CZM Rewind: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult & The Zizian Murder Spree (or Exactly How Harry Potter Fanfic Killed A Border Patrol Agent)

Part Three: Robert tells David about Ziz's glorious plan to take to the sea and sever the right and left brains of her followers in order to make them psychopaths god that sentence was weird to write trust us the episode is weirder. Part Four: Robert concludes the story of the Zizians with a spree of horrific violent crimes and deaths, culminating in a shoot out with the Border Patrol in Vermont of all places. Sources: https://medium.com/@sefashapiro/a-community-warning-about-ziz-76c100180509 https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130318/https://sinceriously.fyi/rationalist-fleet/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130318/https:/sinceriously.fyi/rationalist-fleet/ https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/infohazard https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130316/https://sinceriously.fyi/net-negative/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130316/https:/sinceriously.fyi/net-negative/ Wayback Machine https://archive.is/hgTdD The Zizians https://zizians.info/ Spectral Sight https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130302/https:/sinceriously.fyi/glossary#spectral-sight True Hero Contract https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130302/https:/sinceriously.fyi/glossary#true-hero-contract Schelling Orders – Sinceriously https://web.archive.org/web/20230202013351/https:/sinceriously.fyi/schelling-orders/ Glossary – Sinceriously https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130302/https:/sinceriously.fyi/glossary/#zentraidon https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130330/https://sinceriously.fyi/my-journey-to-the-dark-side/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130330/https:/sinceriously.fyi/my-journey-to-the-dark-side/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130302/https://sinceriously.fyi/glossary/#zentraidon https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130302/https:/sinceriously.fyi/glossary/#zentraidon https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130259/https://sinceriously.fyi/vampires-and-more-undeath/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130259/https:/sinceriously.fyi/vampires-and-more-undeath/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130316/https://sinceriously.fyi/net-negative/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130316/https:/sinceriously.fyi/net-negative/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130318/https://sinceriously.fyi/rationalist-fleet/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130318/https:/sinceriously.fyi/rationalist-fleet/ https://x.com/orellanin?s=21&t=F-n6cTZFsKgvr1yQ7oHXRg https://x.com/orellanin?s=21&t=F-n6cTZFsKgvr1yQ7oHXRg https://zizians.info/ according to The Boston Globe https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/02/11/metro/6-violent-deaths-tied-to-radical-vegan-cult-based-in-california/ Inside the ‘Zizians’: How a cultish crew of radical vegans became linked to killings across the United States | The Independent https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/zizian-murders-david-maland-curtis-lind-b2701101.html Silicon Valley ‘Rationalists’ Linked to 6 Deaths https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ziz-silicon-valley-rationalist-deaths-1235278765/ The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians | WIRED https://archive.is/4HAtn Good Group and Pasek’s Doom – Sinceriously https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130336/https:/sinceriously.fyi/good-group-and-paseks-doom/ Glossary – Sinceriously https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130302/https:/sinceriously.fyi/glossary/#zentraidon Mana – Sinceriously https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130331/https:/sinceriously.fyi/mana/ Effective Altruism’s Problems Go Beyond Sam Bankman-Fried - Bloomberg https://archive.is/xhV0S The Zizian Facts - Google Docs https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RpAvd5TO5eMhJrdr2kz43dxT3nNm0XtuPcaW9kBIZL8/edit?tab=t.0 Several free CFAR summer programs on rationality and AI safety - LessWrong 2.0 viewer https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/LLQYp53vop5BuyKBF/several-free-cfar-summer-programs-on-rationality-and-ai This guy thinks killing video game characters is immoral | Vox https://www.vox.com/2014/4/23/5643418/this-guy-thinks-killing-video-game-characters-is-immoral Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck https://web.archive.org/web/20230128221733/https:/equilibriabook.com/ Eliezer Yudkowsky comments on On Terminal Goals and Virtue Ethics - LessWrong 2.0 viewer https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/gR6H3egpRPNYnoTrA/on-terminal-goals-and-virtue-ethics/comment/mZTPvwcA3DEDCcC7w Effective Altruism’s Problems Go Beyond Sam Bankman-Fried - Bloomberg https://archive.is/xhV0S SquirrelInHell: Happiness Is a Chore https://squirrelinhell.blogspot.com/2017/12/happiness-is-chore.html#more PLUM OF DISCORD — I Became a Full-time Internet Pest and May Not... https://web.archive.org/web/20220217023845/https:/www.plumofdiscord.com/post/675855867193769984/i-became-a-full-time-internet-pest-and-may-not Roko Harassment of PlumOfDiscord Composited – Sinceriously https://web.archive.org/web/20211009234142/https:/sinceriously.fyi/roko-harassment-of-plumofdiscord-composited/#comment-4671 Intersex Brains And Conceptual Warfare – Sinceriously https://archive.is/czxD3 Infohazardous Glossary – Sinceriously https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/infohazardous-glossary#debucketing SquirrelInHell-Decision-Theory-and-Suicide.pdf - Google Drive https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MFJli_QLM75fF4yUGtllNJ-z76FeHZ7x/view The Matrix is a System – Sinceriously https://web.archive.org/web/20230202013352/https:/sinceriously.fyi/the-matrix-is-a-system/ A community alert about Ziz. Police investigations, violence, and… | by SefaShapiro | Medium https://archive.ph/h7j3v Intersex Brains And Conceptual Warfare – Sinceriously https://archive.ph/iOmFI A community alert about Ziz. Police investigations, violence, and… | by SefaShapiro | Medium https://medium.com/@sefashapiro/a-community-warning-about-ziz-76c100180509 PLUM OF DISCORD (Posts tagged cw-abuse) https://web.archive.org/web/20220521125057/https:/www.plumofdiscord.com/tagged/cw-abuse Timeline: Violence surrounding the Zizians leading to Border Patrol agent shooting https://archive.ph/mHiKh 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:32Robert Evans?

  Picture this, you're listening to the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast and suddenly, wait, what did they just say? Well, the questions raised in those show-stopping moments will be answered in the all-new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor. Hosts Gabe and Chris will dive deep on a specific topic covered in that week's Tuesday episode, from sexual health and HIV prevention to finding the right doctor. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor, now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences.

• 1:07Speaker 03

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• 1:37Robert Evans?

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

• 2:10Speaker 04

  Ah, Rambo 3, let's go.

• 2:13Robert Evans?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 2:14Speaker 04

  Let's kill a ton of brown people.

• 2:16Robert Evans?

  Well, no, I mean, in this one, we're just, it's just like Microsoft co-pilots we're killing.

• 2:21Speaker 04

  Okay, all of them.

• 2:22Robert Evans?

  They're not really people.

• 2:24Speaker 04

  It's so bad.

• 2:25Robert Evans?

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

• 2:33Speaker 05

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

• 2:51Speaker 04

  Whoa.

• 2:52Robert Evans?

  I, I made, I made a mistake in doing this.

• 2:57Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna admit that right now. Before we get further, I'm gonna say I erred in this. And it's, you know, I, I've made peace with the inevitability of fucking stuff up, especially when like every week you're doing a different chunk of history. And we're veering from like, we're talking about fucking 17th and 18th century France. And then like, now we're talking about like a fucking guy who did a genocide in, in Darfur or whatever, right? Like you're going to, these are all important topics, but like, you simply can't every single week, cover the breadth of stuff that we do and not, you're gonna misspeak. You're gonna make errors and stuff. And when it, when it comes to like, I'm talking about Hitler, I'm talking about like, not, obviously those are important.

• 3:36Robert Evans?

  But you know, if I, if I fuck up some fact about like, early 1900s Germany, I'm not gonna be like too bent out of shape. Cause it's like, you know, there's, there's no perfection in this. But in this case, it, it's this tiny little community that nearly all of the reporting on has been like deeply incomplete. And I feel like, I, I like the, the, the stress over like, what do I include in here? And the other problem is that none of these people have editors. Uh, and so all of them, everybody in this story has a blog and every blog post is like 40,000 words. So it's just like.

• 4:12Speaker 04

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

• 4:18Robert Evans?

  A lot of it's, I mean, I've, I've read, I've read most of Ziz's blog entries and I've at least done like little surveys of the blogs of everybody else involved in this. There were also a couple of very helpful compilations that like people, there's like one that like a former, sometimes it's like former members of the community, sometimes it's folks who are like rationalists that were trying to warn other rationalists about Zizians, but like people in and around the community have put together compilations where they'll like clip mixes of news stories and like conversations online. And obviously, these folks like-

• 4:52Speaker 04

  A blog mixtape is nasty work.

• 4:55Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. And I'm deeply grateful, we'll have source links and everything in here. I note when I'm kind of like pulling something from something directly, but like I'm very grateful to the maniacs who put together these like documents that have helped me piece together what's happening, because really, if you're coming in as an outsider, if you weren't like embedded in this community while all this crazy shit was going on, it's a little, it's kind of impossible to like get everything you need to get. You have to refer to these interior sources. It's just the only way to actually understand stuff.

• 5:30Speaker 04

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

• 5:40Robert Evans?

  It's going, we know where it ends, which is-

• 5:42Speaker 04

  We know where it ends.

• 5:43Robert Evans?

  A member of Congress shows up at the library in Vermont that the US and Canada shares because a Border Patrol agent was murdered there and like threatens to take over Canada. And that's all, like, there's a degree to which you can kind of tie heightened tensions between the US and Canada to the murder of this Border Patrol agent, which itself is directly tied to the fact that Alyssa Jankowski wrote a piece of Harry Potter fanfiction.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  I love that it all goes back to that.

• 6:08Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. It all comes back to bad Harry Potter fanfiction.

• 6:16Speaker 06

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• 6:47Robert Evans?

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• 7:10Speaker 07

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• 7:46Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit dovato.com or call 1-877-844-8872. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've thought about trying therapy with our long-term sponsor, BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. Your mental health doesn't know it's World Mental Health Day. Stress does not politely wait until October 10th. Burnout does not RSVP. And your brain definitely doesn't check the calendar before deciding to spiral at 11:47 p.m. Mental health is just a part of regular health. Therapy isn't only useful for big life choices, it could be a place to talk through smaller things. That work situation, taking up too much of your mental real estate, or a relationship

• 8:28Robert Evans?

  dynamic you can't quite name, or simply the sense that something feels off. If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks, and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance. Don't have insurance who live outside the U.S.? You can still get 10% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com/behind to explore your payment options. That's betterh-e-l-p.com/behind.

• 8:54Robert Evans?

  So, part three, we spent last episode talking about Ziz's moving to the bay and their first interactions with the rationalist community. That big C-FAR conference they went to that was very reminiscent, had a lot of exercises reminiscent of like Synanon shit, right?

• 9:11Speaker 04

  Right, right, very, very, a lot of talk of murder.

• 9:15Robert Evans?

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

• 9:24Speaker 04

  Which is, can't be a step in a good direction.

• 9:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you know, you should, you should be aware of, there's, it's like, if your community is talking about like, the ethics of escalating to murder in random arguments too much, maybe be a little worried.

• 9:41Speaker 04

  If someone sits down next to you and says, "How would you murder me?" Or whatever they said, that's, you always gotta get out of that room.

• 9:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you wanna, you wanna, you wanna leave immediately.

• 9:50Speaker 04

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

• 9:57Robert Evans?

  And then if they're like, "Yeah, would you, would you perform necrophilia in order to, in the past, scare people away from attacking you?" Like, get out of that room, leave. Bad con, this is not a crew you wanna be a part of.

• 10:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, maybe just take a pickleball or something, there's lots of stuff you can do.

• 10:14Robert Evans?

  Pickleball, people never talk about necrophilia playing pickleball.

• 10:18Speaker 04

  I don't think one time, I don't think one time.

• 10:21Robert Evans?

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

• 10:26Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 10:27Robert Evans?

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

• 10:58Speaker 04

  No, shout out to my landlord, Mr. Lou.

• 11:03Robert Evans?

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

• 11:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, Craigslist is a crapshoot, you know?

• 11:40Robert Evans?

  Craigslist is a crapshoot, yeah.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  Every time.

• 11:43Robert Evans?

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

• 11:51Speaker 04

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

• 11:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Um, so she calls the, or he calls the cops on her and then, yeah, they, they do nothing and he attacks her in her bedroom that night. So she decides to like, he's like throwing a chair at her and shit. So she decides, I gotta get out of this terrible fucking sublet. And unfortunately, her next best option, a very common thing in the rationalist community is to have whole houses rented out that you fill with rationalists who don't have a lot of money. Uh, it never rings badly.

• 12:21Speaker 04

  Kind of like artists.

• 12:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's kind of like artists or like content producer houses. It never explodes. People never have horrible times in these.

• 12:31Robert Evans?

  This particular rationalist house is called liminal, uh, because, you know, Gen Z loves talking about their liminal spaces, um, on the internet. One resident of the house reacts very negatively when Ziz identifies herself as a non-transitioning trans woman and basically asks like, when are you gonna leave? So she has, you know, she, she says that as soon as she arrives, one of the other residents is transphobes. She can't stay there very long. Um, again, all sounds like a very familiar Bay Area housing situation story. She bounces around some short-term solutions, Airbnbs, moving constantly while trying to find work. She gets an interview with Google, but the hiring process there is slow. There's a lot of different stages to it and it doesn't offer immediate relief from her financial.

• 13:13Robert Evans?

  Issues. Other potential offers fall through as she conflicts with the fundamental snake oiliness of this era of Silicon Valley development. Ziz blames it on the fact that she couldn't feign enthusiasm for companies she didn't believe in. Quote, "I was inexperienced with convincing body language inclusive lies like this. I did not have the right false face, but very quick to think up words to say." So like, "I'm not good enough at lying that I'm excited about working for an app to, you know, help you do your laundry better," uh, which is like a third of the bay.

• 13:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. And once again, she has like flashes of like, "Oh, wow. You really, you really have strong morals and all, you know what I mean?" Yeah. She had a strong resume, right? It wasn't, it wasn't-

• 13:54Robert Evans?

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

• 14:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. Don't sell yourself short.

• 14:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 14:32Robert Evans?

  So she does start to transition during this period of time. She goes on finasteride, which is, helps to avoid male pattern baldness, and she starts experimenting with estrogen and anti-androgens. She wanted to avoid this for, uh, I'm sure she had a variety of reasons, but as soon as she starts taking hormones, they have such a positive effect. She describes it as a hard to describe felt sense of cognitive benefits, and she decides to say, stay on them. Um, by October, she'd committed to start writing a blog about her own feelings and theories on rationalism. And her model here was Yudkowski. She names this blog Sin Seriously, and it was her attempt to convince other rationalists to adopt her beliefs about like veganism and such. Her first articles are like pretty bland. It's these scattered concepts and thought experiments,

• 15:16Robert Evans?

  very basic stuff, like can God create a rock so big God couldn't move it? And then like throwing a rationalist spin on that. So it's, you know, a lot of this is like, "Oh, maybe in an area in which college didn't cost 200 grand, you could have just gotten a philosophy degree and that would have made you happy."

• 15:31Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:34Robert Evans?

  You just wanted to spend a couple of years talking through silly ideas based on dead Greek guys.

• 15:39Speaker 04

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

• 15:41Robert Evans?

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

• 16:14Speaker 04

  No.

• 16:14Robert Evans?

  Going down here.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  Is she following this herself?

• 16:18Robert Evans?

  Yes, she's working on, she's, she's trying to use some of these tactics on herself to make herself to deal with like what she sees as her flaws that are stopping her from, you know, saving the cosmos.

• 16:29Robert Evans?

  Great stuff. A lot of good pressure to put on yourself.

• 16:32Speaker 04

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

• 16:36Robert Evans?

  Well, and that's, again, that comes, that comes, that's not Ziz, that's the entire rationalist subculture. The stakes are immediately, we have to save the world from the evil AI that will create hell to punish everybody who doesn't build it. And that actually, we'll talk about this later, that breaks a ton of people in this. She is not the only one kind of fracturing her psyche in this community. So right around this time, as she's bouncing around short term rentals and like desperately trying to get work, she meets a person named Jasper Gwyn, who at that point identified as a trans woman, who now goes by Gwyn Danielson and uses they them pronouns, that's how I'm going to refer to them. But for clarity's sake, I'm going to call them Gwyn or Danielson, even though they went by a different name at this time, because that's what they're called now.

• 17:20Robert Evans?

  Gwyn was a fan of Ziz's blog and had some complex rationalist theories of her own. They came to believe that each person had multiple personalities stored inside their brain, a sort of like mutation of the left brain, right brain hypothesis. And each of these sides of your brain was like a whole, like intact person, right? Great.

• 17:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, no.

• 17:42Robert Evans?

  Cool. No, you guys are gonna be fucking with your heads real hard. Great.

• 17:46Speaker 04

  Oh, man, these poor people.

• 17:49Robert Evans?

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

• 18:21Speaker 04

  Literally all that cult stuff, huh?

• 18:23Robert Evans?

  All that cult stuff.

• 18:24Speaker 04

  All that cult stuff.

• 18:27Robert Evans?

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

• 18:53Speaker 04

  My, uh, my little brother went to school right outside, right outside of San Francisco and his principal lived on a boat.

• 18:59Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 18:59Speaker 04

  Just like a mile away from the school and everybody loved it.

• 19:03Robert Evans?

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

• 19:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:16Speaker 04

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

• 19:19Robert Evans?

  Dank is a good description of boat life, I think, in general. Yeah.

• 19:26Robert Evans?

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

• 19:52Speaker 04

  That also goes along with the Bay Area.

• 19:54Robert Evans?

  That also goes along with the Bay Area.

• 19:56Speaker 04

  Pills and powders are bigger.

• 19:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Quote, "They talked about how when they were a child, their friend who was a cat had died and they had to use their own retroactive paraphrasing, sworn an oath of vengeance against death."

• 20:10Robert Evans?

  These are just people doing great, very healthy. It's like the opposite of what you want a kid to learn when their pet dies is like, yeah, you know, death is inevitable. It happens to everything, you know, it'll happen to you one day and it's sad, but just something we have to accept. No, no, no. War against death.

• 20:27Speaker 04

  No, they were like, nope, nope, nope. I can fix this.

• 20:30Robert Evans?

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

• 20:39Speaker 04

  Maybe no more pets for a while.

• 20:40Robert Evans?

  Maybe no more pets.

• 20:44Robert Evans?

  Gwyn also spent way too much time online, which is how they wound up reading hundreds of theoretical articles about how AGI, artificial general intelligence, would destroy the world. And again, AGI is like a mainstream term now because a fucking chat GPT came out a couple of years ago and everyone started talking about it. At this point, 2016, 17, it's only like real people who are really into the industry in a nerdy way who are using that frame. Like, regular people on the street don't know what you fucking mean when you're talking about this stuff. But this is a term that is in use among them. And like Ziz, Gwyn moved to the Bay Area to get involved in fixing the problem. They were an other kin. Are you familiar with this online community?

• 21:23Speaker 04

  Which one?

• 21:24Robert Evans?

  Other kin?

• 21:25Speaker 04

  Other kin? No, I have no, I've never heard of that.

• 21:27Robert Evans?

  It's like a, it's like the Mormonism of furidom almost, like.

• 21:31Speaker 04

  That's, that's, that's insane, what you said.

• 21:36Robert Evans?

  Like, it's harmless, right? Like, these are people who, there's a mix of beliefs. Some of them like literally believe they're like fantasy creatures. Some of them just like want to be.

• 21:44Speaker 05

  They like, they like half identify as, as like any, a non-human creature.

• 21:50Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 21:51Speaker 04

  Oh, like their furry persona is their true.

• 21:53Robert Evans?

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

• 22:19Speaker 04

  Tale as old as time.

• 22:20Robert Evans?

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

• 22:46Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 22:47Robert Evans?

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

• 22:53Speaker 04

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

• 22:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. So this is a result, or so Ziz commits herself to turning Gwyn to the dark side, which is a term she started to use. Obviously, it's a Star Wars term, and it comes out as a result of her obsession with what's called akrasia. Akrasia is an actual Greek term for a lack of willpower that leads someone to act in ways that take them further from their goals in life. It's an actual like, I think akrasia often, it was like an early term for like what we call ADHD, right? Like people who have difficulty like focusing on tasks that they need to complete. "One of the promises of rationalism was to arm a person with tools to escape this state of being and act more powerfully and effectively in the world." Ziz adds to this some ideas cribbed from Star Wars. She

• 23:38Robert Evans?

  decides that the quote unquote way of the Jedi, which is like accepting moral restrictions, you know, about like not murdering people and the like, is a, is a, is a prison for someone who's like truly great and has the opportunity to accomplish important goals, right? If you're, if you're that kind of person, you can't afford to be limited by moral beliefs. So in order to achieve the kind of vegan singularity that she thinks is critical to save the cosmos, she and her fellow rationalists need to free themselves and from the restrictions of the Jedi and become vegan Sith.

• 24:10Robert Evans?

  That's, that's more or less, uh,

• 24:14Robert Evans?

  where things are going here. So I'd here, I should note that while Gwynn and Ziz are spinning out on their own, everything that you're seeing from them, these feelings of grandiosity and cosmic significance, but also paranoid obsession are the norm in rationalist and effective Altruism circles. There's a great article in Bloomberg News by Ellen Hewitt. It discusses how many in the EA set would suffer paralyzing panic attacks over things like spending money on a nice dinner or buying ice cream, obsessing over how many people they'd killed by not better optimizing their expenses. And quote, "In extreme pockets of the rationality community, AI researchers believed their apocalypse-related stress was contributing to psychotic breaks." Miri employee, and that's one of these organizations created by the, the people around

• 24:58Robert Evans?

  Yudkowski, Jessica Taylor, had a job that sometimes involved imagining extreme AI torture scenarios. As she described it in a post on Less Wrong, "The worst possible suffering an AI might be able to inflict on people. At work, she says, she and a small team of researchers believed, 'We might make God, but we might make, mess up and destroy everything.'" In 2017, she was hospitalized for three weeks with delusions that she was intrinsically evil and had, "Destroyed significant parts of the world with my demonic power," she wrote in her post. Although she acknowledged taking psychedelics for therapeutic reasons, she also attributed the delusions to her job's blurring of nightmare scenarios in real life. "In an ordinary patient, having fantasies about being the devil is considered megalomania," she wrote. "Here,

• 25:40Robert Evans?

  the idea naturally followed from my day-to-day social environment and was central to my psychotic breakdown."

• 25:46Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 25:49Robert Evans?

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

• 25:53Speaker 04

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

• 25:56Robert Evans?

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

• 26:02Speaker 04

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

• 26:05Robert Evans?

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

• 26:33Speaker 04

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

• 26:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, bro, sorry.

• 26:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's just how, that's just how it goes.

• 26:44Robert Evans?

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

• 26:59Speaker 04

  You just watched Star Wars again and decided you gotta figure it out?

• 27:02Robert Evans?

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

• 27:14Speaker 04

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

• 27:19Robert Evans?

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

• 27:23Speaker 04

  Oh, man, and honestly, well deserved.

• 27:25Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah, yeah. Talk about info hazards, Jesus.

• 27:30Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 27:32Robert Evans?

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

• 28:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 28:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Anyway, at rationalist meetups, Ziz began to pushing this whole vegan-sith thing hard, and again, meets with little success, but she and Gwyn gradually start to expand the circle of people around them. Meanwhile, in her professional life, that Google interview process moves forward. Ziz says that she passed every stage of the process, but that it kept getting dragged out, forcing her to ask her parents for more help. In November, around the time her blog started to get a following, she says Google said she'd passed the committee and would be hired once she got picked for a team. Now, I don't know what happens after this. She says Google asked for proof of address, which she doesn't have. She's just turned 26, and she's not on her parents' health insurance either. She's been... Paige is describing what is a very familiar nightmare scenario to me of like, trying

• 28:52Robert Evans?

  to get proof of address so you can get a job and like, continue getting like, you know, get on Calimed and stuff. And I do think it's probably worth acknowledging that like, as her brain is starting to break, and she's having... she's getting further and further into all these delusional ideas, she's also struggling with being off of her parents' health insurance and like, trying to find stable housing in the bay? And like, that influences the situation.

• 29:16Speaker 04

  And still in the process of transitioning, right?

• 29:19Robert Evans?

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

• 29:22Speaker 04

  It's a heavy workload.

• 29:23Robert Evans?

  You're doing too much to your brain right now, Ziz.

• 29:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:28Robert Evans?

  So, and then she makes the worst possible decision, which is to live with her friend Gwyn in her tiny sail... in their tiny sailboat, which is now anchored by the Berkeley Marina. Again, this is not like, a houseboat. This is like, a sailboat with one small room.

• 29:43Speaker 04

  Right. It's got a court... like, yeah, there's like, a bed, a table, and a sink.

• 29:49Robert Evans?

  Right, like, a little bathroom, probably, maybe a kitchenette, but it's not like, livable for two people.

• 29:55Speaker 05

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

• 30:03Robert Evans?

  It's horrible.

• 30:04Speaker 05

  That's a bad idea.

• 30:06Robert Evans?

  And now imagine... Imagine if that shitty tiny apartment that you remember from your past was a boat.

• 30:17Robert Evans?

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

• 30:56Speaker 04

  Oh my god.

• 31:01Speaker 04

  This is a, it's a real villain story. It couldn't get any worse than that.

• 31:06Robert Evans?

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

• 31:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, how often do you think they were leaving that boat?

• 31:28Robert Evans?

  Not nearly long enough. And Gwyn is on what Ziz describes as a cocktail of stimulants, quote, "mapped out the cognitive effects of each hour they were on them." They get very angry if Ziz interrupts their thoughts at the wrong time, and also, like, Ziz isn't really sleeping, so they're just talking for hours and getting on each other's nerves at the same time, but also like, building these increasingly elaborate fantasies about how they're going to save the cosmos. And it's, you know, it's not great. Through these conversations, they do develop Gwyn's multiple personalities theory, mixing in some of Ziz's own beliefs about good and evil. And I want to quote another passage from that Wired article that summarizes what they come to believe about this.

• 32:12Robert Evans?

  "A person's core consisted of two hemispheres, each one intrinsically good or non-good. In extremely rare cases, they could be double good, a condition that so happened, Lisota identified in herself." And Ziz is consistently going to identify herself as intrinsically good. So she's, both sides of her personality are only good. But most people are at best, single good, which means part of them is non-good or basically evil. And they're at war with this other half of their brain. That's a whole person that's evil. Which is why the other people can't be trusted to make decisions. You know, like increasingly, Ziz's attitude is going to be like, only intrinsically good people can be trusted to make good decisions.

• 32:52Speaker 04

  Only the double goods.

• 32:53Robert Evans?

  Only the double goods. It's such like a, you know, you're making your own like Orwell speech, Ziz. This is, this is a bad sign.

• 33:04Robert Evans?

  So Ziz's Google ambitions fall apart at this time. They don't really give us a good explanation as to why. I kind of think they started bombarding their contact with Google with like, requests about why the process wasn't going faster. And maybe Google was like, ah, maybe we don't need this person. Ziz concludes failing at Google was good because she's gotten, she'd gotten $10,000 from unemployment at this point. Quote, "This means I had some time. If they hired me soon, it would deprive me of at least several months of freedom." In which of course, she is continuing to work out her theories with Gwyn on the sailboat.

• 33:36Speaker 04

  Also, I don't know if that's freedom.

• 33:38Robert Evans?

  It's, it's really not freedom.

• 33:40Speaker 04

  Maybe, maybe work, I hear the Google campus has a lot of things to do.

• 33:46Robert Evans?

  Kind of the what if, I think maybe at this point, she still could have pulled out of this tailspin if she'd like gotten a job and worked around other people and socialized, not on the sailboat. But also a real consistent thing with Ziz is at this point, she has no willingness to like, do the kind of compromise. And I'm not just talking about the moral compromise, but like, if you're going to work a job for a company, you're going to spend a large part of your day doing a thing that like, you wouldn't be doing otherwise, right? Cause that's what a job generally is.

• 34:14Speaker 04

  It's just work.

• 34:15Robert Evans?

  That's just work. And Ziz feels like she can't handle the idea of doing anything but reading fanfiction and theorizing about how to give herself superpowers, right? That's the most important thing in the world because the stakes are so high. So she like, like ethically can't square herself with doing anything she needs to succeed in this industry where she has the skill to succeed. And this is, this is another trait she's got in common with the rest of the rationalist EA subculture. That, that Bloomberg article interviewed a guy named Kuachu Yuan, a former rationalist and PhD candidate who dropped out of his PhD program in order to work in AI risk. He stopped saving for retirement and cut off his friends so he could donate all of his

• 35:00Robert Evans?

  money to, you know, EA causes and because his friends were distracting him from saving the world. And these are all, this is all cult stuff, right? Cults want you to cut off from your friends. They want you to give them all your money. He's doing, but he's doing it like independently, like he's not, there's not like a single leader. He's not like living on a compound with them. It's just, once you kind of take these beliefs seriously, the things that you, that you will do to yourself are the things people in cults have done to them, right? In an interview with Business Insider, Yuan said, "You can really manipulate people into doing all kinds of crazy stuff if you can convince them this is how you can prevent the end of the world. Once you get into that frame, it really distorts your ability to care about anything else."

• 35:42Speaker 04

  Man.

• 35:43Robert Evans?

  And that's, yeah, that's kind of the thing. It's harder to talk about this than like, could people talk about Ziz as like, oh, it's a cult leader and she had her, you know, vegan, trans AI death cult or something. And, you know, I, I feel like that's not close enough to the truth to get what's like, to get how this happened, right? Cause what happens with Ziz is very cultish, but Ziz is one of a number of different people who have calved off of the rationalism community and had disastrous impacts. But it happens constantly with these people because like-

• 36:18Speaker 04

  It's got such an engine for it, right?

• 36:20Robert Evans?

  Yes, it's an engine for making cults.

• 36:22Speaker 04

  It's, it's, this is a cult factory for sure.

• 36:26Robert Evans?

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

• 36:29Speaker 04

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

• 36:33Robert Evans?

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

• 36:50Speaker 04

  Is there anyone here who doesn't want that within this group? They're all-

• 36:54Robert Evans?

  No, that's all of them. Right, that's the whole community.

• 36:59Robert Evans?

  And like Anna was emailing direct, gave Ziz like some of the advice that Ziz considered like key to her moving to the Bay Area and stuff, right? Like, these people, like, the rationalists really, really want you to think that this was just like some fringe person, but she's very much tied in to all of this stuff, right? So, for her part, Ziz doesn't deny that failing to convince other rationalists was part of why she pulled away from mainstream rationalism, but she's also going to claim that a big reason for her break is sexual abuse among people leading in the rationalist community. And there's a specific case that she'll cite later that doesn't happen until 2018, but this is a problem people were discussing in 2017, when she's living on that boat. The representative story is the case of Sonia Joseph, who was the basis of that Bloomberg

• 37:43Robert Evans?

  News piece I've quoted from a couple of times. And it's a bummer of a story. Sonia was 14 when she first read Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which is, set her on the path that led her to moving to the Bay Area in order to get involved in the Rationalist EA set, and she's focused on the field of AI risk. And I'm gonna read a quote-

• 38:03Speaker 05

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

• 38:11Robert Evans?

  It's never drops too far below the surface. I cannot overemphasize how important this Harry Potter fanfiction is to all these murders.

• 38:19Speaker 04

  I mean, that's sort of like primary text, right?

• 38:21Robert Evans?

  And this woman getting abused. Yes, yes, it's a primary text of the movement. Wow. I'm gonna read a quote from that Bloomberg article. Sonia was encouraged when she was 22 to have dinner with a 40-ish startup founder in the rationalist sphere because he had a close connection to Peter Thiel. At dinner, the man bragged that Yudkowsky had modeled a core Harry Potter professor in that fanfic on him. Joseph says that he also argued that it was normal for a 12-year-old girl to have sexual relationships with adult men, and that such relationships were a noble way of transferring knowledge to a younger generation. Then she says he followed her home and insisted on staying over. She says he slept on the floor of her living room and that she felt unsafe until he left in the morning.

• 39:03Speaker 04

  Jesus.

• 39:04Robert Evans?

  So great. You know, bragging about your Harry Potter, how you helped inspire the Harry Potter fanfic, and then explaining how 12-year-old girls should have sex with adult men. Good stuff.

• 39:13Speaker 04

  I gotta say.

• 39:14Robert Evans?

  Rational.

• 39:15Speaker 04

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

• 39:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, to get chicks.

• 39:20Speaker 04

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

• 39:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, "I'm the snake of this." By the way, what do you think about 12-year-olds?

• 39:28Speaker 04

  Oh, god damn.

• 39:30Robert Evans?

  Also, I have a close connection to Peter Thiel.

• 39:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:36Robert Evans?

  Cool.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  Oh, shit.

• 39:38Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. As that Bloomberg article makes clear, this is not an isolated issue within rationalism. Quote, "Sexual harassment and abuse are distressingly common," according to interviews with eight women at all levels of the community. Many young, ambitious women described a similar trajectory. They were initially drawn in by the ideas, then became immersed in the social scene. Often that meant attending parties at EA or rationalist group houses, or getting added to jargon-filled Facebook Messenger chat groups with hundreds of like-minded people. The eight women say casual misogyny threaded through the scene. On the low end, Brick, the rationalist-adjacent writer, says a prominent rationalist once told her condescendingly that she was "a five-year-old in a hot 20-year-old's body." Relationships with much older men were common, as was polyamory.

• 40:21Robert Evans?

  Neither was inherently harmful, but several women say those norms became tools to help influential older men get more partners. And this is also, this isn't just rationalism, that is the California ideology, that is the Bay Area tech set, right?

• 40:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was gonna say, it feels very techy.

• 40:37Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 40:38Speaker 04

  Ah, man.

• 40:40Robert Evans?

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

• 40:48Speaker 04

  Yo, to say that.

• 40:50Robert Evans?

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

• 40:54Speaker 04

  That shit's vile.

• 40:56Robert Evans?

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• 43:13Robert Evans?

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

• 43:57Robert Evans?

  Maybe we should get a bunch of rationalists all living together on boats.

• 44:03Speaker 04

  Ah, she needs a work-life balance.

• 44:06Robert Evans?

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

• 44:24Robert Evans?

  So great.

• 44:25Speaker 04

  And I get it, right? It's expensive here. I want to get some boats with my friends. It does sound cool.

• 44:31Robert Evans?

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

• 44:46Speaker 04

  No, no. Like a

• 44:48Robert Evans?

  Isn't that a good living boat?

• 44:50Speaker 04

  Like a full boat?

• 44:52Robert Evans?

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

• 44:55Speaker 04

  Oh, man, that had to be a piece of shit.

• 44:58Robert Evans?

  To be a shitty, shitty boat.

• 45:00Speaker 04

  A colossal piece of shit.

• 45:01Robert Evans?

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

• 45:30Speaker 04

  And that's the center. That's the, that's the crown jewel of the fleet.

• 45:34Robert Evans?

  Right, right. That's our flagship.

• 45:36Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 45:38Robert Evans?

  So she and Danielson sail, but they buy this thing with this third guy, Dan Powell, who's at least a Navy veteran. So like, you know, that's a good call.

• 45:47Speaker 04

  He's boat adjacent.

• 45:49Robert Evans?

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

• 46:18Speaker 04

  Right. Comically so. Like known to be a terrible.

• 46:23Robert Evans?

  Nothing depreciates like fucking raw salmon depreciates slower than a boat.

• 46:33Robert Evans?

  I think his attitude is I'm gonna become like the slumlord of a bunch of, or at least landlord to a bunch of boat rationalists, but.

• 46:40Speaker 04

  I think slumlord was correct.

• 46:42Robert Evans?

  I don't know how you expect this to pay off, buying a 70-year-old tugboat for a bunch of like poor rationalist punk kids to live in. How is that ever supposed to work?

• 46:55Robert Evans?

  What's the P and L statement you put together here?

• 46:58Speaker 04

  I, oh man, oh man. When?

• 47:02Robert Evans?

  Holy shit.

• 47:03Speaker 04

  What was the, what was the timeline on him getting his money back, he thought?

• 47:06Robert Evans?

  Oh, God, I have no idea. He, he absolutely takes a bath on this shit, right?

• 47:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, he has to.

• 47:13Robert Evans?

  And I believe him that Ziz lied to him about the whole scenario to get his money. Um, I do think this was essentially a con from her. He says, quote, "Ziz led me to believe that she had established contacts in the bay and that it would be easy for us to at least get a slip, if not one that was approved for overnight use. And as it turns out, when we were coming through the inside passage from Alaska, it was revealed that we did not have a place to arrive."

• 47:35Speaker 04

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

• 47:40Robert Evans?

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

• 47:55Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 47:57Robert Evans?

  So again-

• 47:57Speaker 04

  These people need space.

• 47:59Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 47:59Speaker 04

  Just get a warehouse.

• 48:01Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 48:01Speaker 04

  It's Oakland.

• 48:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well-

• 48:03Speaker 04

  Just get a warehouse.

• 48:04Robert Evans?

  The ghost ship fire had happened by that point, so I don't think warehouse space was easy to get.

• 48:08Speaker 04

  Fair, fair, fair.

• 48:10Robert Evans?

  Um, but this, I think this would have, I think you're right, in an earlier era, they would have just wound up living in like a warehouse.

• 48:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:16Robert Evans?

  And maybe all died in a horrible fire, uh, cause that, there were issues with that kind of life too, but they would have an option besides the boat thing. Anyway, the Caleb is not in good shape again. This boat is 70 plus years old. It is only livable by punk standards. And while it was large enough, it is a 94 foot boat, you can keep some people on there. It's also way too big to anchor in most municipal marinas, especially since the boat has 3,000 gallons of incredibly toxic diesel fuel and it's not really seaworthy, which means there's this constant risk of poisoning the waters it sits in, that the authorities are just gonna be consistently like, guys, you can't have this here. Guys, you just, you simply can't have this here.

• 48:56Speaker 04

  So they just got to operate out and into national waters like a cruise ship?

• 49:00Robert Evans?

  No, they're just kind of illegally anchoring places and hoping that it's fine and periodically getting boarded over it. Another crew member on the right down from Alaska, who's just kind of there, they're just there, you know, for the adventure. So they leave and don't come back after they get to the bay. But this person expressed an opinion that Ziz consistently came off as creepy, but not scary. At one point, he says that she confronted him and told him he was transgender. And when he's like, no, I'm really not, she pressured him.

• 49:29Speaker 04

  He was?

• 49:30Robert Evans?

  Yes. She does this a lot. Tells people, I know that you're this, this is, and it works. Like, that's how a number of her followers get to her. But she also, it doesn't work a lot of time. A lot of people are like, no, I'm not, you know, whatever it is you're saying. She does this to Gwynn, too. So I don't doubt his story. Like, she just kind of decides things about people and then tries to brute force them into accepting that about herself. And when there are people who are like both desperate for like approval and affection and also who are housing insecure and need the boat or wherever to live with her, those people feel, a lot, a number of them feel like a significant pull to just kind of accept whatever Ziz is saying about them.

• 50:10Speaker 04

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

• 50:16Robert Evans?

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

• 50:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:54Robert Evans?

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

• 51:18Speaker 04

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

• 51:24Robert Evans?

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

• 51:44Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 51:45Robert Evans?

  We have to make ourselves into Ricky Gervais sociopaths.

• 51:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:49Robert Evans?

  Great.

• 51:51Robert Evans?

  What a good ideology.

• 51:53Speaker 04

  I love that they still love pop culture, though, you know?

• 51:56Robert Evans?

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

• 52:04Speaker 04

  Exactly, it's the thing, yeah, if you have somewhere to go.

• 52:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 52:07Speaker 04

  If you have anywhere to go, this can't fly.

• 52:09Robert Evans?

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

• 52:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is clearly like, or like a cousin.

• 52:26Robert Evans?

  Yes, someone.

• 52:28Speaker 04

  This is, would be so upsetting for someone to just casually talk about it like a paint and sip.

• 52:34Robert Evans?

  Like Ricky Gervais?

• 52:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, Ricky.

• 52:43Robert Evans?

  So by this point, their breaks with mainstream rationalism had gone terminal. Gwyn criticized the rest of the central rationalist community for, quote, "not taking heroic responsibility for the outcome of this world." In addition to the definitely accurate claims of sexual abuse within rationalism, they alleged organizations like C-FAR were actively transphobic. I don't know how true that is. Some of the articles I've read, there's a lot of trans rationalists who will be like, no, there's a very high population of trans people within the rationalist community. So people disagree about this, it's not my place to come to a conclusion, but this is one of the things that Ziz says about the central rationalist community. Ziz had concluded that transgender people were the best people to build a cabal around,

• 53:25Robert Evans?

  because they, quote from Ziz's blog, "had unusually high life force." Ziz believed that the mental powers locked within the small community of simpatico rationalists they'd gathered together were enough to alter the fate of the cosmos if everyone could be jailbroken into sociopaths. And-

• 53:43Speaker 04

  And these are all double goods as well.

• 53:45Robert Evans?

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

• 53:59Speaker 04

  Like, no matter what, it was like blind support, right?

• 54:01Robert Evans?

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

• 54:39Speaker 04

  Man, imagine being in the boat community when they move in.

• 54:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, just like.

• 54:43Speaker 04

  What the fuck is going on?

• 54:45Robert Evans?

  I just wanted, I'm just an alcoholic. What's happening?

• 54:49Robert Evans?

  I just wanted to be like Quint from Jaws. Oh, no.

• 54:52Speaker 04

  I'm just here because my wife left me.

• 54:55Robert Evans?

  I think I might die a different way than a great white attack now. This is looking bad.

• 55:00Speaker 04

  Yikes.

• 55:01Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. So around this time, Gwyn claims she came up with a tactic for successfully separating and harnessing the power of different hemispheres of someone's brain. The tactic was uni-hemispheric sleep. And this is a process by which only one half of your brain sleeps at a time. In a critical write-up published as a warning before the killings that are to come, a rationalist named Apollo Mojave writes, "Normally, it is not possible for human beings to sleep with only one hemisphere. However, a weak form of UHS can be achieved by stimulating one half of the body and resting the other. Like hypnosis or fasting, this is a vulnerable psychological state for a person. Entering UHS requires the sleeper to be exhausted. It also has disorienting effects, so they are not quite themselves."

• 55:46Robert Evans?

  And I disagree with them that, like, there's no, they're not just actually sleeping with only one hemisphere. And in fact, I think they may have taken this idea from Warhammer 40,000.

• 55:55Speaker 04

  That's so funny.

• 55:56Robert Evans?

  Because it's something space marines do.

• 55:59Speaker 04

  Because yeah, what are you talking about?

• 56:00Robert Evans?

  But yeah, that doesn't, that's not a thing.

• 56:02Speaker 04

  What are you talking about?

• 56:04Robert Evans?

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

• 56:27Speaker 04

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

• 56:31Robert Evans?

  Right, right, like, one eye open. Watching The Office.

• 56:38Speaker 04

  Furiously taking notes.

• 56:41Robert Evans?

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

• 57:23Speaker 04

  That's the goal.

• 57:24Robert Evans?

  That's the goal.

• 57:25Speaker 04

  That's their goal.

• 57:26Robert Evans?

  You've got to make ourselves into psychopaths so we can save the world.

• 57:31Robert Evans?

  But it also gets used, you can use it to like, I have this thing, I don't like that I react this way in this situation. So get me into this sleep pattern and you like, talk me through and we'll figure out why I'm doing it. And we'll, they describe it as using tech to upgrade their mental capabilities, right? So, they're just kind of brainwashing each other. They're like fucking around with, with some pretty potentially dangerous stuff. And again, drugs are definitely involved in a lot of aspects of this, which, which is not usually written up, but you could, you just have to infer. Given that there's some disagreement, or there's some disagreement around all this, but it seems accurate to say that Gwyn is the one who came up with the unihemispheric sleep idea, but a lot of the language around how this tactic was used and what it was supposed

• 58:15Robert Evans?

  to do came from Ziz. And again, the process is just sleep deprivation, right? This is cult stuff. It's part of how cults brainwash people, but it also wouldn't have seemed inherently suspicious to rationalists because part of that subculture, being part of that subculture and going to those events had already normalized a slightly less radical version of this behavior, as this piece in Bloomberg explains. "At house parties, rationalists spent time debugging each other, engaging in a confrontational style of interrogation that would supposedly yield more rational thoughts. Sometimes to probe further, they experimented with psychedelics and tried jailbreaking their minds to crack open their consciousness and make them more influential or agentic. Several people in

• 58:58Robert Evans?

  Taylor, and this is one of the sources, fear had similar psychotic episodes. One died by suicide in 2018 and another in 2021." So in the mainstream rationalist subculture, they are also trying to consciously hack their brains using a mix of drugs and meditation and social abuse, and people kill themselves as a result of the outcomes of this. This is already a problem in the mainstream subculture.

• 59:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, let alone this extremist offshoot, right?

• 59:24Robert Evans?

  Yep. In her own writings at The Times, Ziz describes hideous fights with Gwyn, in which Gwyn tries to mentally dominate and mind control Ziz. They've both become believers in the new theories Ziz has. Basically, she uses the term mana, which she describes as your ability to persuade people, which is if you can convince someone of something, it's evidence that you have an inherent level of magical power, and someone with naturally high mana like Ziz can literally mind control people with low mana. That's what she believes she's doing whenever she tries to talk someone into something about themselves, is she's mind controlling them. And she and Gwyn have mind control battles. At one point, they start

• 1:00:06Robert Evans?

  having one of these arguments where basically Gwyn threatens to mind control Ziz and Ziz threatens Gwyn back, and this starts a verbal escalation. And the way Ziz describes this escalation, which is, again, these are two sleep deprived, traumatized people fucking with each other's heads on a boat, but the way that Ziz describes the escalation cycle is going to be important because this has a lot to do with the logic of the murders that are to come. I said that if they are, were going to defend a right to be attacking me on some level and treat fighting back as a new aggression and cause to escalate, I would not at any point back down. And if our conflicting definitions of the ground state were no further retaliation was necessary, meant that we were consigned to a runaway, positive feedback loop of revenge, so be it. And if that was true, we might as well try to kill

• 1:00:51Robert Evans?

  each other right then and there. In the darkness of the Caleb's Bridge at night, where we were both sitting, lying under things in a cramped space, I became intensely worried they could stand up faster. Consider the idea from World War I, mobilization is tantamount to a declaration of war. I stood up, still, silent, waiting. So you see, first off-

• 1:01:12Speaker 04

  And there's other people there as well.

• 1:01:14Robert Evans?

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

• 1:01:43Speaker 04

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

• 1:01:54Robert Evans?

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

• 1:02:04Speaker 04

  Ancestors guide me.

• 1:02:10Robert Evans?

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

• 1:02:34Speaker 04

  So then her man I must be-

• 1:02:35Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:02:36Speaker 04

  What she thinks it is.

• 1:02:37Robert Evans?

  Her man is strong, and this is a good idea for handling all conflicts, right? So I'm going to increasingly teach all these people who are listening to me, that this is the, like, escalation loop that you handle every conflict with, right? Great stuff.

• 1:02:52Robert Evans?

  One of the young people who got drawn to Ziz at this time was Maya Passick, who blogged under the name Squirrel in Hell. She wrote about mainstream rationalist stuff citing Gudkowski and Elon Musk. But in her blog, there's like a pattern of depressive thought. In one 2016 post, she mused about whether or not experiencing joy and awe might be bad because it biases your perception. So this is, this is a young person who I think is probably, is dealing with a lot of depressive issues.

• 1:03:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's classic, stinking thinking, as they say.

• 1:03:22Robert Evans?

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

• 1:03:33Speaker 04

  Is this a thing that can exist a lot of places? Like...

• 1:03:37Robert Evans?

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

• 1:03:43Speaker 04

  Right, fair.

• 1:03:44Robert Evans?

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

• 1:04:11Speaker 04

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

• 1:04:13Robert Evans?

  My true companion, Gwyn and I are taking a somewhat different than Miri, that's the organization, one of the rationalist organizations.

• 1:04:21Speaker 04

  Is that what they call each other? That's, that's how they refer to each other?

• 1:04:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they're true companions.

• 1:04:25Speaker 04

  True companions, okay.

• 1:04:26Robert Evans?

  At this point. "We're taking a somewhat a different approach than Miri, the Miri approach to saving the world. Without much specific technical disagreements, we are running on somewhat pointed to by the approach. As long as you expect the world to burn, then change course." Right? So basically, we still expect the world to burn, so we can't keep doing what the other rationalists are doing. And she lays out to this, this girl she meets through a blog post, "Her plan to find abnormally intrinsically good people and jailbreak them into Gervais sociopaths." She invites Maya to come out and it's, I don't think this happened, but they do start separately journeying. Into unbucketing and Maya gets really into this uni hemispheric sleep thing.

• 1:05:07Robert Evans?

  And Ziz is kind of like coaching her through the process. She tells Maya that one of her hemispheres is female because Maya is a trans woman and Ziz tells her, "One of your brain hemispheres, each of which is a separate person, is female, but the other is male and quote, "mostly dead." And your suicidal impulses are caused by both the pain of being trans and also the fact that there's this dead man living in your head that's like taking up half of your brain's space. And so you really need to de-bucket in order to have a chance of surviving, right?

• 1:05:39Speaker 04

  Okay, so she needs to be jailbroken to be free.

• 1:05:42Robert Evans?

  To be free. And Maya will basically replace her sleep entirely with this uni hemispheric sleep crap, which exacerbates, not sleeping, exacerbates your depressive swings and leads to deeper and deeper trowels of suicidal ideation. She is believed to have died by suicide in February of 2018. She posts a, what is essentially a suicide note that is very rationalist in its verbiage, literally titled "Decision Theory and Suicide."

• 1:06:10Robert Evans?

  And this is the first death directly related to Ziz and Gwyn's ideas. But I think it's important to note that like the role mainstream rationalism plays in all of this. Suicide is a common topic at Sefar events and people will argue constantly about whether or not like a low-value individual, it's better for them to kill themselves, right? Is that like of higher net value to the world?

• 1:06:33Robert Evans?

  And it was also used as like a threat to stop women who were abused by figures in the community from speaking up. And this is from that Bloomberg article. "One woman in the community who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals says she was sexually abused by a prominent AI researcher. After she confronted him, she says, she had job offers rescinded and conference speaking gigs canceled and was disinvited from AI events. She said others in the community told her allegations of misconduct harmed the advancement of AI safety. And one person suggested an agentic option would be to kill herself." So there is just within rationalism, this discussion of like, it can be agentic, as in like you are taking high agency for your, to kill yourself if you're, if you're net, if you're going to be a net harm to the cause of AI safety,

• 1:07:16Robert Evans?

  which you will be by reporting this AI researcher who molested you, right?

• 1:07:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, because you're taking them, man.

• 1:07:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. Shit.

• 1:07:28Robert Evans?

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

• 1:07:43Speaker 04

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

• 1:07:49Robert Evans?

  Again, and like Lenny Colt, part of the difficulty is like teaching yourself how to speak normally again, how to not talk about all this stuff, right?

• 1:07:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, not, not identify as a vegan Sith, but I can't work.

• 1:08:00Robert Evans?

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

• 1:08:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's so deep. It's so deep.

• 1:08:31Robert Evans?

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

• 1:08:39Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So I'm just gonna conclude this little story and then we'll end the episode for the day. So we, this person Maya has likely killed themselves at the start of 2018 and Ziz reacts to this suicide in her usual manner. She blogs about it. She took from what had happened, not that like de-bucketting might be dangerous and uni-hemispheric sleep might be dangerous, but that explaining hemispheric consciousness to people was an info hazard. She believed that people who were single good like Maya were at elevated risk because learning that one of the whole persons inside them was evil or mostly dead could create irreconcilable conflict leading to depression and suicide. And she, she comes up with a

• 1:09:23Robert Evans?

  name for this. She calls this Passix Doom. That's what she like names the info hazard that kills her friend who she's like fucking with their head. So that's nice.

• 1:09:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, as nice as anything else in this story is.

• 1:09:42Robert Evans?

  I think you might have been the doom here.

• 1:09:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think you were the whole problem. But now, but now it's an info hazard to explain.

• 1:09:52Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:09:53Speaker 04

  A person's like.

• 1:09:56Robert Evans?

  To explain your theories. Yeah.

• 1:09:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, to a person who can't handle it.

• 1:10:01Robert Evans?

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

• 1:10:27Speaker 04

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

• 1:10:30Robert Evans?

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

• 1:10:45Robert Evans?

  Yep. Good stuff.

• 1:10:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:47Robert Evans?

  Anyway, how are you feeling? Got to keep a plug?

• 1:10:51Speaker 04

  I am, I, I am okay. I'm, I'm, I, you know what? I'm deeply sad for these people who are so lost.

• 1:11:01Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:02Speaker 04

  And I'm also pretty interested because this is crazy, but I'm okay.

• 1:11:08Speaker 04

  I'll be all right.

• 1:11:09Robert Evans?

  Great.

• 1:11:11Robert Evans?

  Happy to, happy to, happy to, happy to see that. Well, everybody, this has been Behind the Bastards, a podcast about things that you maybe didn't think, maybe didn't need to know about how the internet breaks people's brains, but also a lot of people surprisingly close to this community are running the government now. So maybe you do need to know about it. Sorry about that info hazard.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

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• 1:12:09Robert Evans?

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• 1:12:33Speaker 07

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• 1:13:08Robert Evans?

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• 1:13:43Robert Evans?

  Auto Parts.

• 1:13:47Robert Evans?

  We're back. Oh my gosh, it's Behind the Bastards. A podcast where Robert Evans ruined his life by reading too many blogs by internet poisoned nerd rationalist people and I deeply regret everything I've done. How are you doing, David?

• 1:14:06Speaker 04

  I'm good. I am, I am concerned for you. This is a difficult place for you to spend a week.

• 1:14:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I've had an, this is an info hazard. They're not wrong to use that term, just not in the way they mean it.

• 1:14:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. This whole...

• 1:14:21Robert Evans?

  Like, I, I, I've half, I'm half committed to like selling my house, putting my goats into like a big trailer and traveling around the country, finding people who are going on online doom loops and like handing them a goat and just like, play with this goat for 20 minutes. Like, touch it, touch an animal, look into its weird little eyes. Get off of your phone.

• 1:14:41Speaker 04

  That's real. You need to go goat, do goat yoga.

• 1:14:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:46Robert Evans?

  Something has to be done.

• 1:14:48Speaker 04

  Oh my god, yeah. This is, it's so wild. It's so wild.

• 1:14:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Again, folks, if you want to immunize your stuff to this, a great way to do it is to just like have friends who don't live in a boat with you. Right?

• 1:15:04Speaker 05

  A very, very small boat.

• 1:15:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:08Speaker 05

  Barely a boat.

• 1:15:10Speaker 04

  Even a big boat.

• 1:15:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:11Speaker 05

  Let alone barely a boat.

• 1:15:13Robert Evans?

  And talk to like, you know, my neighbor's, my neighbor's like a Mexican dude who loves gardening and has had a completely different life than me and knows nothing of the internet. And I talk with him a couple of times a week and it's always one of the best things for me because I spend so much of the rest of my time with people like Garrison who are all like, poison their brains with the same things I've poisoned my brain with. Like, please go find people who don't know all of the weird internet things you do and spend more time with them.

• 1:15:43Speaker 05

  Aggressive on the people like Garrison.

• 1:15:46Robert Evans?

  Look, I love Garrison, but they also have started spending a lot of their time with people who aren't in the same weird internet doom circles that we are and it's been good for them. It's good for everyone.

• 1:15:57Speaker 04

  Truly.

• 1:15:58Robert Evans?

  Save yourselves. Save yourselves.

• 1:16:02Speaker 04

  It doesn't have to be like this.

• 1:16:08Robert Evans?

  So, when we left off, Ziz had kind of psychologically jailbroken her friend into suicide and then created an info hazard named after her friend.

• 1:16:18Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:16:19Robert Evans?

  Great stuff, healthy community. Now, a few things happened in quick succession after this point. The rationalists start to blame Passick suicide on Ziz, and this is really when a lot of folks in rationalist circles start breaking off and calling, like, saying, like, "Hey, this is what Ziz and Winna are doing, they've made like a cult, right?" And again, I don't think they're really off-base here, but also, they tend to ignore all of the suicides in the rationalist community, right?

• 1:16:45Speaker 04

  I was gonna say, they are in a cult.

• 1:16:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You know, it's more, because cult is, I think, like, you get, like, they're in a, there's a cultic milieu that rationalism forms, which is like the substrate, right? You know, if a cult is like a plant growing up from it, like, rationalism is this soil that is extremely optimized for growing cults. I think that might be closer, you know? Although, it's also one of those things where if you're just trying to explain a story, you could just say it's a cult. You could say it's this weird Bay Area cult about science and AI and shit. Like, that's probably close enough. Yeah. A few things happened in quick succession after this point. One is that a story broke later in 2018 confirming Ziz's suspicion that the rationalist community was rife with abuse.

• 1:17:32Robert Evans?

  Two people accused an influential rationalist who worked at Seafar, a guy named Brent Dill, of abuse while they were dating him. Both were 19, and he was close to 40. The allegations here remind me a little of the ones against Neil Gaiman. You've got a very powerful man accused of coercing much younger women into extreme BDSM situations and plying them with drugs. Obviously, none of this is, I don't think any of this has been litigated, so I will continue to refer to them as allegations. I don't know exactly what happened here, but this breaks, right? And it's a big deal within the community. Rumors spread that Seafar had kind of tried to, like, hush the whole mess down in order to protect this guy. They conducted an internal investigation. We all know, like, when the cops do an internal investigation, right?

• 1:18:17Robert Evans?

  That's always reliable.

• 1:18:19Speaker 04

  No, trust us to figure it out.

• 1:18:21Robert Evans?

  We'll police ourselves. That's rational.

• 1:18:26Robert Evans?

  This internal investigation exonerated Dill and included the line, "He is aligned with Sefar's goals and strategy and should be seen as an ally who embodies a rare kind of agency and a sense of heroic responsibility." There's those words again. Agency, heroic responsibility, dating a 19-year-old when you're 40 and giving her drugs.

• 1:18:48Robert Evans?

  Good stuff. People respond with outrage. Sefar eventually banned Dill from future events. They kind of cave. And Ziz would describe Dill later as a true negative. That's someone who both halves of their brain are evil.

• 1:19:02Speaker 04

  Double bad.

• 1:19:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, double bad. Now, at this point, she still thought Yedkowski and some other Sefar leaders might be double good, but she's really not sure about it. And she's especially not sure because none of them embrace this terminology.

• 1:19:15Speaker 04

  I was gonna say, at this point, has Yedkowski, is he like, are they on good terms? Is he still acknowledging?

• 1:19:22Robert Evans?

  No. I don't think she's ever on close terms with Yedkowski. She is speaking and communicating directly with Anna Salomon, who is like one of Yedkowski's top people quite a lot. I don't think she's super close to Yedkowski. Like, I'm sure they're at the same events and stuff several times. She definitely sees him speak. She definitely talks with him. But like, I don't think that they would ever have been close, right?

• 1:19:45Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:19:46Robert Evans?

  She does try to force a conversation with Anna Salomon outside of Sefar HQ about this and other discoveries she and Gwyn had made on their boats. And Ziz writes in the blog post about it that she felt it was going pretty good and Anna was listening to her. There are context clues that I don't think Ziz picks up on that like, oh no, Anna immediately felt uncomfortable and like you were assaulting her, like coming up to her and just like kind of barraging her with all of this nonsense. And she did not want to have this conversation. And she kind of pretended to be, agree with you in order to end this because she's not sure if you're dangerous, which, to be fair, you are.

• 1:20:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:26Robert Evans?

  Soon later, at a Sefar board meeting, Anna recommended that Ziz be disinvited. From joint Meery Seafar events and both of these are separate organizations. But basically that like the the membership overlaps or like a circle, right? Her reasoning for not wanting Ziz at events is that Ziz wore, quote, "black clothes, took supervillains as role models and came up with dangerous plans."

• 1:20:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah. More or less correct.

• 1:20:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, pretty much. I forgot that she was also wearing black robes.

• 1:20:53Robert Evans?

  She's also started dressing like a wizard, yes.

• 1:21:00Robert Evans?

  Speaking of dangerous plans, the rationalist fleet or rat fleet was falling apart by this point. Coast Guard and San Mateo Harbor District authorities had issued numerous warnings over the danger of this tugboat leaking poison into the bay. On several occasion, the Caleb nearly hit other ships while drifting, like the anchor gets fucked up. I don't know that they, they probably don't know how to use it because like they're.

• 1:21:22Speaker 04

  The Navy got, he let, is he still involved?

• 1:21:24Robert Evans?

  He's gone. He isn't, but he's bounced. He had at least the judgment to cut his losses.

• 1:21:29Speaker 04

  So they don't even know how to work boats particularly?

• 1:21:32Robert Evans?

  They do. Gwyn is, I think Gwyn's actually reasonably competent with a sailboat.

• 1:21:35Speaker 04

  Okay, because Gwyn had the sailboat.

• 1:21:37Robert Evans?

  Right. And she, and Ziz gets trained up and these are both smart enough people that I suspect they're competent with a sailboat, but like a 24 foot sailboat and a 94 foot tugboat, very different. That's like, I'm good with driving my Prius. Give me that fucking 18 wheeler with two, with two fucking storage containers on the back, shipping containers on the back. I could, I could probably back that thing into a parking space, no problem.

• 1:22:03Robert Evans?

  They're just different, you know?

• 1:22:05Speaker 04

  Damn, damn, damn.

• 1:22:07Robert Evans?

  Right. And what's very funny, these accounts of like boat cops getting on the Caleb and talking to Zizians, they're like, these people must be sovereign citizens, which is like a totally different kind of thing. And to me, I'm like, they don't sound at all like, but to them it like this mix, because it's this mix of anarchist theory, right? Because these people are anarchists. So they're telling these cops why they don't think the cops have any authority, but they're also like insulting them with these like logical arguments based on obscure rationalist doctrines and these cops are.

• 1:22:36Speaker 04

  Heavy jargon.

• 1:22:37Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:22:38Speaker 04

  Heavy, heavy jargon.

• 1:22:40Robert Evans?

  These cops are just like, okay, so we got some sovereign, some sob sits here. All right. They're out of boat.

• 1:22:46Speaker 04

  It's a 284. Now we know what to do.

• 1:22:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And again, this is like the Bay Area. I think cops in the Bay Area are a little, especially since they're all white, more used to dealing with like, people who are clearly like eccentric, right? Then maybe like if this had happened in another city. So nothing, there's not really a conflict yet. The cops are just being like, hey, guys, you're this. But to be fair, the boat is leaking diesel into the bay. Like, see it as a problem, right?

• 1:23:13Speaker 04

  That's a net negative.

• 1:23:16Robert Evans?

  In 2019, another scandal hits the rationalist community. The story broke that a former employee had blackmailed the company over a dispute and used donor funds to pay. This got stacked on top of the scandal that Dill had just created. And as Iz and many of her comrades saw it, the issue was not whether this employee had been mistreated, but that Miri hadn't made the proper timeless decisions to ensure they couldn't be blackmailed. Per an article for the Rolling Stone, quote, "In their view, this not only represented bad decision theory, but called the organization's entire existence into question." In other words, it's not whatever happened with this employee. It's that you didn't make the timeless decisions to make it so that anyone would be scared to try to blackmail you because they'd know that your response was so, would be so intense.

• 1:23:59Robert Evans?

  That proves you don't have what it takes to really save the world because you're not ruthless enough to just jump to killing people like us.

• 1:24:05Speaker 04

  You're not a psychopath.

• 1:24:06Robert Evans?

  You're not fucking psychopath, right?

• 1:24:08Speaker 04

  We need psychopaths.

• 1:24:09Robert Evans?

  Which is good.

• 1:24:10Speaker 04

  To save the world.

• 1:24:11Robert Evans?

  We love psychopaths.

• 1:24:13Speaker 04

  We're all, we aspire to it.

• 1:24:15Robert Evans?

  And one of the big problems within the rationalist community is people talk about different mental health conditions as if they're like tools in a toolbox. Like you could go into a psychopathic mode and that's really good for accomplishing these things. So you could, you could go ADHD, you can make yourself autistic in this, they talk this way, right? I'm not saying this is, this is not how anything works. They're not comparing autism and psychopathy. I'm just saying this is how they talk, right?

• 1:24:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, they go sicko mode and then save the world.

• 1:24:42Robert Evans?

  Right. And I was like, no, that's, that's not, none of this is accurate to like the way brains are. Like, that's just not how anything.

• 1:24:50Speaker 04

  You can't just be like, I'm gonna turn off my autism today. I got some shit to do.

• 1:24:53Robert Evans?

  No, that's not how it works. And some of this is downstream from how I think online discourse has damaged the discussion of mental health because people sometimes do talk about it like Pokémon, you know?

• 1:25:05Speaker 04

  Very much so.

• 1:25:05Robert Evans?

  Like, I think there's some issues there that do... Anyway, and a lot of this is, yeah, it's just... This soup is not exclusive to Ziz. So, Ziz is banned now from Miri Seafar events, and her whole crew is increasingly radicalized against the organizations. They have also, you know, it's both where like Seafar has good reason to not want Ziz around, but also all of Ziz... Most of Ziz's complaints about rationalists like Seafar and Miri are very valid, right? Like...

• 1:25:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You're both right about each other. It's like how Elon Musk and Peter Thiel would shit-talk each other. It's like, you both do have each other's number, yes!

• 1:25:46Speaker 04

  No, everybody's got a point. Everybody's got a point.

• 1:25:49Robert Evans?

  I just kind of wish you would all go away.

• 1:25:55Robert Evans?

  In November of 2019, Seafar held their annual alumni reunion out in a chunk of the California redwoods down the street from the Bohemian Grove. The road that passes is literally the Bohemian Highway, right? This is like, for an idea of how much money there is in mainstream rationalism, right? They are having their big party next to Bohemian Grove. Ziz had sent an open letter, and like a letter to Yankowski a few days earlier, urging members of both organizations to quit in the interest of saving the world, basically saying, "These groups are so compromised, they can no longer, like, add effectively to the things we're trying to do to our important work. So you should all leave," and kind of the subtext is, "And do what me and Gwyn are doing," you know?

• 1:26:37Speaker 04

  Start a cult.

• 1:26:38Robert Evans?

  So, on the day of this event, Ziz, Gwyn, and two others in their circle drive up to this, like, this location out in the woods with a box truck, a shuttle bus, and a Prius, and they block the entrances and exits of the venue with their vehicles. And they jump out wearing black robes, Guy Fawkes masks, and black gloves. This is not a violent protest. I have, there's no evidence that they intended violence. They had walkie talkies. One person had a can of mace, but like, you know, people carry mace. That's not suspicious. And all they're trying to do is distribute flyers, lying out their case against Seafar and Miri, but they have blocked the entrances and exits. And they talk like Sith wizards, right? So everything they say sounds cryptic and kind of threatening.

• 1:27:23Robert Evans?

  And they're wearing black robes. And they're wearing, and Guy Fawkes masks. The police get called immediately. And as best as I can tell, it does, maybe I'm wrong. It seems like the Seafar Miri people like knew, because they, there's like sent out an email saying, hey, maybe don't come. Or like, if you do, just like be note that these weird people are here. But the venue owner, like the people running the venue, call the cops is what it seems like happens. There are different allegations here. I don't precisely know, but for whatever, whatever the case, two false pieces of information are given to the cops when they get called. They, they are told, the cops are told, one person has a gun and another person has an axe, right? So, and I think it's people who worked at the venue who make these allegations.

• 1:28:06Robert Evans?

  It was definitely an employee at the venue who alleged that he saw an axe. A county sheriff who responded, or sorry, it was a person at the venue who picked up an axe and someone saw them and reported that to the police too, right? Because he was scared of these people. A county sheriff, sheriff's deputy responds and immediately calls for major backup because he's told someone has a gun. And, you know, as a cop with just kind of like a pop culture knowledge, you hear like a bunch of people in robes and masks with a gun outside of this big event where like there's children doing a robes course next door. Like his thought is there's a mass shooting brewing, right? Some people are going to do something fucked up, right? Right. So he calls for a massive like SWAT response, basically, you know, compared

• 1:28:51Robert Evans?

  to the actual danger these people present, which is right now nil. The author of that Wired piece spoke to the sheriff's deputy who responded initially, a guy named Parks, and this is that account, quote, "In Parks's account, which he relayed to me in the fall of 2023 at a local Starbucks, the protesters were speaking in unison. Just stuff I didn't really understand, but it..." It was somewhat rehearsed, he said. The group had printed flyers outlining their complaints against Sefar and Miri. They alleged that Miri had paid out blackmail using donor funds to quash sexual misconduct allegations, and that Sefar's leader discriminates against trans women. Other allegations were more esoteric. "Sefar does not appreciably develop novel rationality mental tech."

• 1:29:30Robert Evans?

  "The path to avoiding extinction," they wrote, "involved escaping containment by society through mental autonomy and interhemispheric game theory." So... Some ra-

• 1:29:43Robert Evans?

  Some random sheriff's deputy is not going to understand what's going on here.

• 1:29:49Speaker 04

  What the fuck are you talking about?

• 1:29:51Robert Evans?

  He and his men default to the thing that cops do when they get confused, which is they get violent, right? Quote, "He and Rix ordered the protesters to get on the ground. As they did, each one called out demanding a same-gender pat-down, like one might request at an airport. All three were trans women, but Parks says he couldn't discern their genders because of the robes and masks. Regardless, they were not going to get that luxury at that time, he told me. It's like, well, we don't know if you're a boy or a girl, and we gotta handcuff you." Parks's deputies subdued the three in prone positions, what Parks calls a "high-risk-style takedown," requiring more force than a normal handcuffing style.

• 1:30:27Robert Evans?

  So, there's a- several articles I've read will refer to a discrepancy between how the Zizians and the cops describe these events. I've read both accounts. I really don't see a gap. What I see is the cops describing their violent and dehumanizing behavior as like, this is the normal way to respond, and the Zizians describing it as dehumanizing and traumatizing. The only question here is like, the moral quality you give to the cops tackling a bunch of people, basically, who don't have weapons because they got a phone call, right? Which like, if you're a cop, you're like, well, this is the only way to act. And if you're, I think, most people, like, you're like, well, probably could have just talked this situation down. I don't see where an arrest would, like, yeah. Gwyn later writes this about the experience. "When we arrived, a staff member called the police and falsely told them we had a gun and that we were going into buildings,

• 1:31:12Robert Evans?

  and that we were too afraid to get off the- they were too afraid to get off the phone. Later reports said there was an active shooter with a duffel bag. None of us had a duffel bag." Police arrived- With their guns out and we were immediately arrested within about 10 minutes of us arriving. After which we were sexually assaulted. In my case, I was groped and I had my pants pulled down and then sat on by an officer in a mounting position. They are mocked and derided, like as they're naked, cops are making comments about their bodies. It's like a really ugly situation, right? And I have no trouble believing that this is true because it comports with dozens of arrest stories I've heard in multiple states.

• 1:31:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's par for the course.

• 1:31:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and it's also the fact that they are specifically, the police are making fun of them for being trans is very much in line with what statistics say about trans people and police violence. A 2013 report from the Anti-Violence Project found that trans individuals are seven times likelier to experience violence while interacting with the police than cisgender people. So I have no trouble believing Gwyn's accounts here, even though, again, I treat her with proper scrutiny in most areas. This all seems like what cops do. Now, the other big discrepancy, where the Zizians are, I think, a little off base, is that they claim they are immediately deadnamed and misgendered by the newspapers covering their initial arrests. And they are deadnamed, but the newspapers don't really have an option here.

• 1:32:33Speaker 04

  Right, it's like their legal names.

• 1:32:34Robert Evans?

  Right, they don't talk when they're arrested, right? Which is a very normal thing for like a protest. They say absolutely nothing and they have no ID on them. So the police fingerprint them, which brings up their legal names, and that's what's given to the newspapers. So like the initial news articles, that's just the only name available, but it escalates this situation, right? And it is worth noting that a number of outlets do continue to deadname them up to the present. But that initial reporting, it's like, well, that's just the only information that was available. But all of this is going to like, this court case is going to, where on? They get charged initially with felonies. Bail is set at like 50 grand for Ziz and Gwyn. This is eventually reduced and they're reduced to misdemeanors.

• 1:33:18Robert Evans?

  But it takes like four days for them to make bail and they will be fighting because they're going to countersue over these arrests. And both the trauma of the arrests, their anger over them, and the fact that there's the stress of this years-long court battle is going to have this extremely deleterious effect on everybody's mental health when they're already not doing well.

• 1:33:38Robert Evans?

  Right, it's great stuff.

• 1:33:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:33:42Robert Evans?

  Right around this time, the Zizians moved, they stopped doing their fleet thing, right? They move out of the boats and they, they kind of end things by leaving their tugboat adrift because there's nothing to do with a 94 foot tugboat. Nobody can handle a tugboat, right? Like it's too big to do much with. And they, they probably could have figured something out, but they decide the opportunity cost of figuring out how to dispose of this boat is it will, it will distract from their important work. So it's okay for it to sink and cause like a modest environmental crisis by leaking diesel into the bay. Basically, Ziz decides that the value of all the sea life that it kills is less than the value of them continuing their work. Which at this point, if you're keeping track, is trying to figure out how to live out of box trucks.

• 1:34:28Robert Evans?

  So that's what they're doing now. And this is where a guy named Curtis Lind.

• 1:34:33Speaker 04

  They got a worse living space?

• 1:34:35Robert Evans?

  They've got a worse living space. They made it worse than boats. Oh, boy. I can't tell you how much of this story is just the result of Bay Area rent prices being unreasonable.

• 1:34:49Speaker 04

  It's really a real estate story.

• 1:34:51Robert Evans?

  It's a real, just like Superman one.

• 1:34:56Robert Evans?

  So, enter Curtis Lind. Lind is a guy, he was like a, he'd made his career doing shipping. He lived in a boat in and around where Ziz and her friends were living at sea and they met each other through that. He like sells them an anchor, but he's also like pushing 80. And so he's got, he's interested in like getting out of the boat life because it sucks. And he's got a plot of land that he, he's, he's got a house on and he's got extra space that he's interested in renting out. There's not like most, there's not like full houses, but there's like some shipping containers and I think like some RV, busted RV or whatever. And he's got like some power and water hookups. Here's how his son Carl described what his father wanted to do with this place. He just wanted this as a place to let artists or woodworkers, electricians to be able to

• 1:35:39Robert Evans?

  come and live in a little trailer and have a container where they could work and put their tools and have a safe place. So again, depending on how you're looking, he's either trying to like have a cheap space where like, you know, artists and the like can afford to like survive and have little working spaces, or he's trying to be like a punk slumlord, right?

• 1:35:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I mean, the line is thin, right?

• 1:35:59Robert Evans?

  The line is thin, right?

• 1:36:01Speaker 04

  The line is so thin.

• 1:36:03Robert Evans?

  Speaking of a thin line, the sponsors of this podcast are the Thin Line, keeping society safe from me not having enough money to live in a boat, you know? This is why I have enough money to live in a boat, where I would go crazy.

• 1:36:24Speaker 04

  Or a box truck.

• 1:36:25Robert Evans?

  Or a box truck. Ah, to live in a box truck. The joy.

• 1:36:30Speaker 04

  The glory days.

• 1:36:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we're back.

• 1:36:32Speaker 04

  In a box truck.

• 1:36:33Robert Evans?

  We're talking about how good it is to live in a box truck.

• 1:36:39Robert Evans?

  Ah, good stuff.

• 1:36:41Speaker 04

  Do we know roughly how big the group is at this point?

• 1:36:44Robert Evans?

  I think at any given time, there's between like six and nine people, you know?

• 1:36:47Speaker 04

  Okay, okay, so very small, very small.

• 1:36:49Robert Evans?

  Very small, somewhere in that neighborhood, it fluctuates. And there's also, there's a bunch of people who are like, you could call them Zizians, they're in and out, they'll visit sometimes, you know, or they even live in other states, but they're always in contact with multiple members of the group through the internet. This is a very like geographically decentralized group, although there is that like core inner circle who are all together on this land. And for a while, things are okay there. The Zizians pay rent. Ziz continues to write blog posts and run her followers through uni-hemispheric sleep sessions to upgrade them. And, you know, again, it's also important for me to note, they don't ever call themselves Zizians. That name first comes up around this period of time, right after that disastrous protest,

• 1:37:32Robert Evans?

  when an anonymous rationalist publishes a paper called like zizians.info that first identifies them as a cult and describes like their uni-hemispheric sleep tactics. And it's written because this person is in the community and wants to stop other people from falling in with Ziz. And I think they have good intentions here, they like see the danger. They also, one of the issues with the document is I don't think they see some of the danger of other rationalist stuff.

• 1:37:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, right.

• 1:38:00Robert Evans?

  This is like, why I say that it's like a cultic substrate rather than being a pure cult, because there are people in it who can recognize stuff like this and try to, you know, provide a degree of like accountability. Just like there are people who will like, report on and they held, they hold Seafar speak to the fire when people get accused of abuse. So the document alleges that Ziz had started telling her followers, she was the, basically, she's the only double good or intrinsically good person there, and one of the only intrinsically good people on the planet. UHS sessions tended to reveal that other people in the community are just single good. And per Ziz's theories about the hero contract, they can only accomplish maximum good by feeding their energy and resources to the hero Ziz.

• 1:38:42Robert Evans?

  Here's an example of the kind of things she sent people she saw as single good. Saying you're single good is saying, "Help, I have a yerk in my head." Did you ever read Animorphs as a book, David?

• 1:38:51Speaker 04

  Wow, yes.

• 1:38:52Robert Evans?

  As a kid?

• 1:38:53Speaker 04

  They were great.

• 1:38:54Robert Evans?

  That's what that's a reference to, is those worms that control your brain and that's another fiction.

• 1:38:58Speaker 04

  Oh my god!

• 1:38:59Robert Evans?

  Right, yeah, yeah. That's, yes. I know, deep cut, deep cut!

• 1:39:03Speaker 04

  Whoa, that unlocked a part of my brain that I have not used in for...

• 1:39:07Robert Evans?

  Right, right. A bunch of people are now like, having like, the severance moment, but like, remembering every scholastic book fair they ever went to as a kid?

• 1:39:15Speaker 04

  Oh man. Oh man, all they gotta do is hit goosebumps and they...

• 1:39:20Robert Evans?

  I know, I know, oh, if only. So, saying you're single good is saying, "Help, I have a yerk in my head that's a mere image of me. I need you to surgically destroy it, even if I'm then crippled for life or might die in the process. Then kill me if I ever do one evil act for the rest of my life. That's better than being a slave." Again, that's her role, is surgically destroying the evil brains of her, half-brains of her followers, and then she has to be willing to murder them if they ever do anything bad. Because if they ever do anything bad, then it means that the evil side could take over and it could do like, mega bad.

• 1:39:55Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:39:56Robert Evans?

  And doom the world, right?

• 1:39:57Speaker 04

  So she, and she takes this on herself?

• 1:39:59Robert Evans?

  Yes, and also, I mean, she's gotta have other people do the killing, basically. But like, yes, this is what she's saying is the stakes and this is how she sees her role within the community, right? And I think at this point, that's pretty cult leader. That's pretty cult leader.

• 1:40:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think you crossed over.

• 1:40:14Robert Evans?

  I think we've probably crossed that KT boundary, right?

• 1:40:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Box trucks, saying you gotta kill some people?

• 1:40:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, saying you gotta murder people, because they're the devil, the yerk inside their brain, yeah. Might be a little bit of cult weather. Feels like a cult outside.

• 1:40:33Robert Evans?

  So, some Zizians, not implicated in any crimes, have attacked this piece, this zizians.info thing, as being inaccurate and basically a rationalist hit job. And again, there's some reason for suspicion here, but most of the claims made in it, I have backed up through reading the individual, like, sources. One of the issues is that a lot, a lot of people writing about this will credit Ziz with all of the unihemispheric stuff, and that's mostly Gwyn. So, there's a point worth making. Around this time, a woman named Jamie Zajko started living nearby with her girlfriend Alice Monday. Both are rationalists that are interested in Ziz's ideas. Alice and Ziz have been in contact for years. And in fact, Alice, because she's an older, more established rationalist, when Ziz was kind of new to the community,

• 1:41:17Robert Evans?

  had sent Ziz an article on the Gervais Principle for the first time, which had spawned her ideas about needing to jailbreak people into psychopathy. And at varying times, Ziz would claim Alice as a mentor. There are some, I don't, like, very vague accounts that Alice has done some problematic abusive stuff in the community. I don't know what trini that is, but this is what people talk about, and I think Ziz may have had a break with her over some sort of disagreement. Because it, it seems like, from what I can tell, Jamie, who is dating Alice at the time, is in direct contact with Ziz and interested in her, but also is not communicating with Ziz under her real name. She is making a bunch of sock puppet accounts on her blog, and she is specifically commenting and trying to engage

• 1:42:02Robert Evans?

  Ziz in different conversations, pretending to be multiple different people, to quote-unquote "sabotage" the hold she believed another woman in the community, Emma Borhanian, had on Ziz. And Borhanian is that former Google engineer.

• 1:42:16Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:42:17Robert Evans?

  So, this is, you know, this is part of the messy thing, is that, like, these people are all influencing each other and trying to, like, their kind of go-to is, like, mind games, to fuck with each other's heads.

• 1:42:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, not a lot of straight conversation, huh?

• 1:42:32Robert Evans?

  No. Now, Emma Borhanian, who Jamie alleges has like-

• 1:42:36Speaker 04

  Jamie's girlfriend.

• 1:42:38Robert Evans?

  No, Jamie's dating Alice Monday.

• 1:42:41Speaker 04

  Oh, I'm sorry.

• 1:42:41Robert Evans?

  Borhanian is this former Google engineer who's been with Ziz since the Rationalist Fleet days. And Jamie thinks that she's controlling Ziz and she has like this bad influence that's leading them in a bad direction. And I've read Borhanian's blog too, because of course I had to. Emma is, she was as long-winded as Ziz, fewer pop culture references. She wrote a lot about narcissism. But unlike most of these people, she tended to like use a, or she's like, I don't know. I don't understand the kind of point she's trying to make about narcissists, but she's very interested in the idea of like how narcissists work.

• 1:43:18Robert Evans?

  Jamie didn't like Emma and she claims that because Emma and another member of the community had started shit talking Alice to Ziz and convinced her that Alice was double evil. So Jamie creates all these sock puppet accounts to argue with Ziz with the goal of fucking with her head and making her distrust Emma. Quote, "I adopted a variety of different personas, many of whom claim to have beliefs I've never held or endorsed for the sake of determining how Ziz would react to these characters." So this isn't-

• 1:43:44Speaker 04

  And then what?

• 1:43:45Robert Evans?

  And then what? Yes, exactly. There's never seems to be a plan behind fuck with each other's mental health constantly. It's like, this is, because there are always, there's all these overlapping fields of influence between all of these mostly women and everyone is fucking with each other's heads deliberately. And also constantly trying to hack and upgrade each other is basically Scientology in the form of a codependent friend group. Right? Like, that's what, that's what's happening here.

• 1:44:12Robert Evans?

  This is so bad for everybody.

• 1:44:14Speaker 04

  It's, oh man, it just, they just dig deeper and deeper and deeper.

• 1:44:18Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. That's what happens. Again, if you don't, this is the, you know, the touch grasp has been turned online. People have some, as you said, some problematic ways of discussing it. But this is the importance of like turning out from your weird little subculture every now and again and like-

• 1:44:33Speaker 04

  Yes, definitely. Because at this point, how often are they interacting with the world, like in general?

• 1:44:42Robert Evans?

  Very rarely. And most of the people they do interact with are like these other people who are kind of on the edge of dropping out of society, living on this guy's property? This 80-year-old man's property and like box trucks? Yeah.

• 1:44:55Speaker 04

  Who wants to?

• 1:44:56Robert Evans?

  Those are their normies. Yeah.

• 1:45:00Robert Evans?

  So while Jamie and Ziz are fighting online, COVID hit. And with it comes that eviction moratorium in the state of California. So Ziz and, and her friends, they stopped paying rent to, to, to Lind, either because they're broke or just because they don't need to anymore. And more than a year goes by. Uh, in April of 2021, Ziz posts this to her blog. Housing in places like the Bay Area is a hierarchy of rent seekers. And the rent seekers above landlords rule by rule surplus, selective enforcement, fear, uncertainty and doubt, corruption. It's all a complex and it makes landlords incredibly vulnerable to blackmail from someone who can do even a little bit of investigative work. It's bad praxis to pay them rent. So again,

• 1:45:41Speaker 04

  I get it.

• 1:45:42Robert Evans?

  I get it. But this is also going to lead you to a bad place.

• 1:45:46Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:45:47Robert Evans?

  This is where we get to divergent stories. Curtis Lind, the landlord's story is that he was very supportive of these people and of trans people in general, taking one Zizian out to shop for her first bra. His friends and family say he was a decent guy. And I actually, when I started talking about writing these episodes on Blue Sky, someone chimed in to say they had known him too, and that he was a nice person. I don't know. To Ziz, he was a landlord and there are claims from the Zizians that he was verbally abusive and transphobic. Uh, by the end of 2021, after a year and a half of unpaid rent, Lind had started working on the process of having police evict them. He and other residents claimed that the Zizians had become aggressive, acting as if the property was theirs now, threatening other people, basically squatting on it and like being violent at times,

• 1:46:32Robert Evans?

  including like throwing rocks at Lind's cabin and brandishing knives at other people. So there are allegations. Yeah, yeah, they have taken to like threateningly playing with knives while talking about how they will not leave the property or pay rent. Um, and you get the feeling like, I, I'm not, again, I'm not, I'm not against the idea that this, again, ambitious slumlord may have done some problematic things, but it sounds like the Zizians are being pretty deeply abusive to everyone around them.

• 1:47:00Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 1:47:01Robert Evans?

  Which is also, they believe is praxis. Is like these other people who are not, who don't, who aren't double good and who aren't aware of the great work, they're not working towards the cause. They're a causal is the term they're use. Their lives don't really have value. If you're not working for the cause, Ziz earlier will decide-

• 1:47:18Speaker 04

  It's not like they're doing outreach, right? It's not like they're trying to convert their neighbors or anything like that.

• 1:47:23Robert Evans?

  They're trying to convert rationalists, but they don't care about these weirdos living on the property with them, right?

• 1:47:28Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:47:29Robert Evans?

  And again, remember, like Ziz had earlier decided that it would be worth four human lives for her to like get a, she would kill four people to get a shower before work, right? Basically-

• 1:47:39Speaker 04

  Oh, with the ants, yes.

• 1:47:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So these people don't have a lot of value for other people, right? Now, the court case over the protest arrests dragged on, and in November of 2021, Ziz and her friends who'd been arrested filed a countersuit against Sonoma County, as well as several individuals associated with Seafar and the venue. By the time 2022 starts, the pressure is on for Ziz and the people living with her to figure out what they're going to do next. They do at some point work out a deal with Curtis, who'll give them a little more time to fix their RV if they promise to bounce as soon as possible. Ziz is no longer actively adding to her blog, but she's still responding to comments and communicating with other sympathetic rationalists regularly. She becomes much more focused in her writing in this period on vengeance, violence, and death, as do others in her community.

• 1:48:25Robert Evans?

  Per Wired, quote, "Lasoda and others wrote of vengeance against the timeless decisions of others. If you truly irreconcilably disagree with someone's creative choice, i.e. their choice extending arbitrarily far into the past and future, ultimately your only recourse is to kill them," one Lasoda ally wrote in a long blog post citing Ziz's philosophies. In the comments, Lasoda wrote, "I am so fucking glad to finally have an equal." Great stuff.

• 1:48:54Robert Evans?

  In spring of 2021, one of the rationalist fleet veterans close to Ziz, Jay Winterford, who went by the name Fluttershy, killed themselves. They had, Winterford had written about seeing Ziz's techniques as a way to deal with his childhood trauma, and Lasota wrote on her blog about her repeated attempts to fix and upgrade him. Now, Ziz wrote about this, this person and calls him a death knight. And as best as I can tell, a death knight is a Zizian term for someone who snaps and murders a bunch of people. She calls Hitler a death knight, but she also uses the term for mass shooters. And she claims Winterford, quote, "tried very hard to convince me and then us to join them in service of the goddess of rape and death. Straight up declared intentions to kill us, did a bunch of horrible shit, like said they

• 1:49:39Robert Evans?

  were going to do even more horrible shit. I spent about seven months, most of every day, in a desperate and mutual mental battle, trying to get in their head, somehow understand this death drive thing I couldn't simulate in my own mind that made no sense, and outpredict them like all their lives in the world depended on it." And basically, this person's talking about doing like a mass shooting or some other terrorist attack against the rationalist community in Ziz's name. And Ziz claims that she's like, spent seven months trying to stop them from doing this. And then finally, they just kill themselves rather than killing anybody else. And again, they frame, Ziz frames this like their heroic battle to stop this person from murdering other people and damaging the cause. But like, I don't know, maybe, maybe like, this person needed professional help when

• 1:50:22Robert Evans?

  they started talking about wanting to do a mass killing. 100%. When it's wanting to murder a bunch of people, maybe they needed help? Like, not your help? I don't know if anyone needs Ziz's help. No, no, Ziz does not even need Ziz's help. No. And she weaves this person's death into this very, this messianic hero's journey for herself, posting this in the summer of 2022. "Since posting this, I have been tortured, survived seven assassination attempts, three more attempts to do me permanent bodily harm, four people individually decided they had the sole rights to be my death love arch-nemesis, as if they'd be alone, accidentally exposed myself to one one-hundredth of my hell, and one committed suicide, others utterly mentally cracked." No one knows what she's talking about with these assassination attempts or anything. This is all just...

• 1:51:07Robert Evans?

  Someone may have given her a mean look at a grocery store, and she decided, right? Like, that's the mindset she's in. And she spins out, yeah. Yeah. Uh, rationalists who had declared Ziz a cult leader considered all of this further evidence that she was dangerous. Um, again, rationalists also convince people to kill themselves to be illogic traps, but like, they're, they're not wrong to point this out. Now, I brought up Jamie Zascho and Alice Monday a little earlier. Um, they had moved out of the Bay in late 2020 and headed to Vermont, where Jamie, who had some family money, bought land and a gun. Uh, in February of 2022, she made a blog post with the subtitle, "I trolled Ziz and now she wants to murder me." In it, she claims, she talks about how like, yeah, she made all these fake accounts and

• 1:51:52Robert Evans?

  in late 2021, she and Ziz finally start talking under their real names. And Ziz talks about these trolling messages from the fake accounts Jamie had made and like said that they really fucked with her head. And so Jamie, who's starting to view Ziz as a friend, comes out and admits what she did. And Ziz responds by saying, "The only way you can make this right is to murder your, like, girlfriend, ex-girlfriend, it's a little unclear, Alice Monday, my old mentor. Like, you have to kill this person for me in order to make this right." Um, here's what Jamie writes. "During her last phone call, Ziz informed me that the only way I could gain her trust and make up for what I did was to murder Alice, preferably sometime soon. Ziz helpfully suggested I use a gun with a potato as a makeshift suppressor, and that I might destroy the body with lye.

• 1:52:37Robert Evans?

  And then told me that after I should video call Ziz and show her the body before I destroy it, so she could get proof positive that I'd really done it. And if I didn't do it, Ziz planned to drive across the entire, entire continental United States to murder me." Great.

• 1:52:53Speaker 04

  The die is cast.

• 1:52:54Robert Evans?

  The die is cast. Now-

• 1:52:56Speaker 04

  Shit.

• 1:52:57Robert Evans?

  Jamie says that Ziz wants Alice dead because she thinks Alice is a mentor and she's got this whole Sith thing going on. So she's like, guess what? The Sith always kill their mentors, so I have to kill Alice or I can't get powerful enough to save the world.

• 1:53:13Robert Evans?

  Great.

• 1:53:14Speaker 04

  It's crazy.

• 1:53:15Robert Evans?

  I love philosophy.

• 1:53:16Speaker 04

  A story that has escalated so crazy. It is wild to hear it where it's like, okay, this is where this is where it starts, the wheels start to really fall off.

• 1:53:25Robert Evans?

  This is where that border patrol officer's death becomes inevitable.

• 1:53:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Cause now you feel like this has backed herself into a corner where someone's going to die.

• 1:53:34Robert Evans?

  Yes, someone like.

• 1:53:35Speaker 04

  Talking about it, you're threatening it. Seriously, you're telling it like at this point, right? Is someone, this is gonna happen.

• 1:53:42Robert Evans?

  At this point, if no outside power comes in to disrupt these thought chains and decision chains, someone is going to die and no one does come in, right? And several people die.

• 1:53:54Speaker 04

  I mean, how could it, someone rationally even, how could you?

• 1:53:58Robert Evans?

  How could you?

• 1:53:58Speaker 04

  I could say in rational, how could, how could someone even get there?

• 1:54:01Robert Evans?

  Cause you think about like.

• 1:54:02Speaker 04

  It's so insular.

• 1:54:03Robert Evans?

  You think about something like 5150, this, this Fluttershy person, right? Or 5050s, does that make it better? Probably not, probably just makes them even more paranoid and angry and convinced to do violence that you like.

• 1:54:17Speaker 04

  11th assassination attempt or whatever, yeah.

• 1:54:20Robert Evans?

  I, I don't know how you fix this at this point.

• 1:54:23Speaker 04

  No, no, it's, it's, it's, it might be, I think it might be too far gone.

• 1:54:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's, there's, I'm sure there's some possible way that this could have been fixed, but it's not clear to me.

• 1:54:34Speaker 04

  And who, who would be the person?

• 1:54:36Robert Evans?

  Who does it? Right.

• 1:54:37Speaker 04

  Who would be the person to do it?

• 1:54:38Robert Evans?

  Maybe get George Lucas in there, George.

• 1:54:40Speaker 04

  Yes, oh my God, that's so.

• 1:54:43Robert Evans?

  Some ladies have taken your movies way too seriously. We need you to fly out and talk them out of committing murders.

• 1:54:50Speaker 04

  This is gonna sound crazy. There's a bunch of people in a box truck wanting to kill in your name.

• 1:54:55Robert Evans?

  Or Ricky Gervais. Yeah, Ricky Gervais, get Ricky Gervais and George Lucas on a fucking chopper. Get him in here on a Blackhawk, they gotta talk these people down.

• 1:55:06Speaker 04

  Oh shit.

• 1:55:08Robert Evans?

  Oh fuck.

• 1:55:12Robert Evans?

  Oh man, it's so funny. Just a week later, George Lucas is completely in the cult. He's wearing all black, he's living in a box truck. Oh no, oh no.

• 1:55:25Robert Evans?

  So.

• 1:55:26Speaker 04

  He's writing, it's not even fan fiction, he's writing canonical Star Wars.

• 1:55:29Robert Evans?

  He's writing canonical Star Wars stuff down about this.

• 1:55:31Speaker 04

  Canonical rational Star Wars.

• 1:55:34Robert Evans?

  Ponder that and ponder these ads, my friends. We'll be back with more.

• 1:55:44Robert Evans?

  So we're back. Now, Jamie is one of the few people who is like as good at manipulating Ziz as Ziz is at other people in this community.

• 1:55:52Speaker 04

  High mana.

• 1:55:53Robert Evans?

  And after Ziz is like, "Hey, look, very high mana." Ziz is like, "Look, I'll have to kill you if you don't kill Alice, you know, and you know I'll do it because it's a timeless decision." Jamie counters in a very effective way by saying like, making a blog post saying, "Ziz said all this. I am not suicidal. If I die, it's her." And also letting Ziz know, quote, "I have friends who will avenge me. Murdering Alice or me now is tantamount to committing suicide by proxy." So they have this like checkmate, counter-checkmate chess match in blog posts that gets interrupted in March when Gwyn fakes her death, probably to escape the litigation they're all about.

• 1:56:31Speaker 04

  Honestly?

• 1:56:31Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:56:32Speaker 04

  Gwyn, get out of here.

• 1:56:34Robert Evans?

  Gwyn does make the good decision because sometime after faking her death, she bounces from this whole community. She does get out of there.

• 1:56:41Speaker 05

  There was just no way this story was gonna end without somebody faking their own death.

• 1:56:47Robert Evans?

  Oh, Sophie, so excited for you. This story doesn't even end. This story like late-middles with two death fakings.

• 1:56:54Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:56:55Robert Evans?

  Because in September of 2022, Ziz fakes her death in a boating accident on the Black Signet. Emma calls the cops, says that she fell overboard. The Coast Guard, they work so hard to try to find her and save her that they get fatigue waivers so they can work all night, but they find nothing because she's not dead.

• 1:57:14Speaker 04

  Is she on the Black Signet?

• 1:57:16Robert Evans?

  I don't know where she actually was. But she doesn't, she's not dead.

• 1:57:21Speaker 04

  She's not dead.

• 1:57:22Robert Evans?

  Ziz is declared dead and her, of her family prints an obituary, like. Gwyn's death faking is a little less successful. Like their lawyer in court after they come in with legal evidence that Ziz is dead, Gwyn's lawyer is like, "I really don't think they're dead. I think they're faking it."

• 1:57:40Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 1:57:42Speaker 05

  Wow. What a snitch-ass lawyer.

• 1:57:46Robert Evans?

  These lawyers don't like them and they don't like their lawyers.

• 1:57:52Speaker 05

  That's where they fucked up. You can't, your lawyer has to ride for you.

• 1:57:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that, look, L Ron Hubbard knew this about having a cult.

• 1:58:02Speaker 04

  Who's writing for this? Who even, who knows what the fuck they're talking about?

• 1:58:05Robert Evans?

  Right, how do you even talk with these people at this point?

• 1:58:08Speaker 04

  When they're asking for counsel, oh, here's what's going on.

• 1:58:11Robert Evans?

  The sanest decision one of them has made is to fake their death.

• 1:58:15Speaker 04

  Honestly, maybe we need more lawyers in this story.

• 1:58:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so maybe a couple of lawyers additional could have fixed this. So, I don't know precisely.

• 1:58:24Speaker 04

  Also, they have lawyer money?

• 1:58:26Robert Evans?

  No, these are, these are public defenders.

• 1:58:27Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 1:58:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So, Gwyn clearly fakes their death just to clear themselves of their legal problems. I think Ziz does it for that, but also she and her closest friends are now plotting the murder of Curtis Lind. We don't really, yeah, that's the landlord.

• 1:58:43Speaker 04

  Now, they want to kill Curtis?

• 1:58:44Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, they want to kill Curtis.

• 1:58:46Speaker 04

  To, they want to stay on the land, is that the kind of the thought?

• 1:58:50Robert Evans?

  I think they want to stay on the land. I think they also, their escalation logic is that if he is having the cops evict us, that is a situation that could end in our deaths, so he's trying to murder us. So, the logical thing for us to do is to kill him now to protect us both from him and from other people.

• 1:59:06Speaker 04

  And then have sex with his body?

• 1:59:08Robert Evans?

  I don't, I don't think they're going to do that, but they, they are at least aware of that as an option.

• 1:59:13Speaker 04

  So on the table.

• 1:59:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so the reality of what happens next is a little bit in dispute. But what no one disagrees is that on November 13th, 2022, this is like right after midnight, Curtis Lind is stabbed repeatedly and impaled with a samurai sword. He also, during the same altercation, shoots and kills Emma Borhanian and wounds another member of the group. In one Tumblr post, a Zizian with the username A Flower By Another Name gives what I think is probably a representative example of how the Zizians want to depict what happened next, what happened here. Kurt, quote, Curtis Lind and his ex-CIA best friend, Patrick McMillan, spent months threatening Emma and her friends. Unlike what the papers claim, Emma and her friends weren't squatters.

• 1:59:57Robert Evans?

  They were tenants who were struggling to find jobs or a place that would lease to them after Merrick and Seafar called a SWAT team on them in 2019. Now, I don't know if McMillan was in the CIA, and I don't know if he and Curtis threatened these ladies, but I will say the preponderance of evidence suggests they were in fact squatting. This account blames them on not being able to make rent on their legal bills, but by this point, they had been squatting for like two years and change.

• 2:00:20Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:00:21Robert Evans?

  I don't know if Lind was transphobic. I don't know, you know, if he, they say he alienated them from their neighbors by telling them that they were in a cult. I don't know if that's true, or if they alienated their neighbors by being very off-putting and aggressive. This Zizian account claims that other individuals started threatening to call the cops on the Zizians and thus, quote, "It was an unending nightmare for them of terrifying insane threats from every corner." Now, the author of this document says they weren't there themselves, but believes, heard like other members of the community explain what happened, and they said that Lind made specific threats in the fall of 2022, which culminated in one member of the group buying a bulletproof vest and wearing it at all times. I don't trust this account, and among other things, it lies about the nature of their

• 2:01:06Robert Evans?

  living situation. It lies by saying Emma had filed paperwork to take Curtis to court over the eviction. There was no court thing filed here. There's a very good, comprehensive source on this by an individual who goes by Ken the Cowboy on Twitter, and he notes, "In this timeline of events, the last sentence is not true. There's no record of any lawsuit being filed in 2022 with any of the Zizians as plaintiffs and with Curtis Lind as a defendant." So, they claim basically, "This guy was aggressive and threatening us, and one day he attacked us," right? Quote, "That morning, he decided to stop them. He walked all the way from his trailer to their trucks while they were packing their things and opened fire. Lind shot Emma point-blank through her heart and lungs. She collapsed to the ground, and immediately

• 2:01:49Robert Evans?

  her lung began filling with her heart's blood. She died within 20 seconds, violently coughing up chunks of her lung tissue in a futile attempt to clear her airways. Somni was shot six times, rushing in a futile attempt to save Emma's life. The vest saved her life, but she was still hit through the neck and stomach. She acted only in self-defense." That's the Zizian claim here, that he just walks in as they're getting ready to leave and starts shooting them, right?

• 2:02:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's stupid.

• 2:02:14Robert Evans?

  Now, that's their claim. This leaves out a very important fact, which is that Curtis Lind is stabbed 50 times.

• 2:02:23Speaker 04

  Fifteen.

• 2:02:24Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 2:02:25Speaker 04

  Jesus.

• 2:02:26Robert Evans?

  Lynn's account is somewhat less sympathetic to these people. He claims that after successfully getting a judgment against them in a court, he moved to evict and the sheriff agreed to do an eviction on November 15th. And this is what Lynn later said, quote, "So they're worried about where they were going to go and what they were going to do. And they had a meeting with me and the meeting was about them staying for another two months and not paying. I said, no, I can't do that. So one of them took out a knife. It was a folding knife. It was a fairly large folding knife. And started patting the blade in their hand like this and looking at me and smiling." And they don't specify who this was. I don't know, like, you know, entirely like which person he's accusing here or whatever. But he says, this is how his account of like the attack itself is that

• 2:03:13Robert Evans?

  after this, after he gets threatened with a knife, he goes and he buys a pistol and he gets a license to carry. And then right before the sheriffs are supposed to show up to evict them, one of the Zizians named Suri shows up and she tries to get him to like come help turn the water off in her trailer. So he goes over to there to turn the water off. And as he bends over to do that, he gets hit with something that shatters the right side of his skull. Quote, "And the next thing I remember is standing up with three of them right next to me, you know, or around me. And I was bleeding from numerous puncture wounds. I think around 50. I couldn't see out of my right eye, had been punctured three times. The back of my neck had some severe cuts, like someone was trying to cut my head off. You know, I had no idea what was happening or when this at all happened. I was completely gone while this was happening. And how I stood back up or got to that spot, I have

• 2:03:58Robert Evans?

  no idea. But I looked at all the blood coming out of me. Oh, and I had a sword, a long sword, all the way through my chest, right next to my heart, sticking out the other end, which I went to the hospital with. I was afraid to take it out. But anyway, at that time, I pulled out my pistol and started shooting. I killed the person to my right." And I gotta say, based on the physical evidence, I think Lynn's account is the real one of what happens here. I think they ambush him and stab him repeatedly and he shoots and kills one in self-defense.

• 2:04:29Robert Evans?

  Obvious, like, again, he has a samurai sword entirely through his back.

• 2:04:34Speaker 04

  Can we acknowledge that this man took fifty to the chest and a samurai sword?

• 2:04:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:40Speaker 04

  It don't make him like that anymore.

• 2:04:41Robert Evans?

  And it's one of those, one of the, like, doubting claims by the Zizians is that, like, he couldn't survive being stabbed this many times. People survive getting stabbed a crazy amount of times, all the time. It's all, like, if you read about enough stabbing accounts, you will read about people who die because they get stabbed once, and you will read about people who live through getting, like, seventy stab wounds. It's nuts. Stabbings are very hard to predict.

• 2:05:03Speaker 04

  Tricky, tricky. Yeah, and also, it's also so worrisome because now they've done it, right? They've crossed that line.

• 2:05:09Robert Evans?

  They've crossed that line, and one of them has died, right?

• 2:05:12Speaker 04

  Yes, so the stakes are as high as they had always thought that they were.

• 2:05:17Robert Evans?

  And when the box trucks are cleaned out after they get arrested, um, the ones who had carried out the attack, because Ziz is on the property, and I think Gwyn is too still at this point, but Ziz does not participate in the attack. And, like, cops recognizes and know that she's faking her death and don't arrest her, which is one of, like, the weird things.

• 2:05:36Speaker 04

  Like, the cops are just... They're familiar enough to know that...

• 2:05:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I think this is that, because, like, they've been called before because of these people. Yeah, I think that they're aware of who she is, but just don't do, even after this mass stabbing shooting? Like, again, the cops just don't do their jobs also as part of this story.

• 2:05:56Robert Evans?

  You know, it's, uh, it's also worth noting that when they, this, after this arrest, when, like, their box trucks are being cleaned out, they find tubes, containers of lye, which, you know, Ziz had talked to Jamie about dissolving bodies in lye. That's probably what the plan was with Curtis, my guess is. That's certainly what Curtis gets convinced of. Now, my thinking, and I can't, I, this is not proven, I, I'm sure courts will try. We'll see how well they are able to do this in a court. My suspicion is that Ziz orchestrated this attack and convinced her friends to do it, or convinced them to convince themselves to do it, and justified it using the same escalatory logic that they used on everything.

• 2:06:38Robert Evans?

  Else, uh, on her blog, when discussing theoretical acts of deadly violence, Ziz referred to what she called Quirl's Algorithm, from the Harry Potter rationalist fan pick these people all love. And she quoted this line from the book describing the mental state she believed was necessary to survive a life-threatening situation. Intent to kill, think purely of killing, grasp at any means to do so, sensors off, do not flinch, kill.

• 2:07:03Robert Evans?

  Again, this Harry Potter book really has now got me.

• 2:07:05Speaker 04

  This really goes all the way back to that.

• 2:07:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, be careful what you write, authors, you might get someone impaled by a samurai sword.

• 2:07:16Speaker 04

  Of course they had a samurai sword.

• 2:07:17Robert Evans?

  Of course they had a samurai sword. I'm sure they bought them all from the Bud K catalog.

• 2:07:23Robert Evans?

  So Ziz had also written in late 2021 in a comment on her blog, "I get so many people lining up to commit suicide by Ziz." And then she hyperlinks to the Wiki for Suicide by Cop, and her meaning is that anyone acting in a way to like harm her or her goals is killing themselves because she has to kill them now, right? And there's a good Medium post by someone named Sepha Shapiro that traces around how this time, how around this time Ziz's online writing becomes increasingly obsessed with the idea of using deadly violence to make oneself less vulnerable, right? That you, again, you have to always be ready to kill in order to protect yourself.

• 2:08:03Robert Evans?

  So the police arrest two of her friends, Somni and Suri Dao, who were the two surviving Zizians who'd taken part in the attack, and they take them to jail. Per a California law, these two are not just charged with trying to kill Curtis, but with the murder of their friend Emma. It's like if, you know, three people rob a liquor store and one of them kills someone, the other two will get charged with murder because someone died in the commission of a crime that they were involved in, right? This is California state law. Lot of people get life sentences as a result of this. Usually not in this exact scenario, but.

• 2:08:33Speaker 04

  No, usually not.

• 2:08:38Robert Evans?

  Somni was placed in a men's jail and complained. Dow, after being assigned to a women's jail, demanded a men's jail. I think this is because they were trying to like make a case that they weren't in their right mind, but it's kind of unclear to me exactly why this happens. There's a lot in terms of these two and their interactions with the court system that I'm not gonna get into, right? Because it's just, we simply can't go down all of those rabbit holes. But you should know that like this is a factor in everyone's thinking is like their two friends are in prison, they're constantly sending these letters to the judge, they're like making these like weird rationalist arguments in their court cases and like that's

• 2:09:19Robert Evans?

  all going down while Ziz and the remainder of her inner circle kind of go on the run, right? Because you know, now they've been involved in a murder.

• 2:09:28Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:09:28Robert Evans?

  Gwynn seems to go fully into hiding at this time. I don't know if that's because of the murder or just because she had finally had enough of Ziz and all of her talk about killing, but in any case, she goes to ground around this point. Now, while all this is going on, I hate to keep bringing in new people, but there's a bunch of them.

• 2:09:47Speaker 04

  There's a bunch of them.

• 2:09:49Robert Evans?

  Jamie, up in Vermont, I don't think is continuing to is seeing Alice Monday anymore. Alice seems to have also made the wise decision to fucking bounce and go to ground. Jamie is living with a another Ziz follower named Daniel Blank up in Vermont at this point. And Jamie has gotten increasingly into Ziz's ideas. Blank is one of the people, we know he delivers several documents to the court on Somni's behalf during this whole like after they go get charged with murder. And he's like a guy who has like a job and you know, stuff going on in his life. And then like a month after this shooting stabbing, he drops out of society, cuts ties with his family and quits his job to go live with Jamie and like, it's kind of a little

• 2:10:32Robert Evans?

  unclear of exactly what's happening, but my belief is basically Jamie and the people who are around here who are up in Vermont who are Zizians. Are being before Ziz gets there told to prepare for Ziz because they want to get access to money and a private property, a compound, right? Where they can both not be on the run, have a living space and continue to work on their ideas. That is what I think is happening. And Daniel Blank is someone who has been following Ziz online, gets convinced to drop out of his life, cut ties with everybody, move in with this person, Jamie. And it looks like they're kind of working to like ready a situation for Ziz and the Zizians in Vermont.

• 2:11:13Robert Evans?

  And again, there's a lot of this that has not been litigated yet, but what we know is that on December 31st, 2022, Jamie Zashko's parents, who were 72 and 69 respectively, are murdered in their home.

• 2:11:27Speaker 04

  Oh, my God. On the property in Vermont?

• 2:11:30Robert Evans?

  They, no, they live in a separate state. They live in Pennsylvania, right? But we don't know who committed this murder. No one has yet been charged for it. Unlike in the lynch stabbing, we do not have an obvious explanation. There is a ring video that shows an unknown vehicle pulling into the driveway, followed by screams. Some investigators think they hear someone yell, "Mom," before another person yells, "Oh, my God, oh, my God." But other people who have viewed the recording say they, it's unclear if that first word is "mom." I have not seen this recording, so I can't tell you what's accurate. But Zashko's parents were worth several million dollars and had a sizable estate to inherit.

• 2:12:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, you said that she had bought the property initially off of family money, right?

• 2:12:11Robert Evans?

  Right. She's got some amount of access to it, right? And her last, right before these people are murdered, Jamie's mom messages with Jamie earlier that same day about savings bonds that Zashko is due to receive. In blog posts from 2021, Zashko had written about her parents and repeatedly accused them of being abusers. One specific accusation she makes is that they snuck meat into her food and forced her to eat it after she expressed a desire to go vegan. So she has talked extensively online about her parents being fundamentally evil people. We know that at this point, she lives with Daniel Blank and that their phones go dark right around the time of the murder, as if they had like played. Them in a Faraday bag, basically.

• 2:12:54Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:12:54Robert Evans?

  Right? But we don't know where they are on the day of the murder. Police visit them in Vermont shortly after the murder because obviously the daughter is someone that you're going to think of as a potential like because one of the things about the murder is that whoever did it had some degree of knowledge of the property and an ability to get on it without forcing an entry. Right? So obviously the cops, they're going to think who's the next of kin, right? Um, so police visit them on their property in Vermont and talk to blank and Jamie. Jamie, they ask if she has a gun. Jamie says yes, and she shows them a handgun that she owns that is the same caliber as the one used in the shootings. Now that doesn't necessarily mean much. It's a nine millimeter, ton of nine millimeters. Right? There's one thing the cops will point out is that Zajko owned the same type of bullet,

• 2:13:38Robert Evans?

  the same make of bullet as those used in the shooting. But again, like I, I, the bullets I use keeping my carry gun are Hydra shocks, which is like what cops care because that's the safest thing in court. If you're in a defensive shooting, you want to be like, I have the same bullets the cops have, right? Because someone can't, you don't want to have like the, the man shredder zombie rounds or some shit. So the fact that like a common defensive caliber murdered these people was in the gun. That's not a smoking gun, if you'll forgive it, but it also is like, that's not nothing either, right? Like, that's not nothing.

• 2:14:09Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:14:13Robert Evans?

  What means more is that Jamie is now the full beneficiary of her parents' estate. And while she has not been charged, an attorney for Pennsylvania has filed a potential Slayer statute issue, which is a law in Pennsylvania that you can't inherit someone's stuff if you kill them. Right? But again, they haven't been charged. There's a lot of suspicious shit about this. She also lies to her relatives claiming she couldn't have driven to Pennsylvania from Vermont because she didn't have a working car and we know she did. So. You know.

• 2:14:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's very suspicious over here.

• 2:14:48Robert Evans?

  I don't think it's unlikely that she may have been basically tasked with killing her parents to get access to her money for the cause, their money for the cause, right? That's kind of my suspicion, you know? And she was partly told it was okay because they were abusive and so like you maybe have to do this in order to protect yourself and other people from abusers, which is the kind of logic they have too. On January 13th, right after midnight, Pennsylvania state troopers raid a hotel near the Philadelphia airport where Blank and Zaschko are staying. A Vermont judge had issued a warrant for their home. The police had not found the gun they believed was the murder weapon. They touched that weapon when they're in Vermont, but they don't have a warrant for it, right? So they don't get to take it.

• 2:15:33Robert Evans?

  Zaschko was detained and the only one and would have been the only one detained if she hadn't shouted to hotel staff as they're taking her away, "Tell Daniel in room 111 I'm being arrested."

• 2:15:43Speaker 04

  Damn.

• 2:15:45Robert Evans?

  Great. Smooth, smooth. These rationalists and their brilliant crimes. The cops obviously get interested in this and they recognize Daniel's name and they find on surveillance footage that she has handed a bag to him outside of his room in the night before, right? And they recognize his name because they visited Zaschko and Blank in their Vermont home. So they get a warrant for his hotel room and raid it like an hour or two later. Blank is found in the bathroom next to a blonde person dressed in black. This is Ziz. So.

• 2:16:19Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 2:16:21Robert Evans?

  Right, yeah. An article by the San Francisco Chronicle explains what happened next. Blank put his hands behind his back and walked out of the room, obeying police commands, but Ziz did not do any of that. He had his eyes closed, a trooper testified using masculine pronouns. He would not speak. He was just laying almost unconscious or as if he was dead on the ground. He had to be carried out. Again, this is misgendering. I don't know if it's intentional or if Ziz was like acting and like portraying themselves as masculine because they're on the run, you know, at this point in time. It's not actually clear to me. Um, whatever the case, Ziz is taken into custody and charged with disorderly conduct and interfering with a police investigation. A nine millimeter handgun was found in the room along with ammo.

• 2:17:04Robert Evans?

  Forty thousand dollars in cash is found in Zashco's Subaru. And again, she doesn't get charged with murder. They let her out very soon and she just leaves. They, the, the cops are shocked because she, they have to give her back her car and the 40 grand, which she abandons. She and Blake just leave the car and forty thousand dollars in cash.

• 2:17:27Robert Evans?

  I don't think they're making good decisions at this point, is my only explanation for you, David.

• 2:17:31Speaker 04

  How?

• 2:17:34Robert Evans?

  Maybe it's that they're thinking like, well, they, they, they put a tracker in the money, they'll track the car. It's not safe to have any of it. I don't know why they're making this decision, but it's very weird, right? Now, during this same time, several other Zizians are at least suspected to have been coming in and out of like Pennsylvania during the area around the murder. It is unclear how many people, if they were, if the Zizians killed this husband and wife, it's unclear how many of them were there. And again, no one has been charged. But it's at this point that another Zizian enters the playing field. Uh, this, this person goes by the name Ophelia. They are a German citizen. Uh, they have like a, a, a legal residency in the U S. Their last name is Bacholt.

• 2:18:18Robert Evans?

  They used to work at James Street, uh, or Jane Street, which is where Sam Bankman-Fried worked. They're a quant trader, right? So this is someone functioning at a high level of the finance industry who like drops out of their career and life to go to Vermont. Uh, hours, like really, like they fly in like right before the murders.

• 2:18:36Speaker 04

  Um, that's such a troubling theme about this.

• 2:18:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:39Speaker 04

  Whole thing about how many of these people really do integrate in a major way. Like it's not just like fringe people.

• 2:18:46Robert Evans?

  No, these are people who are successful in their other lives, but they're lacking, I think a lot of this is just that desperation that is also core to like fascism's appeal, to feel like a sense of heroism, like I am part of a heroic struggle.

• 2:19:01Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:19:01Robert Evans?

  People are very vulnerable to that. And even if you're making the money, if you're succeeding at a tech company or in finance, but it all feels empty to you because it kinda is. If someone's like, you can save the cosmos.

• 2:19:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, here's the cause.

• 2:19:15Robert Evans?

  You'll give up your whole life in order to do that, right?

• 2:19:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:19:20Robert Evans?

  So Blank and Zaschko are released in short order. As I said, they get out of jail quickly, but Ziz stays in custody for a while and bail is set, I think at 50,000 initially.

• 2:19:30Speaker 04

  Are they aware of the fake death and everything at this?

• 2:19:33Robert Evans?

  Yes, they are aware she has faked her death. California shows no interest in sending police out to get her, which is like, it is a crime. This is, the bail is set very high for two misdemeanors and police justify it in like the court documents by saying Ziz had recklessly created a dangerous situation by making the police move her. Per that argument, that article in Wired, quote, "Behind these arguments and even the charges themselves lay a deeper motive. Unable to charge for the Zaschko murders but suspecting that La Sota, Michelle Zaschko, that's Jamie, and Danielle Blank could be tied to them, prosecutors were trying desperately to hold La Sota while the police gathered evidence. Obviously you realize we don't give a shit about this case, one

• 2:20:16Robert Evans?

  local official familiar with it told me. What they were interested in was La Sota's involvement in the homicide." So the authorities here have recognized this is all centered around this person, but it's very difficult for us to hold them legally responsible at this stage. We can't even arrest anyone for the murder yet. We don't have enough. And, you know, it's, it's, I'm not gonna, again, pretend to know precisely what happened, but I think it's pretty clear Ziz probably gave the order to do this killing.

• 2:20:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:20:47Robert Evans?

  Or everyone using her logic talked themselves into, well, this is the only way to further our crucially important work is we need the money that these abusers are selfishly keeping to themselves. Ziz's bail is eventually reduced. She winds up in the wind immediately. Like, the authorities are like, she's gotta immediately bounce and we'll lose her. And that's exactly what happens. Zaschko and Blank, it's kind of unclear exactly what they do initially after this, but we know Jamie reaches out to her aunt and begs for help. And her aunt is like, "Did you kill my sister?" And...

• 2:21:24Robert Evans?

  Jamie says no and blames the murders on Less Wrong, which is Eliza's like blog. So she's blaming the rationalist community. She claims that she's being targeted and that like the Seafar had committed murdered her parents to like, uh, basically make Ziz look bad. A year or so goes by, right? Ziz misses a court date. She never shows back up. We really don't know what the fuck these people are doing for most of this period. In February of 2023.

• 2:21:52Speaker 04

  She's no longer blogging either.

• 2:21:53Robert Evans?

  She's not. No, no, no, no, no, no. But she's still communicating.

• 2:21:57Speaker 04

  She was just responding to people.

• 2:21:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And she is communicating with people still, but I think it's primarily through more like direct means. In February of 2023, a community alert is posted by someone named Sephi Shapiro. It warns that, quote, "Over the past few years, Ziz has repeatedly called for the deaths of many different classes of people." And this, this post lays out a lot of what I've described in these episodes, but there's still no public awareness of the Zizians. Everything happening here is so weird. The circumstances around, around the murderers are so murky that like most law enforcement kind of shrugs it off and there's not like a public, these people are so fringe. It's very difficult to even talk about them, right?

• 2:22:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, how do you qualify that on the nightly news?

• 2:22:38Robert Evans?

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:22:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:22:41Robert Evans?

  This is all going to change. In February of 2024, Jamie Zashko purchases three handguns, I think from a Vermont gun store. A few months later, in May of 2024, a 20-year-old woman named Teresa Youngblood disappears from her home in Seattle. Youngblood is one of a scat, one of the scattered community of people who still obsessively followed and interacted with Ziz and her inner circle's teachings. Her parents feared that she was in a controlling relationship with someone. And months after disappearing, she applies for a marriage license with another rationalist who's obsessed with Ziz named Maximilian Snyder. Now, like most Zizians, Snyder has a very impressive academic record. He was a national merit scholar who attended Oxford University. Then he starts posting on Less Wrong, like all the others.

• 2:23:27Robert Evans?

  He is initially a fan of Yudkowski, but at some point he gets convinced that Ziz's vegan Sith radicalism is the true path. In the summer of 2023, just months earlier, he won $11,000 from an AI alignment contest. And he won that award under his legal name, but he also goes by Audir. It's kind of unclear to me. What the situation is there around the same time he tried to raise money for Ziz when she was briefly behind bars. I don't know if this guy Snyder, this person, if Snyder marries Youngblood because they're actually in love, they had gone to high school together. But I think there may have been some sort of weird legal reason that Ziz wanted them married. Again, very unclear, but they don't stay together physically very long.

• 2:24:10Robert Evans?

  By January of 2025, Teresa is in Vermont, looking at rural properties for purchase alongside Ophelia, the German quant trader, right? Well, Max Snyder is in like California. And reading between some lines, I think because Ophelia and Teresa aren't involved in any of the court cases, Ziz is using them to help actually scout out and find an isolated compound where they can hide out, right? Like they are doing the groundwork of figuring out a place for them to live. They are acting as the legal individuals who can kind of handle everything for the folks who are legally compromised. Later investigation would show that Bockholdt and Youngblood had been leaving, living in Chapel Hill, Vermont in a duplex. And neighbors say that several other people also lived with them.

• 2:24:55Robert Evans?

  These people were always dressed in black and owned a box truck. It is unclear, but I think what happens is after she goes on the run, Ziz starts reaching out to people she'd been in contact with around the world and says, hey, the time is now, drop out of your lives and come devote yourselves to the cause, right?

• 2:25:10Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:25:11Robert Evans?

  And that these, these three are the ones who follow Bockholdt, Youngblood and Snyder, right? Cause they all cut ties with their families, cut, you know, with their jobs and leave home around the same time. While they're looking for rural pro- compounds, Bockholdt and Youngblood wind up in a hotel in Lindenville, Vermont. An employee reports them to the police because they're wearing body armor and other tactical gear, and at least one of them is openly carrying a pistol. Something is very weird here, but uh, cause they're approached not just by Virginia State Police, but by a Homeland Security Investigations Officer. And there's evidence that Homeland Security spends like a week, is surveilling them for like a week before the shootout that happens. I don't know what Homeland Security thought was happening.

• 2:25:53Robert Evans?

  They may have just seen, we're on the border, obviously shit's escalated there. This is an, a, a foreign citizen with an American citizen. They're wrapping their electronics in tinfoil. They've got guns, they're driving around being very suspicious and tactical gear. Maybe they just thought it was like some run of the mill terrorism bullshit.

• 2:26:11Speaker 04

  It's worth checking out.

• 2:26:12Robert Evans?

  Right. So they are surveilling these people. And I think Youngblood and Bockholdt realize they're being surveilled, right? And that, that, that starts that escalatory loop in their head of Zizian logic where, well, if the police confront me, there's only one way to respond, right?

• 2:26:30Speaker 04

  Fuck, yeah.

• 2:26:33Robert Evans?

  Two days later, prosecutors in California asked the judge in the Curtis Lind case to speed up the process of going to trial. He's in his 80s, he's got a bad memory, and he's the only witness of the attacks. They say it's necessary, like, we need to do this quickly. So the next day, January 17th, before this can happen, before Lind can go to trial, a masked assailant assaults Lind near his property and slits his throat, killing him. Maximilian Snyder, Youngblood's husband, will be arrested days later in Redding, California for the murder.

• 2:27:00Speaker 04

  Fuck, because they had been separate. Oh, man. So there's like, there's a possibility that Ziz is sent.

• 2:27:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I don't see what now. He didn't, he hasn't pled yet, at least as of the time we record this, but he sent a letter in jail to Eliza Yedkowski, trying to make him become a vegan. He also.

• 2:27:24Robert Evans?

  Priorities in order.

• 2:27:30Robert Evans?

  He also claimed, quote, "I am not one of Ziz's friends. Neither she nor her friends endorse me or my words. So far as I know, I speak only for myself as myself for the sake of everyone." Sure.

• 2:27:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:27:43Robert Evans?

  Okay, man. You just decided to kill this guy for no reason?

• 2:27:46Speaker 04

  Dog, you are.

• 2:27:49Robert Evans?

  Oh, man.

• 2:27:50Speaker 04

  This guy who happened to, happened to have a relationship with this very small group of people.

• 2:27:56Robert Evans?

  Who is, his, this person he has filed for a marriage license with, Youngblood, the day after Lind gets assassinated. Youngblood and Bockholdt are heading back from a trip out Target shooting when they get pulled over by Border Patrol. Youngblood almost immediately draws her sidearm. There's a shootout, she kill, or I think she kills. Now, anytime there's a shootout and an officer dies. A decent amount of the time that officer is like killed by another cop's bullet. I don't actually know for sure if it was Youngblood or if they all start shooting and he just gets killed in the crossfire. I don't fully know whose gun kills him, but she definitely starts shooting, right?

• 2:28:35Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:28:36Robert Evans?

  Um, and Border Patrol Agent David Malin dies. Uh, Bockholdt is killed in the immediate shootout before she can draw a weapon. And both of the firearms used in this shooting were guns purchased by Zaji, by Jamie in early 2024, right? So again, you, all of these things are, it's very easy to connect them if you like know all these people, but it takes so long to trace out.

• 2:28:57Speaker 04

  For all their talk of murder, the, uh, in, in practice, they're not very good at it, huh?

• 2:29:02Robert Evans?

  No, I guess they, I mean, they didn't plan for this shooting to happen, right? It's just that their kind of escalatory logic made it inevitable. After all this, authorities finally start putting the whole story together. A manhunt is law, launched and on February 16th of 2025, Ziz, Jamie and Daniel Blank are finally caught. After the shootout, they seem to have started living in box trucks again, one of which was registered to Youngblood. Yeah, back to what you know. And again, one of these is Youngblood, like the box truck is registered into her name. They pulled onto a property in Frostburg to camp and the owner like spotted them and said, hey, get off my land. And like Ziz tries to talk this person into letting them stay for a month, but he's like, no, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm gonna call the cops.

• 2:29:45Speaker 04

  You're in a robe. You're in a wizard's robe.

• 2:29:47Robert Evans?

  You look like a wizard. I don't need any of this. Ultimately, they all get arrested and charged with everything the cops could throw at them, which is like illegal possession, carrying a firearm, stuff like that, right? Inside the other box trucks, state troopers found Jamie and Ziz, according to the, the charging documents, dressed all in black and wearing gun belts with ammunition. Um, so yeah, uh, and that's the situation, uh, where we are now. That's it. The story's done.

• 2:30:15Speaker 04

  No.

• 2:30:19Robert Evans?

  Oh, man.

• 2:30:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so this is basically where we are. Ziz asked for pretrial release. Didn't get it.

• 2:30:30Speaker 04

  No.

• 2:30:31Robert Evans?

  Not shocked about that.

• 2:30:34Robert Evans?

  Quote, speaking halt, and this is from a Seattle P I article. Speaking haltingly, she also requested a vegan diet and said that she was in a mild state of delirium due to lack of food. Uh, I have not done anything wrong, she told a judge. I might starve to death if you do not intervene. I need the jail to be ordered to have a vegan diet. It's more important than whatever this hearing is. So I don't think this whole court process is gonna end super well for this.

• 2:30:56Speaker 04

  No.

• 2:30:56Robert Evans?

  But I also, it's very hard to tell, like, what are you, what are you gonna charge? Like, I, I don't, like, I'm legitimately, like, very, uh, uh, like, I, I'll be fascinated to see what the charges are here.

• 2:31:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's exciting to know this, we can see this play out real time. I.

• 2:31:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:16Speaker 05

  This was weird.

• 2:31:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:31:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:20Speaker 04

  Hell, yeah, it was.

• 2:31:23Speaker 04

  Hell, yeah, it was.

• 2:31:25Robert Evans?

  Great. Anyway.

• 2:31:26Speaker 05

  But like, I would like to know how things fucking shake up.

• 2:31:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, yeah, maybe we'll revisit this when my brain has healed. I need to go, like, read about Hitler some to calm down.

• 2:31:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, you need to go talk to your neighbor.

• 2:31:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I need to go talk to my neighbor.

• 2:31:42Speaker 05

  That's a better suggestion, thank you, David.

• 2:31:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, not just keep reading my Hitler books and coming up with theories.

• 2:31:49Speaker 04

  That's how you get double bad.

• 2:31:50Robert Evans?

  That's how you get double bad, exactly.

• 2:31:53Speaker 04

  That's how it happens.

• 2:31:54Speaker 05

  Oh, buddy, you gotta, you gotta go on a run, go talk to your neighbor, go pet a goat, you know?

• 2:31:59Robert Evans?

  Everyone else, go, go talk to somebody, you know, pet an animal, walk, uh, you know, in the woods or something.

• 2:32:09Speaker 04

  Maybe stay away from boats for a while, just in case.

• 2:32:11Robert Evans?

  Stay the fuck away from boats. Don't go live on a boat.

• 2:32:14Speaker 04

  Get out of the water.

• 2:32:16Robert Evans?

  Stay out of the water.

• 2:32:21Robert Evans?

  I don't care how bad it rent is, stay out of the fucking water.

• 2:32:24Speaker 04

  Oh, man, fuck.

• 2:32:28Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 2:32:29Robert Evans?

  How do you feel at the end of this, David?

• 2:32:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, David, how are you doing? This is your first experience on our show. What's up?

• 2:32:35Speaker 04

  I honestly don't know. To tell you the truth, I don't know how I feel. I'm gonna have to, really gonna have to kick this around for a couple of days, but this was interesting.

• 2:32:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:46Speaker 04

  Interesting as hell.

• 2:32:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's, uh, that's one way to describe it. Um, that's one way to describe it. Um.

• 2:32:55Speaker 05

  This is a wild time. David, do you have any, do you have anything you want to plug for the listeners?

• 2:33:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, uh, I produced my own comedy special. It's available on my Patreon, patreon.com backslash David Borey, G B O R I E. It's called Birth of a Nation, spelled with a G because that's my last name and I think it's funny, but yeah, check that out. I have a podcast, My Mama Told Me. I also have one called All Fantasy Everything, where we draft fantasy things that aren't sports. But yeah, check that stuff out.

• 2:33:28Speaker 05

  Oh shit, that sounds really cool.

• 2:33:31Speaker 04

  It's a lot of fun.

• 2:33:32Robert Evans?

  That sounds so much better for you than everything we've talked about today.

• 2:33:35Speaker 04

  It's different than this. It's different than this.

• 2:33:38Speaker 05

  And, and it reminded me, I need to, I need to set my fantasy basketball lineup. So thank you, sir.

• 2:33:43Speaker 04

  Oh, there you go. It's time.

• 2:33:44Speaker 05

  It's time.

• 2:33:45Robert Evans?

  Check it out, everybody. Uh, all right. That's, uh, that's been the podcast. Don't, don't do any of this. Don't do any of the things in this, in this episode.

• 2:33:54Speaker 05

  Please. Bye.

• 2:33:56Robert Evans?

  Bye.

• 2:34:00Speaker 05

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards.

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