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)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, 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

(00:22):
doing it against Microsoft because I fucking hate co Pilot.
With me to talk about how much we hate Microsoft
co Pilot, my producer Sophie Lichterman, and our wonderful guest
David Borie. David, how do you feel about Microsoft co pilot?

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Ah Rambo three, let's go okay, okay, okay, kill a
ton of brown people. Well, no, I mean this one.

Speaker 1 (00:44):
We're just it's just like Microsoft co pilots were killing Okay,
all of them are not really people.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
It's so bad.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
Outlook is terrible. Microsoft has really gone far off of
making a lot of products that people hate to use.

Speaker 3 (01:00):
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 watched it. Know where we're
starting on this story is page twenty one of the
script and where we d The script is page forty nine.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
WHOA, I I made a mistake in doing this. I'm
gonna admit that right now before we get further, I'm
gonna say I aired in this. And it's you know,
I've made peace with the inevitability of fucking stuff up,
especially when like every week you're doing a different chunk
of history and we're veering from like we're talking about

(01:39):
fucking seventeenth and eighteenth century France and then like now
we're talking about like a fucking guy you to a
genocide and 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 comes to like I'm talking
about I'm talking about like not obviously those are important,

(02:03):
but you know, if I fuck up some fact about
like early nineteen hundreds Germany, I'm not going to 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

(02:24):
like I like 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 everybody
in this story has a blog, and every blog post
is like forty thousand words.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
So it's just like, now, say, what media are you
able to get this?

Speaker 1 (02:42):
Is?

Speaker 2 (02:42):
You're getting this all straight from the source, right.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
A lot of it's I mean I read, I've read
most of Zizz'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 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

(03:07):
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 come and
obviously these folks like nasty work, yes, yes, and I'm
deeply great, Well, we'll have source links at everything in here.
I note when I'm kind of like pulling something from

(03:29):
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 is crazy shit was going on, it's
a little it's kind of impossible to like get everything

(03:50):
you need to get. You have to refer to these
interior sources. It's just the only way to actually understand stuff.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
Oh yeah, I as an out cider, I don't know
what's going on. I don't know where it's going for sure.
I don't know where it's going.

Speaker 1 (04:07):
It's going, we know where it ends, which you know
it ends. A member of Congress shows up at the
library in Vermont that the US and Canada shares because
a border patrol agent was murdered there and 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

(04:30):
that Alicia Jedkowski wrote a piece of Harry Potter fan.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
Fiction, Love it all goes back to that.

Speaker 1 (04:35):
Yes, yes, it all comes back to bad Harry Potter
fan fiction. So part three. We spent last episode talking
about zizz Is moving to the Bay and their first
interactions with the rationalist community. That big Sea Far conference

(04:56):
they went to that was very reminiscent, had a lot
of exercises reminiscent of like sin and on ship.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
Right, very very a lot of talking murder, Yes, a
lot of talk a murder.

Speaker 1 (05:07):
These people love theorizing about when it's okay to kill people.
Constant factor at all of this, which.

Speaker 2 (05:15):
Is can't be a step in a good direction.

Speaker 1 (05:18):
Yeah, you know, you should. You should be aware of
There'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.

Speaker 2 (05:32):
If someone sits down next to you and says, how
would you murder me? Or whatever? This right? You always
got to get out of that room.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
Yeah you want to, You want to, You want to
leave immediately.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
And even more if they're like, yeah, that's the right way,
even worse sign.

Speaker 1 (05:48):
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,
leap bad.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
This is not a.

Speaker 1 (06:00):
Crew you want to be a part of.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, maybe just take a pickleball or so pickleball.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
People never talk about necrophilia playing pickleball.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
I don't think one time. I don't think one time.

Speaker 1 (06:12):
No, they all talk about how they're getting knee replacements.
And that's the beauty of pickleball exactly. 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

(06:33):
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 I'm not spreading any news
to you. Shout out to my landlord, mister lou.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
So.

Speaker 1 (06:54):
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 in this part.
Like I obviously I've got one side of this story,
but her claim is that it ends in physical violence.
Ziz claims he was to blame, but she also describes
a situation where they're like, after a big argument, bump
into each other and he calls the cops on her

(07:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:27):
And then La chrislist is a crap shoot. Craigslist is
a crap shoot.

Speaker 1 (07:32):
Yeah, every time I always I feel like they need
to like qualify with like this is just Hisz's account,
But also this sounds like a lot of stories I
know people have had.

Speaker 2 (07:41):
Yeah, it's tough to get by there.

Speaker 1 (07:44):
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 got to get out of this
terrible fucking sublet, and unfortunately, her next best option, a
very common thing in the rationalist community, is to have

(08:05):
whole houses rented out that you fill with rationalists who
don't have a lot of money. It never rents by
the artists yet kind of like artists or like content
producer houses, it never explodes. People never have horrible times
in these. This particular rationalist house is called liminal because

(08:25):
you know, gen Z loves talking about their liminal spaces
on the Internet. One resident of the house reacts very
negatively when Ziz identifies herself as a non transitioning trans
woman and basically asks like, when are you going to leave?
So she has, you know, she says that as soon
as she arrives one of the other residents's transphobes, she
can't stay there very long. Again, all sounds like a

(08:47):
very familiar Bay Area housing situation story. She bounces around
some short term solutions airbnbs, moving constantly while trying to
find work. She gets an interview with Google, but the
hiring process there is slow. There's a lot of different
stages to it, and it doesn't offer immediate relief from
her financial issues. Other potential offers fall through as she
conflicts with the fundamental snake oiliness of this era of

(09:09):
Silicon Valley development. Ziz blames 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

(09:30):
laundry better, which is like a third of the bay.

Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah, right, yeah, And once again she has like flashes
of like, oh, wow, you really you really have strong
morals in all the naim Yeah, she's a strong resume, right,
it wasn't she does.

Speaker 1 (09:45):
She wants like an award as a NASA intern, right
she's still ye, yeah, she really is good at a
lot of this stuff. In all of these Zizians, as
silly as their their beliefs about philosophy and like cognitive
science are, they're all extremely a comp in their fields. Nearly.
It's a it's good evidence of the fact that like

(10:05):
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're you're, you're, you're dumb at plenty of things, mister
software engineer.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
I don't sell yourself.

Speaker 1 (10:19):
Sure. Yeah, So she does start to transition during this
period of time. She goes on finasteride, which helps to
avoid male pattern baldness, and she starts experimenting with estrogen
and anti androgens. She'd wanted to avoid this for I'm
sure she had a variety of reasons, but as soon
as she starts taking hormones they have such a positive effect.

(10:40):
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 belief about like veganism and such. Her first articles

(11:03):
are like pretty bland. It's the 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 two hundred grand, you could have
just gotten a philosophy degree, and right, that would have
made you happy. Like, right, you just wanted to spend

(11:25):
a couple of years talking through silly ideas based on
dead Greek.

Speaker 2 (11:29):
Guys, Well, you know the Bay is the place to
do that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (11:32):
Well, unfortunately, so she starts to really show an interest
early on though, and this is where things get unsettling
and 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 b Minder, which lets
you set goals and punish yourself with a financial bit
penalty if you don't make regular progress. And she's really

(11:55):
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 going down?

Speaker 2 (12:05):
Here is she.

Speaker 1 (12:07):
Following this herself, Like she's working on she's trying to
use some of these tactics on herself to make herself
to deal with like what she sees is her flaws
that's stopping her from you know, saving the cosmos. Great stuff.
I've brought pressure to put on yourself.

Speaker 2 (12:22):
Yeah, this poor woman has been under the highest stakes
this whole time.

Speaker 1 (12:27):
Well, and that's again that that comes. That's not Zizz,
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 will 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.

(12:49):
So right around this time, she's bouncing around short term
rentals and like desperately trying to get work. She meets
a person named Jasper Wynn, who at that point identified
as a trans woman. Now those by Gwynn Danielson and
uses by them pronouns. That's what I'm gonna refer to them,
But for clarity's sake, I'm gonna call them Gwynn or Danielson,
even though they went by a different name at this time,
because that's what they're called now. Gwinn was a fan

(13:12):
of Zizz's blog and had some complex rationalist theories of
her own. They came to believe that each person had
multiple personalities stored inside their brain, a sort of like
mutation of the left brain right brain hypothesis, and each
of these sides of your brain was like a whole,
like intact person, right, Like great, yeah, no, cool, No,

(13:34):
you guys are gonna be fucking with your head's real heart. Great.

Speaker 2 (13:37):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:40):
So Ziz falls in love with Gwynn'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

(14:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
Literally all that cold stuff, huh.

Speaker 1 (14:14):
All that colt stuff, all that cold stuff. Now, Gwynn
and Ziz largely like bonded over their struggle paying Bay
Area rints, 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

(14:36):
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't afford to live in the bay.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
My little brother went to school right right outside of
San Francisco, and his principal lived on a boat right
just like a mile away from the school, and everybody
loved it.

Speaker 1 (14:54):
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.

Speaker 2 (15:04):
Yeah, it feels like you would be dank. I guess
is the word.

Speaker 1 (15:10):
Dank is a good description of boat life, I think.

Speaker 2 (15:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:16):
So Gwinn's boat was anchored off the Encenal 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,

(15:37):
there's a lot of like ketamine and stuff being used
to that isn't written into the narrative.

Speaker 2 (15:42):
That also goes along with it, also.

Speaker 1 (15:45):
Goes along with the Bay Area pills and powers are bigger. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (15:50):
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. Fucking These are just people doing great,
very healthy from the opposite of what you want a
kid to learn when their pet dies. Is like, yeah,

(16:10):
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 wars death.

Speaker 2 (16:18):
No. They were like, no, no, no, I can fix this.

Speaker 1 (16:21):
Okay, I, as a parent have failed in this situation.
This was an unsuccessful step in my child's development. Maybe
no more pets for a while, Maybe no more pets.
Gwynn 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

(16:44):
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 two
sixteen seventeen. 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.

(17:05):
And like Ziz Gwynn moved to the Bay Area to
get involved in fixing the problem. They were another kin,
are you familiar with this online community?

Speaker 2 (17:13):
Which one other kin? Other kin, No, I have no,
I've never heard of that.

Speaker 1 (17:18):
It's like a it's like the Mormonism of furreedom almost like.

Speaker 2 (17:22):
That that's that's the same you say, I.

Speaker 1 (17:25):
Don't mean 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.

Speaker 3 (17:33):
Some of them just like yeah to be like yeah,
like half identify as like it a non human creature, right.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
Oh, like their furry persona is they're true?

Speaker 3 (17:44):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (17:44):
Yeah, kind of that's close enough for government work, and
in Gwin'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. 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

(18:05):
so they'll be able to get their animal friends back
and get their dragon body.

Speaker 2 (18:09):
Tilt time tail as old as time. Again.

Speaker 1 (18:13):
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 anyway.
We've got a lot of people who are committed to
denying that. So I'm not surprised like this happens at
like the corners right Like this is this is just
a little downstream from that Brian Johnson guy tracking his

(18:34):
erections at night and trying to get the penis of
a nineteen year old.

Speaker 2 (18:37):
Yeah, like.

Speaker 1 (18:40):
A massive sanity gap between these two things.

Speaker 2 (18:43):
No, it's I think I think it's I think we're
drinking from the same Well.

Speaker 1 (18:47):
Yeah, yeah, so this is a result or so, Zizz
commits herself to turning Gwynn 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 It's called acrasia. Akrasia is an
actual Greek term for a lack of will power that
leads someone to act in ways that take them further

(19:07):
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 crib from Star Wars. She decides that

(19:29):
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 prison for someone who's like
truly great and has the opportunity to accomplish important goals. Right,
if you're that kind of person, you can't afford to
be limited by moral beliefs. So in order to achieve
the kind of vegan singularity that she thinks is critical

(19:51):
to save the cosmos, she and her fellow rationalists need
to free themselves and from the restrictions of the Jedi
and become vegan scyth. That's more or less where things
are going here. So here I should note that while
Gwynnin's's are spinning out on their own, everything that you're

(20:12):
seeing from them, these feelings of grandiosity and cosmic significance,
but also paranoid obsession are the norm and rationalist in
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

(20:34):
their expenses, and quote in extreme pockets of the rationality community,
AI researchers believe their apocalypse related stress was contributing to
psychotic breaks. Marie employee, and that's one of these organizations
created by the people around Yakowski Jessica Taylor had a
job that sometimes involved imagining extreme AI torture scenarios. As

(20:55):
she described it in a post on Less Wrong, the
worst possible suffering in AI might be able to people
at work, she says, she in a small team of
researchers believed we might make God, but we might make
mess up and destroy everything. In twenty seventeen, she was
hospitalized for three weeks with delusions that she was intrinsically
evil and had destroyed significant parts of the world with

(21:15):
my demonic powers, she wrote in her post. Although she
acknowledged taking psychedelics for therapeutic reasons, she also attributed the
delusions to her job's blurring of nightmare scenarios. In real life,
in an ordinary patient, having fantasies about being the devil
is considered megalomania, She wrote here. The idea naturally followed
from my day to day social environment and was central
to my psychotic breakdown. Oh nah, just taking ketamine and

(21:41):
convincing yourself you're the devil, normal rationalist stuff.

Speaker 2 (21:44):
Yeah, I mean, hey, we've all been there, right, We've
been there now. In fact, no, this is the least
relatable group of people I've ever heard of.

Speaker 1 (21:55):
No, no, exactly, because it's this like grandiosity, it's this
absolutely 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

(22:17):
very few of the things that you valued in your
life are going to exist, and there's still going to
be a world because that's life.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
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 going to happen.

Speaker 1 (22:31):
Yeah, bro, sorry, Yeah, that's just how that's just how
it goes. You know, we've got like ten thousand years
of like philosophy and like like thinking and writing on
the subject of dealing with this, but you didn't take
any humanities and your STEM classes, so you know, you're
just trying to bootstrap it.

Speaker 2 (22:48):
Yeah, you just watched Star Wars again and decided you
got it figure it out.

Speaker 1 (22:53):
Yeah, you watch Star Wars one hundred and thirty seven
times and figured that was going to your a place
reading a little bit of fucking Plato or something. Maybe
it didn't work. Also, again the ketamines not helping. No, no, no, no, God,
to be a fly on that wall, oh god. Yeah,
the rationalist therapists are raking it in.

Speaker 2 (23:14):
Oh man, honestly well deserved.

Speaker 1 (23:16):
But yeah, some talk about info hazards.

Speaker 2 (23:20):
Jesus.

Speaker 1 (23:23):
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 in like more extreme than mainstream rationalism,
is directly related to shit going on in the mainstream

(23:43):
rationalist community, which is deeply tied into big tech, which
is deeply tied into like the Peter Teal 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. Right Yeah, anyway,
At Rationalists meetups, Ziz began to pushing this whole Vegan

(24:04):
syth 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 past every
stage of the process, but that it keeped getting dragged out,
forcing her to ask her parents for more help. In November,
around the time her blog started to get a following,

(24:24):
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 twenty six, and she's not on her parents'
health insurance either. She's been pages describing what is a
very familiar nightmare scenario to me of like trying to
get proof of address so you can get a job

(24:45):
and life continue getting like, you know, get on Cali
med and stuff. And I do think it's probably worth
acknowledging that, Like, as her brain is starting to break
and she's 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.

Speaker 2 (25:04):
And like that that influences the situation. And still in
the process of transitioning, right.

Speaker 1 (25:09):
Yes, yes, exactly, And still in that process of transitioning. Yes,
a heavy workload, you're doing too much to your brain, right, yes, so,
and then she makes the worst possible decision, which is
to live with her friend Gwynn in her tiny sail
in their tiny sailboat which is now anchored by the
Berkeley Marina. Again, this is not like a houseboat. This

(25:31):
is like a sailboat with one small room.

Speaker 2 (25:34):
Right, it's got a court like yeah, there's like a bed,
a table in a.

Speaker 1 (25:39):
Sink, writing, like a little bathroom probably maybe a kitchenette.

Speaker 2 (25:43):
But it's not like livable for two people.

Speaker 3 (25:46):
Somebody who's like ever lived into small space with your
roommate knows just like, no matter.

Speaker 2 (25:53):
Where you're at, it's horrible, bad idea.

Speaker 1 (25:56):
And imagine if that's shitty tidy apart meant that you
remember from your past was a boat just disastrous and
this is not a good situation. This 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

(26:17):
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 Gwynnon's's have endured
some specific traumas, and both are also prone to flights
of grandiosity and delusion. And now they are trapped all day,

(26:38):
every day together in a single room where their various
neurosis are clashing with each other and their only relief
is talking for hours about how to save the world.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
Oh my god, this is a it's a real villain story.
You couldn't get any worse than this.

Speaker 1 (26:56):
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.

Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah, how often do you think they were leaving that boat.

Speaker 1 (27:19):
Not nearly long enough, and Gwynn 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

(27:40):
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 Gwinn's multiple personalities theory, mixing in
some of Zizz's own beliefs about good and evil. And
I want to quote another passage from that Wired article
that's summarizes what they come to believe about this. A

(28:03):
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 with Lesoda identified
in herself and this 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,

(28:25):
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,
this's attitude is going to be like, only intrinsically good
people can be trusted to make good decisions, only the
double goods, only the double goods. That's such like a

(28:46):
you know, you're making your own lig or well speech.
This this is a bad sign. Yeah, so, Zizz is
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.

(29:10):
Ziz concludes failing at Google was good because she's gotten
she'd gotten ten thousand dollars 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 Gwynn on the sailboat. Also,
that's freedom, It's really not freedom.

Speaker 2 (29:30):
I maybe work. I heard the Google campus has a
lot of things to do, and it's.

Speaker 1 (29:36):
The kind of the what if. I think maybe at
this point she still could have pulled out of this
tailspin if she'd gotten a job and worked around other
people and socialized not on the sailboat, but also a
real consistent thing with Zizz is at this point she
has no willingness to do the kind of compromise. And
I'm not just talking about the moral compromise, but like,

(29:56):
even 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,
because that's what a job generally, that's just work. And
Ziz feels like she can't handle the idea of doing
anything but reading fan fiction and theorizing about how to
give herself superpowers. Right, that's the most important thing in

(30:16):
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

(30:37):
quaou Chu Yuan, a former rationalist and PhD candidate who
dropped out of his PhD program in order to work
in AI risk. He stopped saving for retirement and cut
off his friends so he could donate all of his
money to you know, EA causes and because his friends
were distracting him from saving the world. And these are
all this all cult stuff, right. Cults want you to

(30:58):
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 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.

Speaker 2 (31:18):
Right.

Speaker 1 (31:19):
In an interview with Business Insider, Yan 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.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
Man.

Speaker 1 (31:34):
That's yeah, that's kind of a thing. It's harder to
talk about this than like could people talk about Ziz
as like, oh, it's a cult leader and she had
her you know, Vegan trans Ai death cult or something,
and you know, I feel like that's not close enough
to the truth to get what's like to get how
this happened, right, because what happens with Ziz is very cultish.

(31:58):
But Ziz is one of a number of different people
who have cabbed off of the rationalism community and had
disastrous impacts. But it happens constantly with these people because.

Speaker 2 (32:08):
Like it's such an engine for it.

Speaker 1 (32:10):
Yes, it's an engine for making cults.

Speaker 2 (32:12):
It's it's this is a cult factory for sure.

Speaker 1 (32:16):
Yeah, you'reating a cult factory.

Speaker 2 (32:18):
Oh no, I give you the base ideas and then
you can just kind of franchise it how you'd like.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
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 claim, is there anyone here.

Speaker 2 (32:41):
Who doesn't want that?

Speaker 1 (32:43):
Within this No, that's all of them, right, that's the
whole community. And like Anna was emailing directly gave that
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 are
really really want you to think that this was just
like some fringe person. But she's very much tied in

(33:05):
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 to until twenty eighteen, But this

(33:25):
is a problem people were discussing in twenty seventeen 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. Sonya was fourteen
when she first read Yadkowski'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

(33:48):
to get involved in the rationalist EA set. And she's
focused on the field of AI risk And I'm going
to read it a quote.

Speaker 3 (33:54):
This week has been so long that I completely erased
the Harry Potter part of this story from my brain.

Speaker 1 (34:01):
It's never drops too far below the surface. I cannot
overemphasize how important this Harry Potter fan fiction is to
all these murders. I mean primary texts and getting abused. Yes, yes,
it's a primary text of the movement. Wow, I'm going
to read a quote from that Bloomberg article. Sonia was
encouraged when she was twenty two to have dinner with

(34:22):
a fortyish startup founder in the rationalist sphere because he
had a close connection to Peter Teal. At dinner, the
man bragg that Yudkowski had moderate modeled a core Harry
Potter like fit professor in that fanfic on him. Joseph
says that he also argued that it was normal for
a twelve year old girl to have sexual relationships with
adult men, and that such relationships were a noble way

(34:43):
of transferring knowledge to a younger generation. Then, she says
he followed her home and insisted on staying over. She
says he slept on the floor of her living room
and that she felt unsafe until he left in the morning. Jesus,
so great. You know, bragging about your Harry Potter, how
you helped inspire the Harry Potter fan, and then explaining
how twelve year old girls should have sex with adult men.

Speaker 2 (35:03):
Good stuff.

Speaker 1 (35:04):
I got rational.

Speaker 2 (35:06):
I gotta say that's a crazy brag to get chicks. Yeah, no,
it was, you know, one of those characters. I'm the snape.

Speaker 1 (35:15):
Yeah, I'm the snape of this. By the way, what
do you think about twelve year olds? Awesome? I have
a close connection to Peter Teel.

Speaker 2 (35:23):
Yeah. Cool o man.

Speaker 1 (35:30):
As that Bloomberg article makes clear, this is not an
isolated issue within rationalism.

Speaker 2 (35:34):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
Sexual harassment and abuse or 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 to attending parties at
EA or rationalist group houses, or getting added to jargon
filled Facebook messenger chat groups with hundreds of like minded people.

(35:56):
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 and a hot twenty year old's body.
Relationships with much older men were common, as was polyamory.
Now there was inherently harmful, but several women say those
norms became tools to help influential older men get more partners.

(36:18):
And this is also this isn't just rationalism, that is
the California ideology. That is the Bay Area tech set, right, yeah,
very techy. Yes, a man, and it's all super fucking
gross the whole year a five year old and a
hot twenty year old's body thing.

Speaker 2 (36:36):
What the fuck? Man?

Speaker 1 (36:41):
How do you say that? Not hurl yourself off of
the San Francisco Bay Bridge?

Speaker 2 (36:46):
Vile?

Speaker 1 (36:47):
That's fucked up, dude, that's bad speaking of bad to
the bone are sponsors? 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

(37:08):
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

(37:29):
Oh wow, me and Gwnn living alone on this boat.
We kind of hate each other and neither of us
is sleeping, and our emotional health is terrible. But we've
made so many much progress on our ideas. Maybe we
should Maybe we should make this a bigger thing, right,
Maybe we should get a bunch of rationalists all living
together on boats.

Speaker 2 (37:50):
She needs a work life balance.

Speaker 3 (37:52):
Yeah, no, no.

Speaker 1 (37:53):
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 boat bats 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. Oh man, so great, and.

Speaker 2 (38:11):
I get it right. It's expensive here. I want to
get some boats with my friends. It does sound cool.

Speaker 1 (38:17):
We won't go insane together, obviously, you know. She buys
a twenty four foot boat for six hundred dollars off
of Craigslist. And I don't know what you have boats,
but I know you're not getting a good one for
just six hundred dollars. No. No, like a living boat,
like a full boat, like a foot boat. Yes, a

(38:40):
full boat.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
Oh man, that had to be a piece of shit,
to be a shitty, shitty, colossal piece of shit. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:48):
She names it the Black Signet, and she starts trying
to convince some of her idea a lot of 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 going to
be like the center of their fleet, a seventy year
old Navy tug boat named the Caleb, which was anchored
in Alaska. This is like a ninety four foot boat.

(39:09):
It's a sizable boat, and it is also very old
and in terrible shape. That's the that's the crown jewel
of the food right right, that's our flagship. So man
Danielson sale, they buy this thing with this third guy,
Dan Powell, who's at least a navy veteran, So like,

(39:31):
you know, okay, that boot calls boat adjacent, but he's
I get the feeling. Nobody says this, but David 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

(39:54):
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 comically,
so like known to nothing depreciates like fucking raw salmon
depreciates slower than a boat. I think his attitude is

(40:21):
I'm going to become like the slumlord of a bunch
of or at least landlord to a bunch of boat rationalists.

Speaker 2 (40:26):
But I think correct.

Speaker 1 (40:28):
I don't know how you expect this to pay off
seventy year old tug boat for a bunch of like
poor rationalists, punk kids to live in. Who was that
ever supposed to work? What's the P and L statement
you put together here?

Speaker 2 (40:49):
What was the what was the timeline on him getting
his money back?

Speaker 1 (40:52):
He thought, Oh god, I have no idea. He absolutely
takes a bath on this ship, right, yeah, he claims,
And I belie leave 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

(41:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (41:21):
Wait, oh, I didn't realize he sailed it down from Alaska.

Speaker 1 (41:26):
Yeah, they all sail it together, them and a couple
other rationalists that they pick up. They make a post
on the internet being like, hey, any irrationalists want to
sail a boat down from Alaska, talk about our ideas
while we live on a boat.

Speaker 2 (41:41):
Oh man, so these people need space, yes, just get
a warehouse.

Speaker 1 (41:47):
Yes, yeah, Well the ghost ship fire had happened by
that point, so I don't think warehouse space was easy
to get. Yeah, but this, I think this would have
I think you're right. In an earlier era, they have
just wound up living in like a warehouse and maybe
all died in the horrible fire because that there were
issues with that kind of life too, but they would

(42:08):
have been an option besides the boat thing. Anyway, the
Caleb is not in good shape.

Speaker 2 (42:12):
Again.

Speaker 1 (42:12):
This boat is seventy plus years old. It is only
livable by punk standards, and while it was large enough
it is a ninety four 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
three thousand gallons of incredibly toxic diesel fuel and it's
not really seaworthy, which means there's this constant risk of

(42:33):
poisoning the water as it sits in that the authorities
are just going to be consistently like, guys, you can't
have this here, guys, you simply can't have this here,
so they just got.

Speaker 2 (42:43):
To operate out and inter national waters like a cruise ship.

Speaker 1 (42:46):
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 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.

(43:09):
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 told him he was.

Speaker 2 (43:16):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (43:17):
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 Gwinn too,
so I don't doubt his story. Like she just kind
of decides things about people and then tries to brute

(43:37):
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 poll to just kind of accept whatever Ziz is
saying about them.

Speaker 2 (43:56):
Yeah. I mean, when you're desperate in that way, you
kind of definitely find yourself to have a roof over
your head, like.

Speaker 1 (44:03):
Right, yeah, And it's a very normal cult thing, right,
Like this is an aspect of all of that kind
of behavior. Now by this point, a few other people
have come to live in the Rationalist fleet. One of
them is Imma Borhanian, a former Google engineer, and Alex Leatham,
a budding mathematician. The flotilla became a sort of marooned
aquatic salon. Wired quotes Ziz as emailing to a friend

(44:25):
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. Excited for this psychology
you built on the boat, yeah, Wired continues as Lesoda
articulated their goals had moved beyond real estate into a

(44:45):
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 was a road would allow the group members to
operate unponed by the external world.

Speaker 2 (45:05):
Yeah that was because you had said that before, right, Yeah,
they had been that's sort of what they're looking to be.

Speaker 1 (45:10):
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 whatnot and puts them into positions
below them. Like that's how we need what we need
to be in order to gain control of the levels
of power, we have to make ourselves into Ricky Gervais sociopaths.

(45:34):
Yeah great, what a good ideology. I love that they
still love pop culture though you know 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.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
Like exactly it's the thing. Yeah, if you have somewhere
to go, yeah, if you have anywhere to go this camp.

Speaker 1 (45:55):
Yes, yes. If you've got a friend who's like a
nurse or a contract if drinks with once a week
and you just talk about your ideas once, they're gonna
be like, hey, this is bad.

Speaker 2 (46:04):
You need to stop.

Speaker 1 (46:05):
You're going out a bad road. Do you need to
stay with me?

Speaker 2 (46:09):
Are you okay? This is clearly a cousin. Yes, someone
This would be so upsetting for someone to just casually
talk about it like a paint and sip or like.

Speaker 1 (46:21):
Ricky Gervas, somebody there. Breaks with mainstream rationalism had gone terminal.

Speaker 2 (46:34):
GW.

Speaker 1 (46:34):
Gwynn 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 ledge organizations like Seafar 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 will

(46:54):
be like, No, there's a very high population of trans
people within the rationalist community. So people just agree about this.
It's not my place to come to a conclusion. But
this is one of the things that Ziz says about
the central rationalist community. Ziz had concluded that transgender people
were the best people to build a cabal around because
they quote from Zizz's blog, had unusually high life force.

(47:17):
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
jail broken into sociopaths.

Speaker 2 (47:27):
And yeah, these are all double goods as well.

Speaker 1 (47:31):
Well, no, she's the only double good. Actually, she becomes
increasing and 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.

Speaker 2 (47:45):
No, it is like blind support, right, blind support, no
matter what.

Speaker 1 (47:50):
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 big
thing that they say. She and her circle start dressing differently.

(48:12):
Ziz starts wearing like all black robes and stuff to
make her look like a syth or some sort of wizard.
Her community adopts the name vegan anarco transhumanism and starts
unironically referring to themselves as vegan scyth.

Speaker 2 (48:26):
In the boat community when they move in.

Speaker 1 (48:28):
Yeah, just like what I just wanted to I'm just
an alcoholic. What's happening? I just wanted to be like
Quint from John's Oh No.

Speaker 2 (48:38):
Yeah, I'm just here because my wife left me.

Speaker 1 (48:42):
Think a different way than a great White attack. Now
looking bad?

Speaker 2 (48:47):
Yikes? Oh man.

Speaker 1 (48:49):
So around this time, Gwynn 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 himus
spheric sleep, and this is a process by which only
one half of your brain sleeps at a time. In
a critical write up, publishes a warning before the killings

(49:09):
that are to come. A rationalist named Apala 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 are fasting. This is
a vulnerable psychological state for a person entering UHS requires
the sleeper to be exhausted. It also has disorienting effects,

(49:30):
so they are not quite themselves. And I disagree with
them that, like, there's no, they're not just actually sleeping
with only one hemisphere. And in fact, I think they
may have taken this idea from Warhammer forty thousand, because wors.

Speaker 2 (49:44):
Do because yeah, what are you talking about?

Speaker 1 (49:47):
But yeah, that's not a thing. 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. You will become altered. You're
altering your state, and you cant This is why colts
deprive people of sleep. You can fuck with people's heads

(50:08):
a lot when they're in that space, but this isn't
what's happening.

Speaker 2 (50:13):
I like to think of them on on the boat,
just only using one half of their body.

Speaker 1 (50:17):
Line right, eye open, watching the office.

Speaker 2 (50:24):
Furiously taking notes.

Speaker 1 (50:27):
So this is how that write up describes the process
of uni hemispheric sleep. One you need to be tired.
Two you need to be laying down or sitting up.
It is important that you stay in a comfortable position
that won't require it to 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.

(50:50):
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 hemispheric sleep is to jail break
the mind into psychopathy fully right, And that's how Ziz
describes it is that's the goal.

Speaker 2 (51:10):
That's the goal. That's their goal.

Speaker 1 (51:12):
Got to make ourselves into psychopaths so we can save
the world. But it also gets used. You could 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.

(51:35):
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 Gwynn is the
one who came up with the hemispheric sleep idea, but

(51:58):
a lot of the language around how tactic it was
used and what it was supposed to do came from Ziz.
And again, the process is just sleep deprivation.

Speaker 2 (52:06):
Right.

Speaker 1 (52:07):
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,

(52:29):
engaging in a confrontational style of interrogation that would supposedly
yield more rational thoughts. Sometimes, to probe further, they experimented
with psychedelics and tried jail breaking their minds to crack
open their consciousness and make them more influential or agentic.
Several people in Taylor and this is one of the
sources sphere had similar psychotic episodes. One died by suicide
in twenty eighteen and another in twenty twenty one. So

(52:52):
in the mainstream rationalist subculture, they are also trying to
like consciously hack their brains using a mix of like
drugs and meditation and social abuse, and people kill themselves
as a result of like the outcomes of this. This
is already a problem in the mainstream subculture.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
Yeah, let alone this extremist offshoot right yep.

Speaker 1 (53:13):
In her own writings at the time, Ziz describes hideous
fights with Gwinn in which Gwynn what tries to mentally
dominate in mind control Ziz they've both become believers and
new theories is has that's basically like she uses the
term mana, which she is. She describes as like your
ability to persuade people, which is, if you can convince
someone of something, it's evidence that you have an inherent

(53:34):
level of like magical power. And someone with naturally high
manna like Ziz can literally mind control people with low manna.
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 Gwinn have mind control battles. At one
point they start having like one of these arguments where
basically Gwinn threatens to mind control Ziz and Ziz threatens

(53:58):
Gwin back, and this starts of 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,

(54:18):
we're 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 each other right then and there,

(54:39):
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 One mobilization is tantamount to
a declaration of war. I stood up, still silent, waiting
see see.

Speaker 2 (54:57):
First off, and there's other people there is Well, it's
not just yes.

Speaker 1 (55:03):
And just like the logic of well, obviously if you
attack me, then I'm going to counterattack you, and then
you're going to counterattack me, which means eventually will 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 One, maybe not a good like positive example.

Speaker 2 (55:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (55:39):
Yeah, really taking some leaps, It's it's yeah, I mean
just having a fight with your friend and then opening
your locket which has like Kaiser Vilhelm and the Tzar
in it and going what would you guys do here?

Speaker 2 (55:49):
Yeah, ancestors guide me.

Speaker 1 (55:56):
And again, but 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. Gwinn 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,

(56:17):
and Ziz concludes that the technique works.

Speaker 2 (56:19):
Right, and so.

Speaker 1 (56:22):
Yes, yes, what she thinks 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 escalation loop
that you handle every conflict with, right, great stuff. One
of the young people who got drawn as is at
this time was Maya Passek, who blogged under the name

(56:43):
Squirrel in Hell. She wrote about mainstream rationalist stuff, citing
Yakowski and Elon Musk, but in her blog there's like
a pattern of depressive thought. In one twenty sixteen 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.

Speaker 2 (57:04):
Yessues and the classic stinking thinking.

Speaker 1 (57:08):
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, is this something that can exist a
lot of places like share 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

(57:29):
with you. Right, Yeah, like that's that's always possible. She
found Zizz's blog and she starts commenting on it. She's
particularly drawn to Zizz's theories on manna and Zin's theory
in Gwynn's theory about hemispheric personalities. In one of her
most direct cult leader moments, Ziz reaches out directly to

(57:49):
this to Maya as she's like posting on her blog
and emails her saying, I see you like some of
my blog posts. Truly a sinister opening.

Speaker 2 (57:57):
Yeah, that's.

Speaker 1 (58:00):
My true companion. Gwynn and I are taking us somewhat
different than Maria. That's the organization, one of the rationals.
Organization approaches, they call each other, that's how they get
for their true companions opinions at this point, or taking
a somewhat a different approach than the Miria approach to
saving the world without much specific test technical disagreements. We

(58:21):
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 jail break them into Gervais's sociopaths. She

(58:42):
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 Zizz is kind of like coaching her through the process.
She tells Maya that one of her hemispheres is female,
because Maya is a trans and Ziz tells her one
of your brain hemispheres, each of which is a separate person,

(59:04):
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 debucket in order to have a chance of surviving, right.

Speaker 2 (59:25):
Okay, So she needs to be jail broken to be free.

Speaker 1 (59:29):
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
troughs of suicidal ideation. She is believed to have died
by suicide in February of twenty eighteen. She posts a
what is essentially a suicide note that is very rationalist

(59:51):
in its verbiage literally titled decision theory and suicide, and
this is the first death directly related to in Gwen'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 se FAR events, and people will
argue constantly about whether or not, like a low value individual,

(01:00:14):
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 her prisals, says she was sexually abused by a
prominent AI researcher. After she confronted him, she says she

(01:00:35):
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

(01:00:57):
yourself if your net if you're going to be a
net harm to the cause of AI safety, which you
will be by reporting this AI researcher who molested you, right, and.

Speaker 2 (01:01:07):
Yeah, because you're taking them man, Yeah, shit.

Speaker 1 (01:01:14):
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 this,
all of this, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:01:29):
Escaping this is even putting yourself back together after living
in this way seems like it would be such a task.

Speaker 1 (01:01:35):
Again and likely any cult part of the difficulties like
teaching yourself how to speak normally again, how to not
talk about all this stuff?

Speaker 2 (01:01:42):
Right, yeah, not identify as a vegan sith right.

Speaker 1 (01:01:46):
Right, because 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's sociopaths and shit that I'm not talking
about that are important to this is ideology. But like
you just can't like I had to basically learn like
the like a different language to do these episodes, and

(01:02:08):
I'm not fluent in it, right, Like you have to
triage like what shit.

Speaker 2 (01:02:12):
Do you need to know? You know? Yeah, it's so deep,
it's right, so deep.

Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
Deep and silly. Let's do an ad break and then
we'll be done 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.

Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
We've this person.

Speaker 1 (01:02:33):
Maya has likely killed themselves at the start of twenty eighteen,
and Zis reacts to the suicide in her usual manner.
She blogs about it. She took from what had happened,
not that like debucketing 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

(01:02:56):
were single, good like Maya were at elevated risk because
learn that one of the whole persons inside them was
evil or mostly dead could create a reconcilable conflict, leading
to depression and suicide. And she she comes up with
a name for this. She calls this passex 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, Yeah,

(01:03:26):
as nice as anything else in this story. Is I
think you might have been the doom here.

Speaker 2 (01:03:30):
Yeah, I it's you with the whole problem. But now,
but now it's an info hazard to explain. Yes, a
person's like.

Speaker 1 (01:03:42):
To explain your theories.

Speaker 2 (01:03:44):
Yeah, yeah to a person who can't handle it.

Speaker 1 (01:03:47):
Yeah, And she thinks 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.

(01:04:08):
This information is absolutely essential to saving the world. So
you just have to roll the dice.

Speaker 2 (01:04:13):
Yeah. It isolates herself within her own group that she's created, well.

Speaker 1 (01:04:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:04:31):
Yep. Good stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:04:33):
Yeah, anyway, how are you feeling?

Speaker 2 (01:04:37):
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, and I'm also pretty interested because this is crazy.
But I'm okay.

Speaker 1 (01:04:54):
I'll be great, happy to happy, to happy to have
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

(01:05:16):
community are running the government now, so maybe you do
need to know about it. Sorry about that info hazard.
We're back. Oh my gosh, it's Behind the Bastards, a
podcast where Robert Evans ruined his life by reading too

(01:05:37):
many blogs by Internet poisoned nerd rationalist people, and I
deeply regret everything I've done. How are you doing, David,
I'm good. I am concerned for you.

Speaker 2 (01:05:50):
This is a difficult place for you to spend a week.

Speaker 1 (01:05:53):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:06:00):
Yeah, exactly, this whole.

Speaker 1 (01:06:03):
Like 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 twenty minutes,
Like touch it, touch an animal, look into its weird
little eyes.

Speaker 2 (01:06:22):
Get off of your phone. That's you need to go,
go do goat yoga.

Speaker 1 (01:06:26):
Yeah, something has to be done. Oh yeah, so wild
yeah wid 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, small.

Speaker 3 (01:06:48):
Boat, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:06:53):
Yeah, let alone barely a boat and talk to like, you.

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
Know, my neighbor's.

Speaker 1 (01:06:57):
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 them 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 the same things I've poisoned my
brain with, Like please go find people who don't know

(01:07:21):
all of the weird Internet things you do and spend
more time with.

Speaker 3 (01:07:24):
Them, aggressive on the people like Garrison.

Speaker 1 (01:07:28):
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. Truly,
save yourself, Save yourself.

Speaker 2 (01:07:44):
It doesn't have to be like this.

Speaker 1 (01:07:50):
So when we left off, Ziz had kind of psychologically
jail broken her friend into suicide and then created an
info hazard named after her friend. Great stuff, healthy community.
Now a few things happen in quick succession after this point.
The rationalists start to blame passic suicide on Ziz, And

(01:08:11):
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 Winter 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 rationalists community.

Speaker 2 (01:08:28):
Right they are in a cult.

Speaker 1 (01:08:30):
Yeah, but 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 they're like, rationalism is this soil
that is extremely optimized for growing cults. I think that

(01:08:50):
might be closer, you know, although it's also one of
those things where if you're just trying to explain the storm,
you can just say it's a cult. You can say
it's this weird Bay Area cult about science and AAI
and shit like. That's probably close enough.

Speaker 2 (01:09:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:09:05):
A few things happen in quick succession after this point.
One is that a story broke later in twenty eighteen,
confirming Zizz's suspicion that the rational rationalist community was rife
with abuse. Two people accused an influential rationalist who worked
at Seafar, a guy named Brent Dill, of abuse while
they were dating him. Both were nineteen and he was
close to forty. The allegations here remind me a little

(01:09:26):
of the ones against Neil Gaiman. You've got a very
powerful man accused of coercing much younger women into extreme
BDSM situations, implying 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

(01:09:47):
that SEFAR had kind of tried to 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, that's always reliable.

Speaker 2 (01:10:01):
Trust us to figure it out.

Speaker 1 (01:10:03):
We'll police ourselves, that's rational. This internal investigation exonerated Dil
and included the line he is aligned with Seafar'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

(01:10:24):
a nineteen year old when you're forty and giving your
drugs good stuff, people respond with outrage. Se Far eventually
eventually banned Dil from future events. They kind of cave,
and Ziz would describe Dil later as a true negative.
That's someone who both have haves of their brain. Are
even double bad? Yeah, double bad. Now, at this point,

(01:10:47):
she still thought Yudkowski and some other c FAR leaders
might be double good, but she's really not sure about it,
and she's especially not sure because none of them like
embrace this terminology.

Speaker 2 (01:10:57):
I was going to say at this point, his Yudkowski
is he like, is she still? Are they on good terms?
Is he still acknowledging?

Speaker 1 (01:11:04):
No? Okay, I don't think she's ever on close terms
with Yidkowski.

Speaker 2 (01:11:08):
She is.

Speaker 1 (01:11:08):
She is speaking and communicating directly with Anna Salomon, who
is like one of the Yadkowski's like 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,
and she sees she definitely like sees him speak, She
definitely talks with him, but like, I don't think that
they would ever have been close, right, Okay. She does

(01:11:29):
try to force a conversation with Anna Salomon outside of
c FR HQ about this and other discovery she and
Gwynn had made on their boats, and Ziz like writes
in the blog post about it that like she felt
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

(01:11:50):
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 that to be
agree with you in order in this because she's not
sure if you're dangerous, which, to be fair, you are.

Speaker 2 (01:12:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:12:09):
Soon later, at a Sea Far board meeting, Anna recommended
that Ziz be disinvited from joint Mary c Far events.
And both of these are separate organizations, but basically like
the membership overlaps or like a circle.

Speaker 2 (01:12:21):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:12:22):
Her reasoning for not wanting Zizz at events is that
Ziz war quote black clothes, took super villains as role
models and came up with dangerous plans.

Speaker 2 (01:12:29):
Yeah, yeah, that's correct. I forgot that she was also
wearing black roles.

Speaker 1 (01:12:35):
She's also started dressing like a wizard. Yes, 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 occasions, the

(01:12:57):
Caleb nearly hit other ships while drifting like the anchor
gets fucked up. I don't know that they they probably
don't have to use it because like they're the navy guy,
he is, he still gone, he is bounced. He had
at least the judgment to cut his losses.

Speaker 2 (01:13:11):
So they don't even know how to work boats.

Speaker 1 (01:13:14):
They do gwin Is. I think Gwin's actually reasonably competent
with the stoat, right, and she and Zis gets trained up.
And these are both smart enough people that I suspect
they're competent with a sailboat, but like a twenty four
foot sailboat and a ninety four foot tug boat very different.
That's like, I'm good with him driving my prius. Give
me that fucking eighteen wheeler with two with two fucking

(01:13:36):
storage containers on the back, shipping containers on the back.
I could probably back that thing into a parking space,
no problem. Like they're just different, you know, damn authorities, right.
And what's very funny these accounts of like boat cops
getting on the Caleb and talking to Zizians. They're like,

(01:13:56):
these people must be sovereign citizens, which is like a
totally different kind of thing. And to me, I'm like,
you don't sound at all like but to them, it's
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.

Speaker 2 (01:14:17):
And these peoples are heavy jargon, right, heavy.

Speaker 1 (01:14:22):
These cops are just like, okay, so we got some sovereign,
some sob sets here, all right, it's four now. Yeah,
and again this is like the Bay Area. I think
cops in the Barrier are a little especially since they're
all white, more used to dealing with like people who
are clearly like eccentric, right than maybe like if this

(01:14:43):
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. See it as a problem. Right.
That's in twenty nineteen and other scandal hits the rationalist community.
The story broke that a former employee had blackmailed the

(01:15:05):
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 is in, 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.

Speaker 2 (01:15:23):
For the Rolling Stone Quote.

Speaker 1 (01:15:25):
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 it would be
so intense. That proves you don't have what it takes
to really save the world, because you're not ruthless enough

(01:15:45):
to just jump to killing people like us.

Speaker 2 (01:15:47):
You're not a psychopath. You're not a psychopath, or they
need psychopaths, which is good to save the world. We
love psychopaths. We're all we aspired to it.

Speaker 1 (01:15:57):
And one of the big problems within the rationalists 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 can go adh you
can make yourself autistic in this they talk this way, right,
I'm not saying this is this is not how anything works.

(01:16:18):
I'm not carrying autism and psychopathy. I'm just saying this
is how they talk right the world, right, And I
was like, no, that's that's not None of this is
accurate to like the ways are like, you can't just
be like.

Speaker 2 (01:16:33):
I'm gonna turn off by autism today, I got some ships.

Speaker 1 (01:16:36):
No, that's not how we're 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 pokemon, you know, very much like I think
there's some issues there that that do anyway, and and
a lot of this is yeah, it's just this soup
is not exclusive to Ziz. So Ziz is band now

(01:17:00):
from mari ce Far Events, and her whole crew is
increasingly radicalized against the organizations they have. Also, you know,
it's both where like Sefar has good reason to not
want Zizz around, but also all of Zizz. Most of
Zizz's complaints about rationalists like Sefar and Marie are very valid, right, Like, yeah, yeah,

(01:17:20):
you're both right about each other. It's like how Elon
Musk and Peter Teal would shit talk each other. It's like,
fact you both do have each other's number.

Speaker 2 (01:17:28):
Yes, everybody's got a point. Everybody's got a point.

Speaker 1 (01:17:32):
I just kind of wish you would all go away.
In November of twenty nineteen, Seafar held their annual alumni
reunion out in a chunk of the California Redwoods, down
the stream from 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

(01:17:52):
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 he had Kowski a few
days earlier, or 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

(01:18:13):
important work, So you should all leave and kind of
the subtext is and do what me and Gwynn are doing,
you know, start ale. So on the day of this event,
Ziz Gwinn 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

(01:18:33):
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. Now, 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

(01:18:55):
out their case against Sefar 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,
and they're wearring Guy Fowk's masks. The police get called immediately,
and as best as I can tell, it does Maybe
I'm wrong. It seems like the CEA farmer people like

(01:19:17):
knew because there's like send out an email saying hey,
maybe don't come, or like if you do, just like
being 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 whatever, whatever the case, two
false pieces of information are given to the cops when

(01:19:38):
they get called. 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
or make these allegations. It was definitely an employee at
the venue who are alleged that he saw an axe,
a county sheriff who responded, or so it was a
person at the venue who picked up an axe and
someone saw them and reported that to the police too,

(01:20:00):
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 ropes course next door. Like,

(01:20:23):
his thought is there's a mass shooting brewing, right, some
people are going to do something fucked up, right, so
he calls for a massive like swat response basically, you know,
compared to the actual danger these people present, which is
right now nil. The author 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

(01:20:45):
he relayed to me. In the fall of twenty twenty three,
at a local Starbucks, the protesters were speaking in unison,
just stuff I didn't really understand, but it was somewhat rehearsed.

Speaker 2 (01:20:53):
He said.

Speaker 1 (01:20:54):
The group had printed flyers outlining their complaints against Sefar
and Miri. They alleged that Mary 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.
Sephar does not appreciably develop novel rationality mental tech. The
path to avoiding extinction, they wrote, involved escaping containment by

(01:21:16):
society through mental autonomy and inter hemispheric game theory.

Speaker 4 (01:21:20):
So some.

Speaker 1 (01:21:26):
Some random sheriff's deputy is not going to understand what's.

Speaker 2 (01:21:31):
Going on here. What the fuck are you talking about?

Speaker 1 (01:21:33):
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 pack down, like one might request
at an airport. All three were trans women, but Park
says he couldn't discern their genders because of the robes
and masks. Regardless that we're not going to get that

(01:21:54):
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 got to handcuff you. Arks deputy subdued the
three and prone positions what Parks calls a high risk
style takedown, requiring more force than a normal handcuffing style.
So there's a several articles I've read will to refer
to a discrepancy between how the Zizians and the cops

(01:22:15):
describe these events. I've read both accounts. I really don't
see a gap. What I see is the cops describing
their violent into humanizing behavior as like this is the
normal way to respond and the Zizians describing it as
to humanizing 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,

(01:22:36):
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 in arrest was like yeah. Gwinn later writes
this about the experience when we arrived, as staff member
called the police and falsely told them we had a
gun and that we were going into buildings and that
that we were too afraid to get off the phone.
They were too afraid to get off the phone. Later

(01:22:58):
report said there was an active shooter with a None
of us had a duffel bag. Police arrived with their
guns out, and we were immediately arrested within about ten
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 their naked, cops are making comments about their bodies.

(01:23:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:23:31):
Yeah, it's part for the course, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:23:34):
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 twenty thirteen report from the
Anti Violence Project found that trans individuals are seven times
likely or to experience violence while in interacting with the
police than cisgender people. So I have no trouble believing
Gwin's accounts here, even though again I treat her with

(01:23:55):
proper scrutiny. In most areas, this all seems like what
cops do.

Speaker 2 (01:24:01):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:24:01):
The other big discrepancy where the Zizzians are I think
a little off base is that they claim they are
immediately dead named and misgendered by the newspapers covering their
initial arrests. And they are dead named, But the newspapers
don't really have an option here, right, 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

(01:24:23):
they have no idea 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 aren't
try this is just the only name available. But it
escalates this situation, right, And it is worth noting that
a number of outlets do continue to dead name them
up to the present, but that initial reporting it's like, well,
that's just the only information that was available. But all

(01:24:45):
of this is going to like this is this court
case is going to where on they get charged initially
with felonies. Bayla said it like fifty grand for Ziz
and Gwynn. This is eventually reduced and they're reduced to misdemeanors.
But it takes like four days for them to make bail.
And there's they will be finding because they're going to
counter sue over these arrests, and both the trauma of

(01:25:08):
the arrests, their anger over them, and the fact that
there's the stress of this year's long court battle is
going to have this extremely deleterious effect on everybody's mental
health when they're already not doing well right arrest it's
great stuff. Yeah, right around this time the rash the
Zizzi ends move. They stop doing their fleet thing, right,

(01:25:30):
they move out of the boats, and they kind of
end things by leaving their tugboat adrift because there's nothing
to do with a ninety four foot tug boat. Nobody
can handle a tug boat, 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

(01:25:50):
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, Zizdus
sides 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. So that's what they're doing now. And this

(01:26:14):
is where a guy named curtis space. 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. Yeah,
it's a really just like Superman one. So enter Curtis

(01:26:40):
lind Lynd is a guy. He was like a he
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 push
an eighty 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

(01:27:01):
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 RVY a 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

(01:27:22):
to 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, And
I mean the line is thin, right, The line is thin, right,

(01:27:43):
The line is so thin. 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, or this is why I
have enough money a lot within a boat where I
would go crazy, or a box truck or in a

(01:28:07):
box truck, to live in a box truck.

Speaker 2 (01:28:11):
The joy. Yeah, we're truck.

Speaker 1 (01:28:15):
We're talking about how good it is to live in
a box truck. Good stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:28:24):
We know roughly how big the group is at this point.

Speaker 1 (01:28:26):
I think at any given time there's between like six
and nine people, you.

Speaker 2 (01:28:29):
Know, okay, okay, so very small, very.

Speaker 1 (01:28:32):
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

(01:28:52):
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, it's also
important for me to know they don't ever call themselves Zizians.
That name first comes up around this period of time,
right after that disastrous protest, when an anonymous rationalist publishes

(01:29:17):
a paper called like Zizians dot info that first identifies
them as a cult and describes like their un hemispheric
sleep tactics. And it's written because this person is in
the community and wants to stop other people from falling
in with zizz 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

(01:29:38):
some of the danger.

Speaker 2 (01:29:39):
Of other rationalists stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:29:41):
Yeah right, 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 deal
degree of like accountability, just like there are people who
will like report on and they help. They hold seafar
s feet to the fire when people get acute of abuse.

(01:30:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:30:12):
Uhs.

Speaker 1 (01:30:13):
Sessions tended to reveal that other people in the community
are just single good and Perziz's theories about the hero contract,
they can only accomplish maximum good by feeding their energy
and resources to the heroes.

Speaker 2 (01:30:23):
Ziz.

Speaker 1 (01:30:24):
Here's an example of the kind of things she sent
people she saw as single good. Saying your single good
is saying help, I have a yerk in my head.
Did you ever read Anamorphs as a book? David, Wow,
Oh that's a reference to is those worms that control
your brain?

Speaker 2 (01:30:38):
And that's right?

Speaker 1 (01:30:40):
Yeah, yeah, that's yes. I know, deep cut, deep cut,
whoa not.

Speaker 2 (01:30:46):
Un luck to part of my brain that I have
not used for right?

Speaker 1 (01:30:50):
Right, A bunch of people are now like having like
the severance moment, but like remembering every scholastic book fair
they ever went to is again.

Speaker 2 (01:31:00):
Oh man, all they gotta do is hit goosebumps to they.

Speaker 1 (01:31:02):
I know, I know, if only so saying your 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

(01:31:26):
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 Megabad right, doom the world. She
and she takes this on herself, yes, and also I
mean she's gonna have other people do the killing basically,

(01:31:46):
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 cold leader.

Speaker 2 (01:31:54):
That's pretty good, I think.

Speaker 1 (01:31:56):
Over I think we're probably crossed that KT boundary, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
saying you got to murder people because they're the devil,
the yurk inside their brain. Yeah, it might be a
little bit of cult weather feels like a cult outside.
So some Zizians, not implicated in any crimes, have attacked

(01:32:19):
this piece, this Zizzians dot info things 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 of that A lot a lot
of people writing about this will credit Ziz with all
of the uni hemispheric stuff, and that's mostly Gwynn, So
there's a point worth making. Around this time, a woman

(01:32:42):
named Jamie Zashko started living nearby with her girlfriend Alice Monday.
Both are rationalists that are interested in Zizz's ideas. Alice
and Ziz have been in contact for years, and in fact, Alice,
because she's an older and more established rationalist, when Ziz
was kind of new to the community, had sent Ziz
an article on the Gervais principle for the first time,

(01:33:03):
which had spawned her ideas about needing to jail break
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 tree any of
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 looked It seems

(01:33:27):
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 Ziz in different conversations,
pretending to be multiple different people to quote unquote sabotage

(01:33:50):
the whole. She believed another woman in the community, Emma Borhanian,
had on Ziz, and Borhanian is that former Google engineer. Okay,
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.

Speaker 2 (01:34:11):
Yeah, not a lot of straight conversation, huh.

Speaker 1 (01:34:15):
No, Now, Imma Borhanian, who Jamie alleges his life's girlfriend. No,
Jamie's dating Alice Munday. I'm sorry, but 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

(01:34:39):
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 narcissist, but she's very interested in
the idea of like how narcissists work. Jamie didn't like Emma,

(01:35:02):
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 Zizz 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
her endorsed, for the sake of determining how Ziz would

(01:35:23):
react to these characters.

Speaker 2 (01:35:25):
So this isn't what and then what?

Speaker 1 (01:35:28):
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 they're 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

(01:35:48):
the form of a codependent friend group, right, Like, that's what,
that's what's happening. Wow, this is so bad for everybody.
It's oh man, it just they just dig deep and
deeper and deeper. 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,

(01:36:09):
some problematic ways of discussing it. But this is the
importance of like turning out from your weird little subculture
right now and.

Speaker 2 (01:36:15):
Again, and like, yes, definitely, because weren't. How often are
they interacting with all the world, like in general.

Speaker 1 (01:36:24):
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 eighty year old dance.

Speaker 2 (01:36:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:36:42):
So, while Jamie and Zizz are fighting online, COVID hit
and with it comes that eviction moratory in the state
of California. So Zizz and her friends they stop paying
rent to to to lend, either because they're broke or
just because they don't need to anymore, and more than
a year goes by. In April of twenty twenty one,
Ziz posts this to her blog. Housing in places like

(01:37:04):
the Bay Area is a hierarchy of rent seekers and
the rent seekers above landlords rule by rules, 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 praxice
to pay them rent. So again, just get it, I

(01:37:25):
get it. But this is also going to lead you
to a bad place. This is where we get to
divergent stories. Curtis Lynde, the landlord's story is that he
was very supportive of these people and of trans people
in general, taking one Zizi and out to shop for
her first bra. His friends and family say he was
a decent guy, and I actually when I started talking

(01:37:46):
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. By the end
of twenty twenty one, after year and a half of
unpaid rent, Lynde had started working on the process of
having police vic them. He and other residents claimed that

(01:38:06):
the Zizzians had become aggressive, acting as if the property
was theirs now threatening other people, basically squatting on it,
and like being violent at times, including like throwing rocks
at Lynd's cabin and brandishing knives at other people. So
there are knives, yeah, yeah, they have taken to like
threateningly playing with knives while talking about how they will
not leave the property or pay rent, and you get

(01:38:29):
the feeling like I'm not again, 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, right right, which
is also they believe is praxis. Is like these other
people who are not who don't who aren't double good,

(01:38:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:38:58):
For the cause.

Speaker 1 (01:38:59):
Ziz earlier will decide, it's not.

Speaker 2 (01:39:01):
Like they're doing outreach, right, It's not like they're trying
to convert their neighbors or anything like that.

Speaker 1 (01:39:05):
They're trying to convert rationalists, but they don't care about
these weirdos living on the property with them, right right,
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 with the answer yeah, yeah, yeah,
so that these people don't have a lot of value

(01:39:25):
for other people right now. The court case over the
protest arrests dragged on, and in November of twenty twenty one,
Ziz and her friends who'd been arrested filed a countersuit
against Sonoma County, as well as several individuals associated with
Sea Far and the venue. By the time twenty twenty
two 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

(01:39:47):
a deal with Curtis Will, who give them a little
more time to fix their RV if they promised 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. Per Wired quote,

(01:40:08):
Losoda and others wrote, a vengeance against the timeless decisions
of others. If you truly irreconcilably disagree with someone's creative
choice i e. Their choice, extending arbitrarily fallen far into
the past and future, ultimately your only recourse is to
kill them one, Lesoda ally wrote in a long blog
post citing Zizz's philosophies. In the comments, Losoda wrote, I

(01:40:30):
am so fucking glad to finally have an equal.

Speaker 2 (01:40:33):
Great stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:40:37):
In spring of twenty twenty one, one of their rationalist
Fleet veterans close to Zizz, Jay Winterford, who went by
the name Fluttershy, killed themselves. They had Winterford had written
about seeing Zizz's techniques as a way to deal with
his childhood trauma, and Losoda wrote on her blog about
her repeated attempts to fix and upgrade him. Now, Ziz

(01:40:59):
wrote about this person and calls him a death knight,
and as best as I can tell, a death knight
is a zizi in 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

(01:41:19):
kill us, did a bunch of horrible shit, like said
they 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 how understand this death drive thing I couldn't
simulate in my own mind that made no sense and
out predict 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

(01:41:39):
the rationalist community in Ziz's name, and Ziz claims that
she's like spend seven months trying to stop them from
doing this, and then finally they just kill themselves rather
than killing anybody else. And again they framed Ziz Frims
is like their heroic battle to stop this person from
murdering other people and damaging the cause. Like I don't know,

(01:42:00):
maybe maybe like this person needed professional help when they
started talking about wanting to do a masterfully when it's
running the murder a bunch of people, maybe they needed help,
like not your help.

Speaker 2 (01:42:13):
I don't know if anyone needs help.

Speaker 1 (01:42:15):
No, No, Ziz does not even needs 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
twenty twenty two. 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

(01:42:36):
if they'd be alone. Accidentally exposed myself to a one
one hundredth of my hell, and one committed suicide, others utterly, utterly,
mentally cracked. No one knows what she's talking about with
these assassination attempts are all just Someone may have given
her a mean look at a grocery store and she
sided right, Like that's the mind Staate bins out right.

Speaker 2 (01:42:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:42:59):
Rationalists who had declared Ze's a cult leader considered all
of this further evidence that she was dangerous Again. Rationalists
also convince people to kill themselves be alogic traps, but
like they're not wrong to point this out now. I
brought up Jamie's Ashco and Alice Monday a little earlier.
They had moved out of the Bay in late twenty
twenty and headed to Vermont, where Jamie, who had some

(01:43:21):
family money, bought land in a gun in February of
twenty twenty two, she made a blog post with the
subtitle I trolled Ziz and now she wants to murder me.
In it, she claimed, she talks about how, like yeah,
she made all these fake accounts, and in late twenty
twenty one, 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

(01:43:43):
they really fucked with her head. And so Jamie, who's
starting to view Zizz 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 girlfriends a little unclear Alice Monday,
my old mentor like, you have to kill this person
for me in order to make this right. Here's what

(01:44:04):
Jamie writes during her last phone call Ziz in for
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 lie and then told me
that after I should video call Ziz and show her
the body before I destroy it so she could get

(01:44:24):
proof positive that I'd really done it. And if I
didn't do it, Ziz plan to drive across the entire
entire continental United States.

Speaker 2 (01:44:31):
To murder me.

Speaker 1 (01:44:34):
Great cast the die is cast.

Speaker 2 (01:44:37):
Now shit.

Speaker 1 (01:44:39):
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 with the Sith
always kill their mentors, So I have to kill Alice
or I can't get powerful.

Speaker 2 (01:44:52):
Enough to save the world.

Speaker 1 (01:44:55):
Great, it's crazy. I love philosophy. A story that is escalator.

Speaker 2 (01:45:00):
It's so crazy it is wild to hear it where
it's like, Okay, this is where this is where it starts,
the wheels start.

Speaker 1 (01:45:06):
To really this is where that border patrol officer's death
becomes inevitable.

Speaker 2 (01:45:10):
Yeah, because now you feel like us backed herself into
a corner where someone's going to die. Yes, someone like
talking about it, You're threatening it seriously, you're telling it
like at this point, right is someone this is going
to happen at this.

Speaker 1 (01:45:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:45:36):
I mean, how could it someone rationally even? How could we?
How could say irrationally right? How how could someone even
get there?

Speaker 1 (01:45:43):
How can you think about like it's so you think
about something like fifty one, fifty this this fluttershy person
right or fifteen or fifties? Is?

Speaker 2 (01:45:52):
Does that make it better?

Speaker 1 (01:45:52):
Probably not? Probably just makes them even more paranoid and
angry and convince to do violence.

Speaker 2 (01:45:58):
Because like the eleven assassination, I.

Speaker 1 (01:46:02):
Don't know how you fix this at this point.

Speaker 2 (01:46:05):
No, No, it's it might be I think it might
be too far gone.

Speaker 1 (01:46:10):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:46:16):
And who who would be a person does it?

Speaker 1 (01:46:19):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:46:19):
It would be the person to do it. Maybe get
George Lucas in there. George, yes, Oh my god, that's so.

Speaker 1 (01:46:25):
Lady's have taken your movies way too seriously. We need
George sound and talk.

Speaker 2 (01:46:30):
Them out of committing murders. This is gonna sound crazy.
There's a bunch of people in a box truck wanting
to kill in your name, Get.

Speaker 1 (01:46:39):
Ricky, get Ricky Gervas and George Lucas on a shopper,
get him in here on a black They gotta talk
these people down. Oh shit, fuck, oh man, it's so funny.
Just a week later, George Lucas is completely in the cult.
He's wearing all black.

Speaker 3 (01:47:01):
No no, no, no.

Speaker 2 (01:47:07):
So he's writing it's not even fan fiction. He's writing
canonical stars, writing.

Speaker 1 (01:47:11):
Canonical star wars. Ponder that and ponder these ads, my friends.
We'll be back with more. So we're back now. Jamie
is one of the few people who is like as
good at manipulating zizz as zizz at other people in

(01:47:34):
this community. And after this is like, hey, look very
high man, this 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

(01:47:54):
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 Gwynn fakes her death, probably to escape the litigation.
They're all, yeah, Gwinn, get out of here. Gwinn does

(01:48:17):
make the good decision, because sometime after faking her death
she bounces from this whole community. She does get out
of there.

Speaker 3 (01:48:23):
Okay, there was just no way this story was going
to end without a deaf somebody faking their own death.

Speaker 1 (01:48:29):
Oh yeah, Sophie, so excited for you. This story doesn't
even end. This story like Late middles with two death fakings,
because in September of twenty twenty two, Ziz fakes her
death in a boding accident on the Black Signet. Emma
calls the cops says that she fell overboard the Coastguard.
They work so hard to try to find her and

(01:48:50):
save her that they get fatigue waivers so they can
work all night. But they find nothing because she's not dead.

Speaker 2 (01:48:56):
Jesus on the block signal.

Speaker 1 (01:48:58):
I don't know where she actually was, but she doesn't.
She's not dead, is declared dead, and her of her
family princes an obituary like Gwinn's death faking is a
little less successful. Like their lawyer in court after they
come in with legal evidence that this is dead, Gwinn's

(01:49:19):
lawyer is like, I really don't think they're dead. I
think they're faking it.

Speaker 3 (01:49:24):
Wow, what a snitch a lawyer.

Speaker 1 (01:49:29):
These lawyers don't like they don't like their lawyers. Well,
now that's.

Speaker 3 (01:49:35):
Where they fucked up. You can't your lawyer has to
ride for you.

Speaker 1 (01:49:41):
That look, l Ron, who knows what they're talking about?
These people at this is what's going on. The sanest
decision one of them is made is to fake their death.

Speaker 2 (01:49:58):
More lawyers in this story, maybe so maybe.

Speaker 1 (01:50:01):
A couple of lawyers digital could have fixed this. So,
I don't know precisely. So they like money, No, these
are these are public defenders.

Speaker 2 (01:50:09):
Oh yeah, so.

Speaker 1 (01:50:11):
Gwinn clearly fakes their death just to clear themselves of
their legal problems. I think Zizz does it for that.
But also she and her closest friends are now plotting
the murder of Curtis Lynd. We don't really Yeah, that's
the landlord and they want to kill Curtis. Yes, yes,
they want to kill Curtis. They want to stay on
the land Is that the kind of the thought. I

(01:50:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:50:48):
People, and then have sex with his body.

Speaker 1 (01:50:50):
I don't I don't think they're going to do that,
but they are at least aware of that as an option. Yeah,
So the reality of what happens next is a little
bit in dispute. But what no one disagrees is that
on November thirteenth, twenty twenty two, this is like right
after midnight, Curtis Lynde is stabbed repeatedly and impaled with
a samurai sword. He also, during the same altercation, shoots

(01:51:13):
and kills Imma Borhanian and wounds another member of the group.
In one Tumbler 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 lynd
and his ex CIA best friend Patrick McMillan spent months

(01:51:34):
threatening Emma and her friends. Unlike what the papers claim,
Emma and her friends weren't squatters. They were tenants who
were struggling to find jobs or a place that would
least to them after Mierkan Sefar called a swat team
on them in twenty nineteen. 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.

(01:51:56):
This account blames them on not being able to make
rent on their legal bills, but at this point they
had been squatting for like two years in change. I
don't know if Lynde was transphobic.

Speaker 2 (01:52:05):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:52:06):
You know, 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,

(01:52:27):
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 Lynde made specific threats
in the fall of twenty twenty two, 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

(01:52:48):
their 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 twenty twenty

(01:53:10):
two with any of the Zizzian's as plaintiffs and with
Curtis Lynde 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.
Lynde shot Emma point blank through her heart and lung.

(01:53:30):
She collapsed to the ground and immediately her lung began
filling with her heart's blood. She died within twenty seconds,
violently coughing up chunks of her lung tissue in a
feutal attempt to clear her airways. Soomny was shot six
times rushing in a feutal 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

(01:53:51):
as they're getting ready to leave and starts shooting them. Right, Yeah,
that's stupid, now, that's their claim. This leaves out a
very important fact, which is that Curtis Linde is stabbed
fifty times.

Speaker 2 (01:54:05):
Fifteen.

Speaker 1 (01:54:06):
Yes, Lind's account is somewhat less sympathetic to these people.
He claims that after getting successfully getting a judgment against
them in a court, he moved to a vict and
the sheriff agreed to do an eviction. On November fifteenth,
and this is what Lynd later said.

Speaker 2 (01:54:21):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (01:54:22):
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,

(01:54:42):
like you know entirely, like which person he's accusing here
or whatever. But he says, this is how his account
of the attack itself is that 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

(01:55:03):
to evict them, one of the Zizians named Surrey shows
up and she tries to get him to like come
help turn the water off and her trailer. So he
goes over there to turn the water off, and as
he bins 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

(01:55:23):
around me, And I was bleeding from numerous puncture wounds.
I think around fifty. 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 had all happened.
I was completely gone while this was happening. And how
I stood back up or got to that spot, I
have no idea. But I looked at all the blood
coming out of me. Oh, and I had a sword,

(01:55:44):
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 got to say, based on
the physical eleven, I think Lind's account is the real
one of what happens here. I think they ambush him

(01:56:06):
and stab him repeatedly, and he shoots and kills one
in self defense obvious, Like, again, he has a samurai
sword entirely through his bed.

Speaker 2 (01:56:16):
We acknowledge that this meant took fifty to the chest. Yeah,
they don't make them like that anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:56:24):
And it's one of those one of the like doubting
claims by the Zizians is that, like, he couldn't have
survived 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.

Speaker 2 (01:56:45):
Tricky, tricky, Yeah, And also it's also so worrisome because
now they've done it, right, they've crossed that line.

Speaker 1 (01:56:51):
They've crossed that line, and one of them has died.

Speaker 2 (01:56:54):
Right. Yes, some steaks are as high as they had
always thought that they were.

Speaker 1 (01:56:59):
And when the box trucks are cleaned out after they
get arrested the ones who had carried out the attack,
because Ziz is on the property, and I think Ginn
is too still at this point, but Ziz does not
participate in the attack, and like cops recognize Ziz and
know that she's faking her death and don't arrest her,
which is one of like the weird.

Speaker 2 (01:57:17):
Things, like they're familiar enough to know that.

Speaker 1 (01:57:21):
Yeah, I think this is that because like they've been
called before 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, you know,
it's a It's also worth noting that when they this

(01:57:43):
after this arrest, when like their box trucks are being
cleaned out, they find tubes of containers of lie, which
you know, Ziz had talked to Jamie about dissolving bodies
and lie. 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 this is not proven.

(01:58:04):
I'm sure courts will try, will 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 else. On her blog, when
discussing theoretical acts of deadly violence, Ziz referred to what

(01:58:26):
she called Quirrel's algorithm from the Harry Potter Rationalist fan
pick that 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 again. This Harry Potter book.

Speaker 2 (01:58:47):
Really go all the way back to that.

Speaker 1 (01:58:50):
Yeah, be careful what you write, authors. You might get
someone st impaled by a samurai. Sort of course they have.
Of course they had a samurai's sword. I'm sure they
bought them all from the Budka catalog. So Ziz had
also written in late twenty twenty one in a comment
on her blog, I get so many people lining up

(01:59:11):
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, this is online writing becomes increasingly

(01:59:33):
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.
So the police arrest two of her friends, Somni and
Suri dw who are the two surviving Zizians who'd taken
part in the attack, and they take them to jail.

(01:59:53):
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, it's California state law. A lot of
people get life sentences as a result of this, usually
not in this exact scenario, but.

Speaker 2 (02:00:17):
Usually not.

Speaker 1 (02:00:21):
Soomny was placed in a men's jail and complained now
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,

(02:00:43):
because it's just we simply can't go down all of
those rabbit holes. But you should know that the like
this is a factor, and 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 all going down,
while Zizz and the remainder of her inner circle kind

(02:01:05):
of go on the run, right because you know, now
they've been involved in a murder. Right, Gwynn seems to
go 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, well, all this is

(02:01:26):
going on, I hate to keep bringing in new people,
but there's a bunch of them. Jamie up in Vermont.
I don't think is continuing to seeing Alice Monday anymore.
Alice seems to have also made the wise decision to
fucking bounce and go to ground. Jamie is living with
another Ziz follower named Daniel Blank up in Vermont at

(02:01:46):
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 Soomny's behalf during this
whole like after they go get charged with murder, and
he is 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

(02:02:07):
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 unclear of exactly what's happening, but
my belief is basically Jamie and the people who are
around here, who are up in Vermont to ores Zizians,
are being before Ziz gets there, told to prepare for
Ziz because they want to get access to money and

(02:02:30):
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

(02:02:51):
to like ready a situation for Ziz and the Zizzians
in Vermont. And again there's a lot of this that
has not been litigated yet. But what we know is
that on December thirty first, twenty twenty two, Jamie z
Ashco's parents, who were seventy two and sixty nine, respectively,
are murdered in their home.

Speaker 2 (02:03:09):
Oh my god, we don't have the property of Vermont.

Speaker 1 (02:03:12):
They know they live in a separate state. They live
in Pennsylvania, right, Okay, But we don't know who committed
this murder. No one has yet been charged for it.
Unlike in the Lend 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

(02:03:33):
yells oh my god, Oh my god. But other people
who have viewed the recording, say 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 sizeable estate
to inherent Yeah, you.

Speaker 2 (02:03:50):
Said that she had bought the property initially off of
family money.

Speaker 1 (02:03:53):
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 twenty twenty one, Zashco had written about her parents
and repeatedly accused them of being abusers. One specific accusation

(02:04:14):
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 placed them in a faraday bag.

(02:04:35):
Basically okay, 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

(02:04:57):
to think, who's the next of Ken, Right, 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 milimeter ton of nine mills, right. There's
one thing the cops will point out is that Zasco

(02:05:18):
owned the same type of bullet, the same makeup bullet
as those used in the shooting.

Speaker 2 (02:05:22):
But again, like.

Speaker 1 (02:05:25):
The bullets I use keeping my carry gun are hydra shocks,
which is like what cops can 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 some mechanic 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 would
murder these people was in the gun. That's not a
smoking gun, if you'll forgive it. But it also is

(02:05:47):
like that's not nothing either, right, you know, like that's
not nothing, right. 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

(02:06:10):
kill them, right, But again, they haven't been charged. There's
a lot of suspicious shit about this. She also lies
to a relatives claiming she couldn't have driven to Pennsylvania
from Vermont because you didn't have a working car, and
we know she did, so.

Speaker 2 (02:06:25):
You know, yeah, it's it's very suspicious over here.

Speaker 1 (02:06:30):
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're abusive, and so like,
you maybe have to do this in order to protect

(02:06:51):
yourself and other people from abusers, which is a kind
of logic they have too. On January thirteenth, right after midnight,
Pennsylvania State troopers rade a hotel the Philadelphia Airport where
Blank and Zashco 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

(02:07:13):
take it. Zashko 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 one a Leffheim being arrested, so that
damn smooth, smooth. These rationalists and they're brilliant crimes obviously

(02:07:36):
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
Zashkoh and Blank and the Vermont home. So they get
a warrant for his hotel room and rate it. Like
an hour or two later, Blank is found in the
bathroom next to a blonde person dressed in black. This

(02:07:59):
is Zizz, so oh.

Speaker 2 (02:08:03):
Right, yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:08:06):
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 I don't know if it's intentional or if

(02:08:27):
Ziz was like acting and like portraying themselves as masculine
because they're on the run. You know, at this point
in time, that's not actually clear to me. 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 forty thousand
dollars in cash is found in Zashco Subaru, and again

(02:08:50):
she doesn't get charged with murder. They let her out
very soon and she just leaves. The cops are shot
because sheet they have to give her back car and
the forty grand which she abandons. She and Blake just
leave the car and forty thousand dollars in cash. I
don't think they're making good decisions at this point, is

(02:09:12):
my only explanation for you, David. How Maybe it's that
they're thinking, like, well, 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.

Speaker 2 (02:09:27):
Now.

Speaker 1 (02:09:29):
During this same time, several other Zisians 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.

(02:09:51):
This person goes by the name Ophelia. They are a
German citizen. They have like a legal residency in the US.
Their last name is Bachhol. They used to work at
James Street or Jane Street, which is where Sam Bankman
Freed work. 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

(02:10:13):
go to Vermont hours like really like they fly in
like right before the murders.

Speaker 2 (02:10:19):
That's such a troubling theme about this whole thing about
how many of these people really do integrate in a
major way. Like it's not just like fringe people.

Speaker 1 (02:10:28):
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. People are very vulnerable
to that. And even if if you're making the money,
if you're succeeding at a tech company or in finance,

(02:10:50):
but it all feels empty to you because it kind
of is if someone's like you can save the cosmos, Yeah,
maybe you'll give up your whole life in order to
do that, right. Yeah, So Blank and zashcoh are released
in short order. As I said, they get out of
jail quickly, but Zizz stays in custody for a while.
And Baylis said I think at fifty thousand initially, are

(02:11:13):
they aware of the fake death and everything it does? Yes,
they are where she has faked her death. California shows
no interest in sending police app to get her, which
is like, it is a crime. This is the bayl
is set very high for two misdemeanors, and police justify
it in like the court documents by saying Ziz had

(02:11:33):
recklessly created a dangerous situation by making the police move
her per that argument, that article and wired quote. Behind
these arguments and even the charges themselves lay a deeper motive.
Unable to charge for the Zasco murders, but suspecting that Lesoda,
Michelle Zashko, that's Jamie and Danielle b and Daniel Blank
could be tied to them. Prosecutors were trying desperately to
hold Lesto while the police gathered evidence. Obviously you realize

(02:11:56):
we don't give a shit about this case. One local
official familiar with it told me what they were interested
in was Lesoda'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

(02:12:18):
it's I'm not gonna again pretend to know precisely what happened,
but I think it's pretty clear Zizz probably gave the
order to do this killing or everyone using her logic
talk 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. Jay or

(02:12:42):
Zizz's bail is eventually reduced. She winds up in the
wind immediately, like the authorities are like, she's got to
immediately bounce and will lose her And that's exactly what happens.
Zashkoh and Blank. It's kind of unclear exactly what they
do initially after this, but we know Jamie reaches out
to her aunt begs for help, and her aunt is like,
did you kill my sister? And Jamie says no and

(02:13:07):
blames the murders on less wrong, which is a lizer's
like blog, so she's blaming the rationalist community. She claims
that she's being targeted and that like Seafar had commit
murdered her parents to like 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

(02:13:29):
know what the fuck these people are doing for most
of this period. In February of twenty twenty three.

Speaker 2 (02:13:34):
She's no longer blogging either.

Speaker 1 (02:13:36):
She's not no no, no, no, no no, but she's
still said she had stopped.

Speaker 2 (02:13:39):
She was just responding to people.

Speaker 1 (02:13:41):
Yeah, and she is communicating with people still, but I
think it's primarily through more like direct means. In February
of twenty twenty three, a community alert is posted by
someone named Sepha 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 the
post lays out a lot of what I've described in

(02:14:01):
these episodes, but there's still no public awareness of the Zizians.
Everything happening here is so weird. The circumstances around them,
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.

Speaker 2 (02:14:18):
Them right now. How do you qualify that on the
nightly news?

Speaker 1 (02:14:21):
Yes, exactly, this is all going to change. In February
of twenty twenty four, Jamie's Ashco purchases three handguns I
think from a Vermont gun store. A few months later,
in May of twenty twenty four, a twenty year old
woman named Teresa Youngblood disappears from her home in Seattle.
Young Blood is one of one of the scattered community

(02:14:41):
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,
has a very impressive academic record. He was a National

(02:15:03):
Merit scholar who attended Oxford University. Then he starts posting
on Less Wrong like all the others. He is initially
a fan of Yadkowski, but at some point he gets
convinced that Ziz's vegan sith radicalism is the true path.
In the summer of twenty twenty three, just months earlier,
he won eleven thousand dollars from an AI alignment contest,
and he won that award under his legal name, but

(02:15:24):
he also goes by Audere. 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 young Blood because they're actually
in love. They had gone to high school together, but
I think there may have been some sort of weird

(02:15:45):
legal reason that Ziz wanted them married again. Very unclear,
but they don't stay together physically very long. By January
of twenty twenty five, Teresa is in Vermont looking at
rural properties for purchase alongside Ophelia German quant Trader right well,
Max Snyder is in like California and reading between some lines.

(02:16:06):
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

(02:16:28):
investigation would show that Bachholt and young Blood had been
leaving living in Chapel Hill, Vermont, in a duplex, and
neighbors say that several other people also lived with them.
These people were always dressed in black and owned a
box truck. It is unclear, but I think what happens
is after she goes in 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

(02:16:49):
of your lives and come devote yourselves to the cause,
right okay, And that these these three are the ones
who follow Bacault, young Blood and Snyder right because they
all cut ties with their family, cut you know, with
their jobs, and leave home around the same time. While
they're looking for rural prop compounds, Backholt and young Blood
wind up in a hotel in Lyndenville, Vermont. An employee

(02:17:11):
reports them to the police because they're wearing body armor.
Another tactical gear, and at least one of them is
openly carrying a pistol. Something is very weird here because
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

(02:17:32):
what Homeland Security thought was happening. They may have just
seen we're on the border. Obviously shit's escalated there. This
isn't a foreign citizen with an American citizen. They're wrapping
their electronics in tenfoil, they've got guns, they're driving around
being very suspicious and tactical gear.

Speaker 2 (02:17:50):
Maybe they just.

Speaker 1 (02:17:50):
Thought it was like some run of the mill terrorism bullshit.

Speaker 2 (02:17:53):
It's worth checking out, right, So.

Speaker 1 (02:17:55):
They are surveilling these people, and I think young Blood
and Bockholt they're being surveilled, right, and that that starts
that escalatory loop in their head of Zizi and logic, where, well,
if the police confront me, there's only one way to respond.

Speaker 2 (02:18:12):
Fuck yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:18:15):
Two days later, prosecutors in California ask the judge and
the Curtis Lind case to speed up the process of
going to trial. He's in his eighties, 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 seventeenth, before this can happen,
before Lynd can go to trial, a masked assailant assaults
Lind near his property and slits his throat, killing him.

(02:18:37):
Maximilian Snyder, young Blood's husband, will be arrested days later
in Reading, California for the.

Speaker 2 (02:18:42):
Murder fuck because they had been separate. Oh right, so
there's like there's a possibility that says it's said.

Speaker 1 (02:18:51):
Yeah, I don't see what now. He denied he hasn't
pled yet, at least as the time we record this.
But he sent the letter in jail to Alisa Jitkowski
try to make him become a vegan. He also priorities
in order. Oh. He also claimed, quote, I am not

(02:19:14):
one of Zizz'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.

Speaker 2 (02:19:23):
Sure, Yeah, okay, okay.

Speaker 1 (02:19:25):
Man, you just decided to kill this guy for no reason.

Speaker 2 (02:19:33):
Who happened to happen to have a relationship with this
very small group of people.

Speaker 1 (02:19:39):
Wis this person? He has filed for a marriage license
with young Blood. The day after Lynde gets assassinated, young
Blood and Backolt are heading back from a trip out
target shooting when they get pulled over by Border Patrol.
Young Blood almost immediately draws her side arm. There's a shootout.
She killed or I think she kills. Now, anytime there's

(02:20:00):
a shootout and an officer dies, a decent amount of
the time that officer is like killed by another cops bullet.
I don't actually know for sure if it was young
But 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 right,
and Border Patrol agent David Mallin dies Bacholt is killed

(02:20:23):
in the immediate shootout before she can draw a weapon.
And both of the firearms used in this shooting were
guns purchased by Zadji by Jamie in early twenty twenty four. Right, So, again,
all of these things are it's very easy to connect
them if you know all these people it takes so
long to trace out.

Speaker 2 (02:20:39):
For all their talk of murder, the in practice, they're
not very good at it. Huh, No, I guess.

Speaker 1 (02:20:45):
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 man hunt is law launched in on February sixteenth
of twenty twenty five. 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

(02:21:07):
to young Blood. Yeah, back to what you know, and
again one of these is young Blood. Like the box
truck is registered in 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 gonna call
the cops.

Speaker 2 (02:21:27):
In a row, you're a wizard's role. You look like
a wizard.

Speaker 1 (02:21:31):
You don't need any of this. Ultimately, they all get
arrested and charged with everything. The cops could throw at them,
which is like a legal possession carrying a firearm, stuff
like that. Right inside the other box trucks, state troopers
found Jamie and Ziz, according to the charging documents, dressed
all in black and wearing gun belts with ammunition. So yeah,

(02:21:53):
and that's the situation. Uh, where we are, Now, that's
the story's done. No, yeah, so this is basically where
we are. Ziz asked for pre trial release, didn't get it. No,

(02:22:13):
not chucked about that quote speaking and this is from
a Seattle PI 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. I have
not done anything wrong, she told her Jes, 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

(02:22:34):
don't think this whole court process is going to end
super well for Ziz.

Speaker 4 (02:22:38):
No.

Speaker 1 (02:22:39):
But I also it's very hard to tell, like what
are you what are you got to charge that? Like,
I don't like I'm legitimately like very uh like I
I'll be fascinated to see what the charges are here.

Speaker 2 (02:22:52):
Yeah, it's excited to know that this we can see
this play out real time.

Speaker 1 (02:22:56):
I yeah, this was weird.

Speaker 2 (02:23:00):
Yeah yeah, hell yeah I was great.

Speaker 3 (02:23:08):
Anyway, Like I would like to know how things fucking
shake up.

Speaker 1 (02:23:13):
Yeah, well, maybe we'll revisit this when my brain has healed.
I need to go, like read about Hitler some to
calm down.

Speaker 2 (02:23:20):
Yeah, you need to go talk to your neighbor.

Speaker 3 (02:23:22):
Yeah, I need to go talk to my Name's a
better suggestion, thank you.

Speaker 1 (02:23:26):
Yeah. Not just keep reading my Hitler books and coming
up with theories. That's how you get That's how you
get double bad exactly.

Speaker 2 (02:23:35):
That's how it happens.

Speaker 3 (02:23:37):
You got to go on a run. Go talk to
your neighbor, Go petigot.

Speaker 1 (02:23:41):
You know everyone else, go go talk to somebody, you know,
pet an animal, walk.

Speaker 2 (02:23:48):
You know, in the woods or something. Maybe stay away
from boats for a while, just to.

Speaker 1 (02:23:53):
Stay the fuck away from boats. Don't go live on
a boat. Don't go live on a boat. Stay out
of the water. I don't care about it.

Speaker 2 (02:24:04):
Rent to stand on the fucking water. Oh man, fuck.

Speaker 1 (02:24:10):
Wow. At the end of this, David, David.

Speaker 3 (02:24:13):
How are you doing this? Is your first experience on
our show What's Up?

Speaker 2 (02:24:18):
I honestly don't know to tell you. I don't know
how I feel. I'm gonna have to I'm really gonna
have to kick this around for a couple of days.

Speaker 1 (02:24:25):
But this is interesting.

Speaker 2 (02:24:27):
Yeah, interesting as hell.

Speaker 1 (02:24:29):
Yeah, that's one way to describe it. That's one way
to describe it.

Speaker 3 (02:24:37):
This is a wild time, David, you have any Do
you have anything you want to plug for?

Speaker 1 (02:24:43):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (02:24:44):
I produced my own comedy special. It's available on my Patreon,
Patreon dot com backslash David bory 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, I have a podcast. My mama
told me. I also have one called All Fantasy Everything,

(02:25:05):
where we draft fantasy things that aren't sports. But yeah,
check that stuff out.

Speaker 1 (02:25:10):
Yes, ship that sounds really cool.

Speaker 2 (02:25:13):
It's a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 (02:25:14):
That sounds so much better for you than everything we've
talked about.

Speaker 2 (02:25:17):
It's different than this.

Speaker 3 (02:25:18):
It's different than this, and it reminded me I need
I need to set my fantasy basketball line up. So
thank you, sir.

Speaker 2 (02:25:26):
It's time.

Speaker 3 (02:25:26):
It's time.

Speaker 1 (02:25:27):
Check it out. Everybody, 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, please
bye bye.

Speaker 4 (02:25:42):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot 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.

Speaker 3 (02:26:00):
Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind
the Bastards

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Behind the Bastards News

Follow Us On

Host

Robert Evans

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Dateline NBC

Stuff You Should Know

The Bobby Bones Show

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}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)