like, why she finally has this fracture? Because number one, this dude keeps telling her you have a net negative value to the universe. Right? Um, and so she's obsessed with like, how do I, and it comes to the conclusion, my best way of being net positive is to make myself into a sociopath.

• 1:17:38Robert Evans?

  And a Sith Lord.

• 1:17:41Robert Evans?

  To save the animals, of course.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

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

• 1:17:54Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:17:55Speaker 06

  Well, I guess the only logical collusion is doom.

• 1:18:01Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 1:18:03Speaker 01

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

• 1:18:08Robert Evans?

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

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  Ah, I have a comedy special you can purchase on Patreon. It's called Birth of a Nation with a G. You can get that at patreon.com/davidboy.

• 1:18:25Robert Evans?

  Excellent, excellent. Um, all right, folks. Well, that is the end of the episode. David, thank you so much for coming on to our inaugural episode by listening to some of the weirdest shit we've ever talked about on this show.

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

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

• 1:18:46Speaker 06

  I mean, yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:47Robert Evans?

  To be, it's, there's a lot more to come.

• 1:18:50Speaker 06

  Fair because your co-host, Lexi Kermit, came on for the Elders of Zion episodes.

• 1:18:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay. I wanted to, I was initially gonna kind of just focus on, all of this would have been like half a page or so, you know, just kind of summing up. Here's the, the gist of what this believes, and then let's get to the actual cult stuff when like, you know, Ziz starts bringing in followers and the crimes start happening. But that Rolling, or the, uh, that Wired article really covers all that very well. And that's the best piece. Most of the journalism I've read on these guys is not very well written. It's not very good. It, it does not really explain why they are, what they are, or why they do. So I decided, and I'm not, the Wired piece is great. I know the Wired guy knows all of the stuff that I brought up here. He just, it, it's an article. You have editors. He, he, he left, he

• 1:19:39Robert Evans?

  left out what he thought he needed to leave out. I don't have that problem. And I wanted to really, really deeply trace exactly where this, this lady's, how this lady's mind develops and how that intersects with rationalism. Um, cause it's interesting and kind of important and bad.

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:00Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  He's so...

• 1:20:03Robert Evans?

  Anyway, thanks for having a head fuck with me. Um, alright, that's it everybody. Goodbye.

• 1:20:13Speaker 06

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio 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 slash at Behind the Bastards.

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