Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult

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. 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.

• 0:03Robert 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 Borey. David, how do you feel about Microsoft Copilot?

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Ah, Rambo 3, let's go.

• 0:39Robert Evans?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  Let's kill a ton of brown people.

• 0:43Robert Evans?

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

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Okay, all of them.

• 0:49Robert Evans?

  They're not really people.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  It's so bad.

• 0:52Robert Evans?

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

• 1:00Speaker 02

  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 end the script is page 49.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 1:19Robert Evans?

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

• 1:24Robert 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 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, but you know, if I, if I fuck

• 2:04Robert Evans?

  up some fact about like, early 1900s Germany, I'm not gonna be like too bent out of shape because it's like, you know, there's, there's no perfection in this, but in this case, it's this tiny little community that nearly all of the reporting on has been like, deeply incomplete, and I feel like-

• 2:25Robert Evans?

  I like the the stress over like, what do I include in here? And the other problem is that none of these people have editors. 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.

• 2:39Speaker 01

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

• 2:45Robert 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.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Mixtape is nasty work.

• 3:22Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. And I'm deeply great. Well, we'll have source links and everything in here. I I note when I'm kind of like pulling something from something directly. But like, I'm very grateful to the the maniacs who put together these like documents that that 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.

• 3:57Speaker 01

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

• 4:03Speaker 01

  I don't know where it's going. I for sure don't know where it's going.

• 4:07Robert Evans?

  It's going, we know where it ends, which is 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 fan fiction.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  I love that it all goes back to that.

• 4:35Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, it all comes back to bad Harry Potter fan fiction.

• 4:43Speaker 03

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• 4:47Robert Evans?

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• 5:54Robert 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, Sinon shit, right?

• 6:11Speaker 01

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

• 6:15Robert 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.

• 6:24Speaker 01

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

• 6:27Robert 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.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:48Robert Evans?

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

• 6:53Robert Evans?

  And furthermore, if they're like, yeah, that's the right way, even worse sign. 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 want to be a part of. Yeah, maybe just take a pickleball or something. Lots of stuff you could do. Pickleball. People never talk about necrophilia playing pickleball. I don't think one time. I don't think one time. No, they all talk about how they're getting knee replacements. And that's the beauty of pickleball. Exactly.

• 7:30Robert 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. No, shout out to my landlord, Mr. Lou.

• 8:03Robert 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 per- 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 who assaulted them in the Bay Area and in LA. Yeah, no. Craigslist is a crapshoot, you know? Craigslist is a crapshoot, yeah. Every time. I always, I feel like the need to like qualify with like, this is just Ziz's account,

• 8:47Robert Evans?

  but also, this sounds like a lot of stories I know people have had.

• 8:51Speaker 01

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

• 8:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So she calls the, or he calls the cops on her and then, yeah, they do nothing and he attacks her in her bedroom that night. So she decides to like, he's like throwing a chair at her and shit. So she decides, I 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 rains badly.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Kind of like artists.

• 9:22Robert Evans?

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

• 10:07Robert Evans?

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

• 10:43Speaker 01

  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?

• 10:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  She had a strong resume, right? It wasn't.

• 10:53Robert 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 all in 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.

• 11:12Robert Evans?

  It's just, it's a, 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, you're dumb at plenty of things, Mr. Software Engineer.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, don't sell yourself short.

• 11:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 11:32Robert 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, I'm sure she had a variety of reasons. But as soon as she starts taking hormones, they have such a positive effect. She describes it as a hard to describe felt sense of cognitive benefits. And she decides to say, stay on them. By October, she'd committed to start writing a blog about her own feelings and theories on rationalism. And her model here was Yudkowski. She names this blog 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.

• 12:13Robert Evans?

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

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Like, right.

• 12:33Robert Evans?

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

• 12:39Speaker 01

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

• 12:41Robert 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.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  No.

• 13:14Robert Evans?

  Going down here.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Is she following this herself?

• 13:17Robert 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. They're stopping her from, you know, saving the cosmos.

• 13:29Robert Evans?

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

• 13:31Speaker 01

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

• 13:36Robert 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.

• 13:50Robert Evans?

  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 Gwynne, who at that point identified as a trans woman who now goes by Gwynne 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 Gwynne or Danielson, even though they went by a different name at this time, because that's what they're called now. Gwynne 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.

• 14:34Robert Evans?

  And each of these sides of your brain was like a whole like intact person, right? Like, great.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, no.

• 14:42Robert Evans?

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

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Oh, man, these poor people.

• 14:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So Ziz falls in love with Gwynne'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, 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.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Literally all that cult stuff, huh?

• 15:23Robert Evans?

  All that cult stuff.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  All that cult stuff.

• 15:26Robert 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.

• 15:45Robert Evans?

  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.

• 15:53Speaker 01

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

• 15:58Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 15:59Speaker 01

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

• 16:03Robert 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.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 01

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

• 16:19Robert Evans?

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

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:26Robert 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.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  That also goes along with the Bay Area.

• 16:53Robert Evans?

  That also goes along with the Bay Area.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Pills and powders are bigger.

• 16:57Robert 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."

• 17:10Robert 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!

• 17:27Speaker 01

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

• 17:30Robert Evans?

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

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Maybe no more pets for a while.

• 17:40Robert Evans?

  Maybe no more pets.

• 17:44Robert 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 ChatGPT came out a couple of years ago and everyone started talking about it. At this point, 2016, 17, it's only like real people who are really into the industry in a nerdy way who are using that frame. Like, regular people on the street don't know what you fucking mean when you're talking about this stuff. But this is a term that is in use among them. And like Ziz, Gwyn moved to the Bay Area to get involved in fixing the problem. They were an Otherkin. Are you familiar with this online community? Which one? Otherkin? Otherkin? No, I have no, I've never heard of that.

• 18:27Robert Evans?

  It's like a, it's like the Mormonism of freedom, almost, like- That's, that's, that's insane, what you said. I don't want to be, 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-

• 18:44Speaker 02

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

• 18:50Robert Evans?

  Right. Oh, like their furry persona is their true- 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. Tale as old as time, you know? Tale as old as time. Again, a lot of this could be avoided by just like, processing death and, uh, stuff like that a little better. But we don't do that very well in our society,

• 19:32Robert Evans?

  anyway. We've got a lot of people who are committed to denying that. Uh, 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? Yes.

• 19:48Robert Evans?

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

• 19:52Speaker 01

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

• 19:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, 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 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

• 20:38Robert 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, um, 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 uh, and from the restrictions of the Jedi and become vegan Sith. Um, that's, that's more or less uh, where things are going here. So I'd hear, I should note that while Gwyn and Ziz are spinning out on their own, everything that you're seeing from them, these feelings

• 21:22Robert Evans?

  of grandiosity and cosmic significance, but also paranoid obsession are the norm in rationalist and effective altruist circles. There's a great article in Bloomberg News by Ellen Hewitt. It discusses how many in the EA set would suffer paralyzing panic attacks over things like spending money on a nice dinner or buying ice cream, obsessing over how many people they'd killed by not better optimizing their expenses. And quote, "In extreme pockets of the rationality community, AI researchers believed their apocalypse-related stress was contributing to psychotic breaks." Miri Employee, and that's one of these organizations created by the, the- People around Yudkowsky, 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

• 22:07Robert Evans?

  suffering an AI might be able to inflict on people." At work, she says, "She and a small team of researchers believed, 'We might make God, but we might mess up and destroy everything.'" In 2017, she was hospitalized for three weeks with delusions that she was intrinsically evil and had "destroyed significant parts of the world with my demonic 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, the idea naturally followed from my day-to-day social environment and was central to my psychotic breakdown."

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 22:48Robert Evans?

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

• 22:54Speaker 01

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

• 22:56Robert Evans?

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

• 23:00Speaker 01

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

• 23:04Robert Evans?

  No, no, exactly, because it's this grandiosity, it's this absolute need to whatever else is going on, even if you're the bad guy, feel like what you're doing is of central cosmic significance. It's this fundamental fear that 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."

• 23:33Speaker 01

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

• 23:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, bro, sorry.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's just how it goes.

• 23:43Robert Evans?

  You know, we've got like 10,000 years of philosophy and 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.

• 23:59Speaker 01

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

• 24:02Robert Evans?

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

• 24:14Speaker 01

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

• 24:19Robert Evans?

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

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Oh, man. Honestly, well deserved.

• 24:25Robert Evans?

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

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 24:32Robert Evans?

  So I have to emphasize here, again, that 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, Ziz is not nearly as much of an outlier as a lot of rationalists want people to think.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:08Robert 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 Gwen 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

• 25:52Robert Evans?

  trying to get proof of address so you can get a job and like continue getting like, you know, get on Calimad 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, that influences the situation.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  And still in the process of transitioning, right?

• 26:18Robert Evans?

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

• 26:22Speaker 01

  It's a heavy workload.

• 26:23Robert Evans?

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

• 26:28Robert Evans?

  So, and then she makes the worst possible decision, which is to live with her friend Gwynn in her tiny sail, or 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.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Right, it's got a court, like, yeah, there, what is there? There's like a bed, a table, and a sink.

• 26:49Robert Evans?

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

• 26:54Speaker 02

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

• 27:05Robert Evans?

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

• 27:16Robert Evans?

  Just, just disastrous. Um, 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 Gwynn 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.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 28:01Speaker 01

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

• 28:05Robert Evans?

  It couldn't. And it's like, at this point, I don't think either of them is like intentionally doing anything bad. You've 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 boats.

• 28:25Speaker 01

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

• 28:28Robert 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.

• 29:12Robert 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, La Sota 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."

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Only the double goods.

• 29:53Robert 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.

• 30:03Robert 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." And which, of course, she is continuing to work out her theories with Gwen on the sailboat.

• 30:36Speaker 01

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

• 30:38Robert Evans?

  It's really not freedom.

• 30:40Speaker 01

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

• 30:45Robert 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 that 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 gonna work a job for a company, you're gonna spend a large part of your day doing a thing that like you wouldn't be doing otherwise, right? Because that's what a job generally is.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  It's just work.

• 31:15Robert 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

• 31:58Robert Evans?

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

• 32:43Robert 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? Because 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-

• 33:18Speaker 01

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

• 33:19Robert Evans?

  Yes, it's an engine for making cults.

• 33:21Speaker 01

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

• 33:25Robert Evans?

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

• 33:29Speaker 01

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

• 33:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And a lot of prominent rationalists who newses 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-

• 33:49Speaker 01

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

• 33:54Robert Evans?

  No, that's all of them, right? That's the whole community. And like Anna was emailing direct, gave the, gave Ziz like some of the advice that Ziz considered like key to her moving to the Bay Area and stuff, right? Like these, these, 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, 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

• 34:36Robert Evans?

  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 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 going to read a quote.

• 35:03Speaker 02

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

• 35:11Robert Evans?

  It's it's never drops too far below the surface. I cannot over emphasize how important this Harry Potter fan fiction is to all these murders.

• 35:19Speaker 01

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

• 35:20Robert Evans?

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

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Jesus.

• 36:04Robert 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 girl should have sex with adult men. Good stuff.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  I gotta say.

• 36:14Robert Evans?

  Rational.

• 36:15Speaker 01

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

• 36:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, to get chicks.

• 36:20Speaker 01

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

• 36:24Robert Evans?

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

• 36:35Robert Evans?

  Cool.

• 36:38Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. As that Bloomberg article makes clear, this is not an isolated issue within rationalism. Quote, sexual harassment and abuse are distressing are distressingly common. According to interviews with eight women at all levels of the community, many young ambitious women described a similar trajectory that 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.

• 37:21Robert 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?

• 37:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that feels very techy.

• 37:36Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Ah, man.

• 37:39Robert 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?

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Yo, to say that.

• 37:50Robert Evans?

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

• 37:54Speaker 01

  That shit's vile.

• 37:56Robert Evans?

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• 39:08Robert 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 breaks away with a small loyal group of friends, and she does create a physical situation that much more resembles the kind of cults we're used to dealing with, particularly Scientology. Because next, she's going to take, oh wow, me and Gwyn, living alone on this boat, we kinda 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

• 39:49Robert Evans?

  make this a bigger thing, right? Maybe we should get a bunch of rationalists all living together on boats.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Ah, she needs a work-life balance.

• 40:00Robert Evans?

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

• 40:16Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 40:18Robert Evans?

  So, great.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  And I get it, right?

• 40:21Robert Evans?

  No, of course.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  It's expensive here, I wanna get some boats with my friends, it does sound cool.

• 40:26Robert 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.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  No, no, like a full-

• 40:43Robert Evans?

  Not a good living boat?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Like a full boat?

• 40:46Robert Evans?

  Like a 24-foot boat, yes, a full boat.

• 40:50Speaker 01

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

• 40:53Robert Evans?

  It should be a shitty, shitty boat.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Just a colossal piece of shit.

• 40:56Robert Evans?

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

• 41:25Speaker 01

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

• 41:28Robert Evans?

  Right, right, that's our flagship.

• 41:32Robert 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.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  He's boat adjacent.

• 41:44Robert 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 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.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Like, comically so, like, known to be a ter-

• 42:17Robert Evans?

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

• 42:28Robert 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-

• 42:35Speaker 01

  I think slumlord was correct.

• 42:37Robert 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?

• 42:50Robert Evans?

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

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Oh, man. Oh, man. When?

• 42:57Robert Evans?

  Holy shit.

• 42:57Speaker 01

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

• 43:01Robert Evans?

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

• 43:30Speaker 01

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

• 43:34Robert 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?

• 43:47Robert Evans?

  Talk about our ideas while we live on a boat.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 43:52Robert Evans?

  So again.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  These people need space.

• 43:53Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Just get a warehouse.

• 43:56Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  It's Oakland.

• 43:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Just get a warehouse.

• 43:58Robert Evans?

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

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Fair, fair, fair.

• 44:04Robert 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. Uh, 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.

• 44:48Robert Evans?

  Guys, you just, you simply can't have this here.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  So they just gotta operate out and enter national waters like a cruise ship?

• 44:54Robert Evans?

  No, they're just kind of illegally anchoring places and hoping that it's fine and periodically getting boarded over it. Another crew member on the ride down from Alaska, who is just kind of there, they, they're just there, you know, for the adventure. So they, they, 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. Uh, at one point, he says that she confronted him and told him he was transgender. And when he's like, no, I'm, I'm really not.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  She told him he was.

• 45:24Robert 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. Um, but she also, it doesn't work a lot of time. A lot of people are like, no, I'm, I'm not, you know, whatever it is you're saying. She does this to Gwynn too, so I, 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, a significant pull to just kind of accept whatever Ziz is saying about them.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:11Robert 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."

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:49Robert Evans?

  Wired continues, "As Lasota articulated, their goals had moved beyond real estate into a more grandiose realm. We are built, 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."

• 47:13Speaker 01

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

• 47:18Robert 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 the, and manipulates these like lesser, like fools and, 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.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 47:39Robert Evans?

  We have to make ourselves into Ricky Gervais sociopaths?

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:43Robert Evans?

  Great. What a good ideology.

• 47:48Speaker 01

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

• 47:51Robert 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.

• 47:58Speaker 01

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

• 48:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 48:02Speaker 01

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

• 48:03Robert 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?

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is clearly like, like a cousin.

• 48:21Robert Evans?

  Yes, someone.

• 48:23Speaker 01

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

• 48:29Robert Evans?

  Like Ricky Gervais?

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, Ricky.

• 48:38Robert 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

• 49:20Robert 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... And these are all double goods as well. 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? Like, no matter what? It was like blind support, right? Blind support, no matter what. And a lot of the language Ziz is using here, in addition to being, you know, rationalist

• 50:03Robert Evans?

  language, this is all like Scientology mixed with gaming and fantasy media. She talks about the need to install new mental tech on she and her friends, which is like, tech is like a Scientology term, right? Like, that's like a big thing that they say. She and her circle start dressing differently. Ziz starts wearing like all black robes and stuff to make her look like a Sith or some sort of wizard. Her community adopts the name Vegan Anarcho-Transhumanism and starts unironically referring to themselves as Vegan Sith. Man, imagine being in a boat community when they move in. Yeah, just like... What the fuck is going on? I just wanted that. I'm just an alcoholic. What's happening? Yeah. I just wanted to be like Quint from Jaws. Oh, no.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  I'm just here because my wife left.

• 50:50Robert Evans?

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

• 50:55Speaker 01

  Yikes.

• 50:56Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. So around this time, Gwen 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."

• 51:41Robert 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.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  That's so funny.

• 51:51Robert Evans?

  Because it's something space marines do.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Because, yeah, what are you talking about?

• 51:55Robert Evans?

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

• 51:57Speaker 01

  What are you talking about?

• 51:59Robert 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.

• 52:21Speaker 01

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

• 52:26Robert Evans?

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

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Furiously taking notes.

• 52:35Robert 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 unihemispheric sleep is to jailbreak the mind into psychopathy, fully, right? And Ziz is, that's how Ziz describes it.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  That's the goal.

• 53:19Robert Evans?

  That's the goal.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  That's their goal.

• 53:21Robert Evans?

  We've got to make ourselves into psychopaths so we can save the world. But it also gets used, you can use it to like, I have this thing, I don't like that I react this way in this situation. So get me into this sleep pattern 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.

• 54:06Robert Evans?

  But a lot of the language around how this tactic was used and what it was supposed to do came from Ziz. And again, the process is just sleep deprivation, right? This is cult stuff. It's part of how cults brainwash people, but it also wouldn't have seemed inherently suspicious to rationalists because part of that subculture, part of 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

• 54:47Robert Evans?

  minds to crack open their consciousness and make them more influential or agentic. Several people in 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 like consciously hack their brains using a mix of like drugs and meditation and like social abuse and people kill themselves as a result of like the outcomes of this. This is already a problem in the mainstream subculture.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, let alone this extremist offshoot, right?

• 55:19Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm. 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 a new theory Ziz has. That's basically like, she uses the term mana, which she describes as like, your ability to persuade people, which is if you can convince someone of something, it's evidence that you have an inherent level of like magical power. And someone with naturally high mana, like Ziz, can literally mind control people with low mana. That's what she believes she's doing. Whenever she like, tries to talk someone into something about themselves, is she's mind controlling them. And she and Gwyn have mind control battles. At one point, they start having like, one of these arguments,

• 56:02Robert Evans?

  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 were going to defend a right to be attacking me on some level, and treat fighting back as a new aggression and cause to escalate, I would not at any point back down. And if our conflicting definitions of the ground state, where no further retaliation was necessary, meant that we were consigned to a runaway, positive feedback loop of revenge, so be it. And if that was true, we might as well try to kill each other right then and there.

• 56:48Robert Evans?

  In the darkness of the Calip'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-

• 57:07Speaker 01

  And there's other people there as well.

• 57:09Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 57:12Robert Evans?

  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.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  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, yeah, really taking some leaps.

• 57:49Robert 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?

• 57:59Speaker 01

  Ancestors guide me.

• 58:04Robert 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?

• 58:28Speaker 01

  So then her man must be.

• 58:30Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  What she thinks it is.

• 58:32Robert 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. 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 Gdanskiewicz 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.

• 59:13Speaker 01

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

• 59:16Robert Evans?

  Right. And maybe the community is 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.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Is this a thing that can exist a lot of places like?

• 59:32Robert 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.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Right, fair.

• 59:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like, that's, that's always possible.

• 59:44Robert Evans?

  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, Gwyn's theory about hemispheric personalities. In one of her most direct cult leader moments, Gwyn, 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.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

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

• 1:00:09Robert Evans?

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

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

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

• 1:00:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they're true companions.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  True companions, okay.

• 1:00:21Robert Evans?

  At this point. Or 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. And Ziz is kind of like coaching her through the process.

• 1:01:04Robert Evans?

  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?

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

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

• 1:01:37Robert Evans?

  Right, 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 trowse 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." And this is the first death directly related to Ziz's 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,

• 1:02:20Robert Evans?

  a low-value individual, it's better for them to kill themselves, right? Is that like of higher net value to the world? And it was also used as like a threat to stop women who were abused by figures in the community from speaking 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,

• 1:03:01Robert Evans?

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

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, because you're taking them, man. Yeah.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  Shit.

• 1:03:22Robert 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.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

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

• 1:03:44Robert 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?

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, not not identify as a vegan Sith like it.

• 1:03:54Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Because 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?

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

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

• 1:04:26Robert Evans?

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

• 1:04:31Speaker 04

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• 1:05:31Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So I'm just going to conclude this little story and then we'll end the episode for the day. So. This person, Maya, has likely killed themselves at the start of 2018. And Ziz reacts to this suicide in her usual manner. She blogs about it. She took from what had happened, not that like, debucketting 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 comes up with a name for this.

• 1:06:16Robert Evans?

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

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

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

• 1:06:34Robert Evans?

  I think you might have been the doom here.

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

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

• 1:06:45Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  A person's like...

• 1:06:49Robert Evans?

  To explain your theories.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

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

• 1:06:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And she thinks, she comes to the conclusion, it's a particular danger to explain, 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.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

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

• 1:07:22Robert Evans?

  Well, it, 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.

• 1:07:37Robert Evans?

  Yep. Good stuff.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:40Robert Evans?

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

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:07:54Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  And I'm also pretty interested because this is crazy, but I'm okay. I'll be all right.

• 1:08:01Robert Evans?

  Great.

• 1:08:04Robert 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.

• 1:08:30Speaker 07

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedi.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 slash at Behind the Bastards.

• 1:08:55Speaker 04

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• 1:09:23Speaker 06

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