Behind the Bastards - 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 Date: January 1, 2026

Part Three: Robert tells David about Ziz's glorious plan to take to the sea and sever the right and left brains of her followers in order to make them psychopaths god that sentence was weird to write trust us the episode is weirder. Part Four: Robert concludes the story of the Zizians with a spree of horrific violent crimes and deaths, culminating in a shoot out with the Border Patrol in Vermont of all places.   Sources:  https://medium.com/@sefashapiro/a-community-warning-about-ziz-76c100180509 https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130318/https://sinceriously.fyi/rationalist-fleet/ https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/infohazard https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130316/https://sinceriously.fyi/net-negative/ Wayback Machine The Zizians Spectral Sight True Hero Contract Schelling Orders – Sinceriously Glossary – Sinceriously  https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130330/https://sinceriously.fyi/my-journey-to-the-dark-side/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130302/https://sinceriously.fyi/glossary/#zentraidon https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130259/https://sinceriously.fyi/vampires-and-more-undeath/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130316/https://sinceriously.fyi/net-negative/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130318/https://sinceriously.fyi/rationalist-fleet/ https://x.com/orellanin?s=21&t=F-n6cTZFsKgvr1yQ7oHXRg https://zizians.info/ according to The Boston Globe Inside the ‘Zizians’: How a cultish crew of radical vegans became linked to killings across the United States | The Independent Silicon Valley ‘Rationalists’ Linked to 6 Deaths The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians | WIRED Good Group and Pasek’s Doom – Sinceriously Glossary – Sinceriously Mana – Sinceriously Effective Altruism’s Problems Go Beyond Sam Bankman-Fried - Bloomberg The Zizian Facts - Google Docs Several free CFAR summer programs on rationality and AI safety - LessWrong 2.0 viewer This guy thinks killing video game characters is immoral | Vox Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck Eliezer Yudkowsky comments on On Terminal Goals and Virtue Ethics - LessWrong 2.0 viewer                                                                                                    Effective Altruism’s Problems Go Beyond Sam Bankman-Fried - Bloomberg SquirrelInHell: Happiness Is a Chore PLUM OF DISCORD — I Became a Full-time Internet Pest and May Not... Roko Harassment of PlumOfDiscord Composited – Sinceriously Intersex Brains And Conceptual Warfare – Sinceriously Infohazardous Glossary – Sinceriously SquirrelInHell-Decision-Theory-and-Suicide.pdf - Google Drive The Matrix is a System – Sinceriously A community alert about Ziz. Police investigations, violence, and… | by SefaShapiro | Medium Intersex Brains And Conceptual Warfare – Sinceriously A community alert about Ziz. Police investigations, violence, and… | by SefaShapiro | Medium PLUM OF DISCORD (Posts tagged cw-abuse) Timeline: Violence surrounding the Zizians leading to Border Patrol agent shooting See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer,

the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio, Apple Podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where I, Robert Evans, am going to war, like a one man, like Rambo, like one of the later Rambo movies, not the first one that was actually about the cost of PTSD and Imperial War, but like the later ones where he's a one-man army. I'm doing that, and I'm doing it against Microsoft because I fucking hate copay.

With me to talk about how much we hate Microsoft co-pilot, my producer, Sophie Lichtenman, and our wonderful guest, David Bore. David, how do you feel about Microsoft co-pilot? Ah, Rambo 3, let's go. Okay, okay, okay. Let's kill a ton of brown people. Well, no, I mean, in this one, it's just like Microsoft co-pilots we're killing. Okay, all of them. They're not really people. It's so bad.

Outlook is terrible. Microsoft has really gone far off of making a lot of products that people hate to use. Speaking of products people hate to use, David said before we started recording that he was excited to hear this story. I just want you to know where we're starting on this story is page 21 of the script. And where we end the script is page 49. Whoa. I made a mistake in doing this. I'm going to admit that right now.

Before we get further, I'm going to 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 fucking 17th and 18th century France. And then like now we're talking about like a fucking guy who did 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 going to misspeak you're going to make

errors and stuff and when it when it comes to like i'm talking about hitler i'm talking about like not obviously those are important but you know if i if i fuck up some fact about like early 1900s 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 And I feel 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 them, everybody in this story has a blog and every blog post is like 40,000 words.

So it's just like. Yeah, I was just say what media are you able to get this is, you're getting this all straight from the source, right? A lot of it's. I mean, I've 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 that like a former, sometimes it's like former members of the community. Sometimes it's folks who are like rationalists that were trying to warn other rationalists about Zizians. But like people in

and around the community have put together compilations where the like clip mixes of news stories and like conversations online. And obviously these folks like, a blog mixtape is nasty work. Yes, yes. And I'm deeply great. We'll have source links and everything in here. I note when I'm kind of like pulling something from something directly. But like I'm very grateful to the maniacs who put together these like documents that 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, well all his crazy shit was going on, it's a little, it's kind of impossible to like get everything you need to get. You have to refer to these. interior sources. It's just the only way to actually understand stuff. No, yeah. As an outsider, I don't know what's going on. I don't know where it's going. I for sure don't know where it's going. We know where it ends, which is a member of Congress shows up at the library in Vermont that the U.S. and Canada shares because a Border Patrol agent was murdered there and like threatens to take over Canada. And that's all like there's a degree to

which you can kind of tie heightened tensions between the U.S. and Canada to the murder of this Border Patrol agent, which itself is directly tied to the fact that Alicia Yudkowski wrote a piece of Harry Potter fan fiction. I love that it all goes back to that. Yes, yes. It all comes back to bad Harry Potter fan fiction. So, part three, we spent last episode talking about Zizz's moving to the bay and their first interactions with the rationalist community, that big C-Farrow. conference they went to that was very reminiscent, had a lot of exercises reminiscent of like synodon shit, right? Right, right.

Very, very, a lot of talk of murder. Yes, a lot of talk of murder. These people love theorizing about when it's okay to kill people. Constant factor in all of this. Which is, can't be a step in a good direction. Yeah. You know, you should, you should be aware of, there's, it's like, if your community is talking about, like, the ethics of escalating to murder in random arguments too much, maybe be a little worried.

If someone sits down next to you and says, how would you murder me or whatever they said? Right, right. You always got to get out of that room. Yeah, you want to leave immediately. Yeah. And furthermore, if they're like, yeah, that's the right way, even worse sign. And then if they're like, yeah, would you perform necrophilia in order to, in the past, scare people away from attacking? you. Like, get out of that room.

Leave. Bad, this is not a crew you want to be a part of. Yeah, maybe just take a pickleball or so. There are lots of stuff we do. People never talk about necrophilia playing pickleball. I don't think one time. I don't think one time. No, they all talk about how they're getting knee replacements.

And that's the beauty of pickleball. Exactly. So, in spite of how obviously bad this community, is Ziz desperately wants to be in the center of the rationalist subculture and that means being in the bay. Unfortunately, the bay is a nearly impossible place to survive in if you don't have

shitloads of money. And one of the only ways to make it in the bay if you're not rich is to wind up in deeply abusive and illegal rental situations. You know this, David. I'm not spreading any news to you. No, shout out to my landlord, Mr. Lou. So Ziz,

winds up in a horrible sublet with a person she describes as an abusive alcoholic. I was there. I don't know if she was the problem and this part. Like I obviously have got one side of this story. But her claim is that it ends in physical violence. Ziz claims he was to blame. But she also describes a situation where they're like after a big argument bump into each other and he calls the cops on her for assault. I wouldn't put it past Ziz to be leaving some parts out of this. But also, I know a bunch of people who wound up in horrible sublets with abusive alcoholics. assaulted them in the Bay Area and in LA. Craig's List is a crapshoot, you know? Craigslist is a crapshoot. Yeah. Every time. I always, I feel like the need to like qualify with like, this is just Zizz's account, but also this sounds like a lot of stories I know people have had.

Yeah. No, it's tough to get by there. 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 whole houses rented out that you fill with rationalists who don't have a lot of money. It never runs bad. It kind of like artists. Yeah, 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, you know, Jin Zee 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 is transphobes. She can't stay there very long. Again, all sounds like a very familiar Bay Area housing situation story. She bounces around some short-term solutions, Airbnb. 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 Silicon Valley development. Ziz blames it on the fact that she couldn't feign enthusiasm for companies she didn't believe in.

Quote, I was inexperienced with convincing body language-inclusive lies like this. I did not have the right false face, but very quick to think of, words to say. So like I'm not good enough at lying that I'm excited about working for an app to, you know, help you do your laundry better, uh, which is like a third of the bay. Yeah. Yeah. And once again, she has like flashes of like, oh, wow, you really, you really have strong morals and all you know what I mean? Yeah. She had a strong resume, right? It wasn't, she does. She wants like an award as a NASA intern, right? She's doing it. Yeah. Yeah. She's, she really is good at a lot of this stuff.

And all of these Zizians, as silly as their beliefs about philosophy and, like, cognitive science are, they're all extremely accomplished in their fields nearly. It's just, it's good evidence of the fact that, like, it's always a mistake to think of intelligence as, like, an absolute characteristic. Like, I am a genius software engineer. Therefore, I am smart. It's like, no, no, no. You're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're so sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. 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 antigens. 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. She describes it as a hard-to-describe felt sense of cognitive benefits, and she decides to

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 Yadkowski. She names this blog Sinsuriously, and it was her attempt to convince other rationalists to adopt her beliefs about, like, veganism and such. Her first articles are like pretty bland. It's these scattered concepts and thought experiments, very basic stuff. Like, can God create a rock so big, God couldn't move it? And then like throwing a rationalist spin on that. So it's, you know, a lot of this is like, oh, maybe in an area in which college didn't cost $200,000, you could have just gotten a philosophy degree. And that would

have made you happy. Like, right, right. You just wanted to spend a couple of years talking through silly ideas based on dead Greek guys. Well, you know, the bay is the place to do that. Yeah, well, unfortunately so. She starts to really show an interest early on, though, and this is where things get unsettling in enforcement mechanisms, which are methods by which individuals can, like, blackmail

themselves into accomplishing difficult tasks for personal betterment. She writes about an app called B-Minder, which lets you set goals and punish yourself with a financial penalty if you don't make regular progress. And she's really obsessed with just the concept of using enforcement mechanisms to make people better, writing, often you have to break things to make them better. So not a great path. No. We're going down here.

Is she following this herself? Yes. She's trying to use some of these tactics on herself to make herself, to deal with like what she sees as her flaws that are stopping her from, you know, saving the cosmos. Great stuff. A lot of good pressure to put on yourself. Yeah. This poor woman has been under the highest stakes this whole time.

Well, and that's, again, that comes, that comes, that's not ziz. That's the entire rationalist subculture. The stakes are immediately, we have to save the world from the evil AI that will create hell to punish everybody who doesn't build it. And that actually, we'll talk about this later. That breaks a ton of people in this. She is not the only one kind of fracturing her psyche in this community. So right around this time, as she's bouncing around short-term rentals and, like, desperately trying to get work,

she meets a person named Jasper Gwyn, who at that point identified as a trans woman, who now goes by Gwyn Danielson and uses they-them pronouns. That's how I'm going to refer to them. But for clarity's sake, I'm going to call them Gwyn or Danielson, even though they went by a different name at this time, because that's what they're called now. Gwyn was a fan of Zizz's blog and had some complex rationalist theories of her own. They came to believe that each person had multiple percent. personality 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. Okay. Yeah. Cool. No, you guys are going to be fucking with your head's real heart. Great.

Oh, man, these poor people. Yeah. So Ziz falls in love with Gwen's ideas and she starts bringing them up in rationalist events, trying to brute force them into going mainstream among the community. but people are like, this is a little weird even for us. And she does not succeed in this. And as a result, she and Danielson and a couple of other friends start like talking and theorizing together separately from the bulk of the community. So now again, you've had this, they're starting to calve off from the broader subculture.

And they're starting to like really like dig ruts for themselves in a specific direction that's leading away from the rest of the rationalists. Literally all that cold stuff, huh? All that cult stuff. All that cold stuff. Now, Gwyn and Ziz largely, like, bonded over their struggle paying Bay Area rents, and together they stumbled upon a solution beloved by generations of punks and artists in Northern California, taking to the sea. Specifically, it's great, it's great.

I mean, I've known, like, three separate people who lived on boats in the Oakland Harbor because it was like, this is the only way I can afford to live in the Bay. My little brother went to school right outside of San Francisco and his principal lived on a boat just like a mile away from the school and everybody loved it. Yeah, yeah, everybody loved it. I mean, I got to 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. Yeah. It feels like it would be dank, I guess, is the word. Dank is a good description of boat life, I think, in general.

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

Yeah. Quote, they talked about how when they were a child, their friend who was a cat had died, and they had to use their own retroactive paraphrasing, sworn an oath of vengeance against death. Fuck. These are just people doing great. Very healthy.

It's like the opposite of what you want a kid to learn when their pet dies is like, yeah, you know, death is inevitable. It happens to. everything, you know, it'll happen to you one day. And it's sad, but just something we have to accept. No, no, no, war against death. No, they were like, nope, no, no, I can fix this.

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. Gwyn also spent way too much time online, which is how they wound up reading hundreds of theoretical articles about how AGI articles, about how AGI artificial general intelligence would destroy the world. And again, AGI is like a mainstream term now because a fucking chat GPT came out a couple of years ago and everyone started talking about it.

At this point, 2016, 17, it's only like people who are really into the industry in a nerdy way who are using that frame. Like regular people on the street don't know what you fucking mean when you're talking about this stuff. But this is a term that is in use among them. And like Ziz, Gwen moved to the Bay Area to get involved in fixing the problem. they were an other kin. Are you familiar with this online community? Which one? Other kin?

Other kin? No, I have no, I've never heard of that. It's like a, it's like the Mormonism of furridden almost. That's insane what you said. I don't want to be like, it's harmless, right? Like these are people who there's a mix of beliefs. Some of them like literally believe they're like fantasy creatures. Some of them just like want to be.

Yeah, they like half identify as like idiot. a non-human creature. Right. Oh, like their furry persona is their true. Yeah, yeah, kind of. That's close enough for government work. In Gwyn's case, it's even different where I don't think they believe they are literally a dragon, but they believe that when there's a singularity and the robot God creates heaven,

they'll be given the body of a dragon because the robot God will be able to do that. If it's a good singularity, at least. That's why this is all so important to them, making sure it's like a nice AI. So they'll be able to get their animal friends back and get their dragon body. Tale is old as time, you know? Tale as old as time. Again, a lot of this could be avoided by just like processing death and stuff like that a little better. But we don't do that very well in our society anyway.

We've got a lot of people who are committed to denying that. So I'm not surprised shit like this happens at like the corners, right? Like this is just a little downstream from that Brian Johnson guy tracking his erections at night and trying to get the penis of a 19 year old. Yes. like, there's not like a massive sanity gap between these two things. No, no, it's, I think, I think we're drinking from the same well. Yeah, yeah. So this is a result, or so Ziz commits herself to turning Gwen to the dark side, which is a term she started to use. Obviously, it's a Star Wars term. And it comes out as a result

of her obsession with what's called Acrasia. Acrasia is an actual Greek term for a lack of willpower that leads someone to act in ways that take them further from their goals in life. It's an actual like, I think Accraja 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 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 to save the cosmos, she and her fellow rationalists need to free themselves from the restrictions of the Jedi and become vegan Sith. that's that's more or less where things are going here so i'd see i should note that while guinnsis are spinning out on their own everything that you're seeing from them these feelings

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

Yodkowski, Jessica Taylor, had a job that sometimes involved imagining extreme AI torture scenarios, as she described it in a post on less wrong. The worst possible suffering and AI might be able to inflict on people. At work, she says, she in a small team of researchers believed, we might make God, but we might mess up and destroy everything. In 2017, she was hospitalized for three weeks with delusions that she was intrinsically evil and had destroyed significant parts of the world with my demonic 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, man. Just taking ketamine and convincing yourself, you're the devil, normal rationalist stuff. Yeah. And I mean, hey, we've all been there, right? We've all been there.

No, in fact, I don't think we have. No, this is the least relatable group of people I've ever heard of. No, exactly, because it's this like grandiosity. It's this absolute need to whatever else is going on, even if you're like the bad guy, feel like what you're doing is like of central cosmic significance. It's this fundamental fear that all is integral to all of these tech guys. It's at the core of Elon Musk too that like one of these days, you're not going to exist. And very few of the things that you valued in your life are going to exist.

And there's still going to be a world because that's life. That's just, yeah. It's so crazy how it boils down to just like, yeah, man. I don't know what you thought was going to happen. Yeah, bro, sorry. Yeah, that's just how it goes. You know, we've got like 10,000 years of like philosophy and like thinking and writing on the subject of dealing with this, but you didn't take any humanities in your STEM classes.

So you don't know any of that. You're just trying to bootstrap it. You just watched Star Wars again and decided you got it figured out. Yeah, you watched Star Wars 136. seven times and figured that was going to replace reading a little bit of fucking Play-Doh or something. I don't know, man. Maybe it didn't work.

Also, again, the ketamine's not helping. No, no, no, no. God, to be a fly on that wall. Oh, God. Yeah, the rationalist therapists are raking it in. Oh, man. Honestly, well-deserved. Yeah, yeah.

Talk about info hazards. Jesus. Oh, man. So I have to emphasize here, again, that the, I want to keep going back to the broader rationales community because I felt like a risk of this is that I would just be talking about how crazy this one lady and her friends were. And it's like, no, no, no, everything they're doing. Even the stuff that is a split off and different and like more extreme than mainstream rationalism is directly related to shit going on in the mainstream rationalist community, which is deeply tied into big tech, which is deeply tied into like the Peter Thiel circle. A lot of these folks are close to in and around the government right now.

Right? So like that is, it's, Ziz is not nearly as much of an outlier as a lot of rationalists want people to think. Right. Yeah. Anyway, at rationalist meetups, Ziz began to pushing this whole vegan Sith thing hard. And again, it meets with little success. But she and Gwen gradually start to expand the circle of people around them. Meanwhile, in her professional life, that Google interview process moves forward. Ziz says that she passed every stage of the process, but that it keeps getting dragged out, forcing her to ask her parents for more help.

In November, around the time her blog started to get a following, she says Google said she'd passed the committee and would be hired once she got picked for a team. Now, I don't know what happens after this. She says Google asks for proof of address, which she doesn't have. She's just turned 26 and she's not on her parents' health insurance either. She's been pages describing what is a very familiar nightmare scenario to me of trying to get proof of address so you can get a job and like continue getting like on Calimed and stuff.

And I do think it's probably worth acknowledging that, like, as her brain is starting to break and she's having, she's getting further and further into all these delusional ideas, she's also struggling with being off of her parents' health insurance and, like, trying to find stable housing in the bay. And, like, that influences the situation. And still in the process of transitioning, right? Yes. Yes. Exactly. And still in the process of transitioning. Yes. It's a heavy workload. You're doing too much to your brain right now. Yes. So, and then she makes the worst possible decision, which is to live with her friend Gwyn in their tiny sailboat, which is now anchored by the Berkeley Marina. Again, this is not like a houseboat. This is like a sailboat with one small room. Right. It's got a quarter. Yeah. What is there?

There's like a bed, a table, and a sink. Right. Like a little bathroom, probably, maybe a kitchenette. But it's not like livable for two people. Anybody who's like ever lived in too small a space with a roommate knows that just like no matter where you're at. It's horrible. That's a bad idea. And now imagine if that shitty tiny apartment that you remember from your past was a boat.

Just just disastrous. And this is not a good situation. Ziz would later write I couldn't use my computer as well. I couldn't set up my three monitors. There was no room. Couldn't have a programming flow state for nine hours. I had trouble sleeping. The slightest noise in my mind kept alerting me to the possibility that someone like my roommate

from several months ago was going to attack me in my sleep. So this is not a healthy situation. And both Gwynn and Z's have endured some specific traumas, and both are also prone to flights of grandiosity and delusion. And now they are trapped all day, every day, together in a single room where their various neuroses are clashing with each other, and their only relief is talking for hours about how to save the world. Oh my God.

This is a, it's a real villain's story. Like, you couldn't get any worse than that. 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. Yeah. How often you think they were leaving that boat?

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

to belief about this. A person's core consisted of two hemispheres, each one intrinsically good or non-good. In extremely rare cases, they could be double good, a condition that it so happened Lesota identified in herself. And Ziz is consistently going to identify herself as intrinsically good. So both sides of her personality are only good. But most people are at best single good, which means part of them is non-good or basically evil. And they're at war with this other half of their brain that's a whole person that's evil,

which is why other people can't be trusted to make decisions. You know, like increasingly Ziz's attitude is going to be like, only intrinsically good people can be trusted to make good decisions. Only the double goods. Only the double goods. It's such like a, you know, you're making your own like Orwell speech, Ziz. This is a bad sign. So Zizz's Google ambitions fall apart at this time.

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

Also, I don't know if that's freedom. It's really not freedom. Maybe work. I hear the Google campus has a lot of things to do. It's the kind of the what if. I think maybe at this point she still could have pulled out of this tailspin if she'd like gotten a job and worked around other people and socialize, not on the sailboat. But also a real consistent thing with Ziz is at this point, she has no willingness to, like,

do the kind of compromise. And I'm not just talking about the moral compromise, but like, if you're going to work a job for a company, you're going to spend a large part of your day doing a thing that, like, you wouldn't be doing otherwise, right? Because that's what a job generally is. It's just work. That's just work. And Ziz feels like she can't handle the idea of doing anything, but reading fans.

Manfiction and theorizing about how to give herself superpowers, right? That's the most important thing in the world because the stakes are so high. So she, like, 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 another trait she's got in common with the rest of the rationalist EA subculture. That Bloomberg article interviewed a guy named Kowchu Yuan, a former rationalist and Ph.D. 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 is all cult stuff, right? Colts want you to cut off from your friends. They want you to give them all your money. He's doing, but he's doing it like independently. Like he's not, there's not like a single leader. He's not like living on a compound with them. It's just once you kind of take these beliefs seriously, the things that you will do to yourself

are the things people in Colts have done to them, right? In an interview with Business Insider, Juan 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 distort your ability to care about anything else. Man. Yeah, that's kind of the thing. it's harder to talk about this than like, could people talk about Ziz as like, oh, it's a cult leader and she had her, you know, vegan trans AI death cult or something. And, you know,

I feel like that's not close enough to the truth to get what's like, to get how this happened, right? Because what happens with Ziz is very cultish, but Ziz is one of a number of different people who have calved off of the rationalism community and had disastrous impacts. But it happens constantly with these people because like it's got such an engine for it yes it's an engine for making cults it's this is a cult factory for sure yeah like they created a cult factory oh no to give you the base ideas and then you can just kind of franchise it how you'd like 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 uh anna salomon of seafar described her as a young

person who was hanging around and who I suspect wanted to be important. And Anna claims... Is there anyone here who doesn't want that within this group? They're all... No, that's all of them. Right? That's the whole community. And like Anna was emailing direct.

Gave Ziz like some of the advice that Ziz considered like key to her moving to the Bay Area and stuff, right? Like these people, like the rationalists really, really want you to think that this was just like some fringe person, but she's very much tidy. in to all of this stuff, right? So for her part, Ziz doesn't deny that failing to convince other rationalists was part of why she pulled away from mainstream rationalism, but she's also going to claim that a big reason for her break is sexual abuse among people leading in the rationalist community. And there's a specific case that she'll cite later that doesn't happen until 2018,

but this is a problem people were discussing in 2017 when she's living on that boat. The representative story is the case of Sonia Joseph, who was the basis of that Bloomberg news piece I've quoted from a couple of times. And it's a bummer of a story. Sony was 14 when she first read Yidkowski's Harry Potter and the methods of rationality, which is set her on the path that led her to moving to the Bay Area in order to get involved in the rationalist EA set. And she's focused on the field of AI risk.

And I'm going to read a quote. This week has been so long that I completely erased the Harry Potter part of the story from my brain. It's never drops too far below the story. surface. I cannot over-emphasize how important this Harry Potter fan fiction is to all these murders. I mean, this sort of primary text, right? And this woman getting abused. Yes. Yes, it's the, it's a primary text of the movement. I'm going to read a quote from that Bloomberg article. Sonia was encouraged when she was 22 to have dinner with a 40-ish startup founder in the rationalist

sphere because he had a close connection to Peter Thiel. At dinner, the man bragged that Yadkowski had modeled a core Harry Potter, like professor in that fanfic on him. Joseph says that he also argued that it was normal for a 12-year-old girl to have sexual relationships with adult men and that such relationships were a noble way of transferring knowledge to a younger generation. Then she says he followed her home and insisted on staying over. She says he slept on the floor of her living room and that she felt unsafe until he left in the morning. Jesus. So great, you know, bragging about your Harry Potter, how you helped inspire the Harry Potter fanfic and then explaining how 12-year-old girl should have sex with adult men.

Good stuff. I got to say that's a crazy brag to get chicks. Yeah, to get chicks. You know it was, you know, one of those characters. I'm the Snape. Yeah, I'm the Snape of this. By the way, what do you think about 12-year-olds? Oh, God.

Also, I have a close connection to Peter Thiel. Yeah. Cool. Oh, shit. Oh, man. As that Bloomberg article makes clear, this is not an isolated issue. within rationalism. Quote, sexual harassment and abuse are distressingly common,

according to interviews with eight women at all levels of the community. Many young, ambitious women described a similar trajectory. They were initially drawn in by the ideas, then became immersed in the social scene. Often that meant attending parties at EA or rationalist group houses or getting added to jargon-filled Facebook messenger chat groups with hundreds of like-minded people. The eight women say casual misogyny threaded through the scene.

On the low end, Brick, the rationalist-adjacent writer, says a prominent rationalist once told her condescendingly that she was a five-year-old and a hot 20-year-old's body. Relationships with much older men were common, as was polyamory. Neither was inherently harmful, but several women said those norms became tools to help influential older men get more partners. And this is also, this isn't just rationalism, that is the California ideology. That is the Bay Area tech set, right?

Yeah, that older men. I was going to say it feels very techy. Yes. Oh, man. And it's all super fucking great. gross. The whole year a five-year-old and a hot 20-year-old's body thing. What the fuck, man? No, to say that. How do you say that and not hurl yourself off the San Francisco Bay Bridge?

That shit's vile. That's fucked up, dude. That's truly vial. Speaking of bad, to the bone, our 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 several murders. Ziz had many of the traits of a cult leader, but again, she's also a victim first of the cult dynamics inherent to rationalism. And what she's doing next is she breaks away with a small, loyal group of friends,

and she does create a physical situation that much more resembles the kind of cults we're used to dealing with, particularly Scientology. Because next, she's going to take, oh, wow, me and Gwen living alone on this boat, we kind of hate each other, and neither of us is sleeping,

and our emotional health is terrible, But we've made so many, much progress on our ideas. Maybe we should, maybe we should make this a bigger thing, right? Maybe we should get a bunch of rationalists all living together on boats. Oh, she needs a work-life balance. Yeah, no, no. What she thinks she needs is, she calls it the rationalist fleet, which is she wants to get a bunch of community members to buy several boats and live

anchored in the bay to avoid high bay area rent so they can spend all their time talking and plotting out ideas for saving the cops. Cosmos. Oh, man. And I get it, right? It's expensive here. I want to get some boats with my friends. It does sound cool.

We won't go insane together, obviously, you know. She buys a 24-foot boat for $600 off of Craigslist. I don't know what you got boats, but I know you're not getting a good one for $600. No, no. Like a fool. Not a good living boat? Like a full boat? Like a 24-foot boat.

Yes, a full boat. Oh, man, that had to be a piece of shit. That would be a shitty, shitty boat. Just a colossal piece of shit. Yeah. She names it the Black Signet, and she starts trying to convince some of her idealities, 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 70-year-old Navy tugboat named the Caleb, which was anchored in Alaska. This is like a 94 foot boat. It's a sizable boat. And it is also very old and in terrible shape. She and Dan- That's the center. That's the crown jewel of the fleet.

Right, right. That's our flagship. Oh, man. So she and Danielson, sail, they buy this thing with this third guy, Dan Powell, who's at least a Navy veteran. So like, you know. Okay. That's a good call.

He's boat adjacent. But he's. I get the feeling. Nobody says this. Powell says that he put tens of thousands of dollars into buying the Caleb. And I just know from what Danielson and Ziz wrote about their finances, neither of them had nearly that much money. So I think by far he invests the most in this project.

And I don't want to insult the guy, but he says he did it because he, quote, considered buying the boat to be a good investment, which boats aren't. Boats are never an investment. Like, comically so. Like known to be in terror. Nothing depreciates like fucking raw salmon depreciates slower than a boat.

I think his attitude is I'm going to become like the slumlord of a bunch of, or at least landlord to a bunch of boat rationalists. I think slumlord was correct. I don't know how you expect this to pay off buying a 70-year-old tugboat for a bunch of like poor rationalist. punk kids to live in? How is that ever supposed to work? What's the P&L statement you put together here? Oh, man.

Oh, man. What was the timeline on him getting his money back, he thought? Oh, God, I have no idea. He absolutely takes a bath on this shit, right? Yeah, no, he claims, and I believe him, that Zizz lied to him about the whole scenario to get his money. I do think this was essentially a con from her. He says, quote,

Ziz led me to believe that she had established contacts in the bay and that it would be easy for us to at least get a slip, if not one that was approved for overnight use. And as it turns out, when we were coming through the inside passage from Alaska, it was revealed that we did not have a place to arrive. Wait. Oh, I didn't realize he sailed it down from Alaska. Yeah, they all sail it together,

them and a couple other rationalists that they pick up. They like make a post on the internet being like, hey, any rationalists want to sail a boat down from Alaska. Talk about our ideas while we live on a boat. Oh, man. These people need space. Yes. Just get a warehouse.

It's Oakland. Yeah. Just get a warehouse. The ghost ship fire had happened by that point. So I don't think warehouse space was easy to get. Fair, fair, fair, fair. But I think this would have. I think you're right.

In an earlier era, they would have just wound up living in like a warehouse. And maybe all died in a horrible fire because there were issues with that kind of life too. But they would have been an option besides the boat thing. Anyway, the Caleb is not in good shape. Again, this boat is 70 plus years old. It is only livable by punk standards. And while it was large enough, it is a 94-foot boat. You can keep some people on there.

It's also way too big to anchor in most municipal marinas, especially since the boat has 3,000 gallons of incredibly toxic diesel fuel. And it's not really seaworthy. which means there's this constant risk of poisoning the waters it sits in, that the authorities are just going to be consistently like, guys, you can't have this here. Guys, you simply can't have this here. So they just got to operate out international waters like a cruise ship?

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 for the adventure. So they leave and don't come back after they get to the bay. But this person expressed an opinion that Ziz consistently came off as creepy but not scary. At one point, he says that she confronted him and told him he was transgender. And when he's like, no, I'm really not.

She told him he was. Yes. She does this a lot, tells people, I know that you're this. 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 Gwyn too. So I don't doubt his story. Like she just kind of

decides things about people and then tries to brute force them into accepting that about herself. And when there are people who are like both desperate for like approval and affection and also who are housing insecure and need the boat or wherever to live with her, those people feel a lot, a number of them feel like a significant pull to just kind of accept whatever Zizz is saying about them. Yeah. I mean, when you're desperate in that way, you kind of definitely find yourself bending things to have a roof over your head. Right. Yep.

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 Emma Borhanian, a former Google engineer, and Alex Leitham, a budding mathematician. The flotilla became a sort of marooned aquatic salon, wired, quote, zizz as emailing to a friend at the time. We've been somewhat isolated from the rationalist community for a while. while and in the course developed a significant chunk of unique art of rationality and theories of

psychology aimed at solving our problems. I'm excited for this psychology you built on the boat. Yeah. Wired continues, as Lassota articulated, their goals had moved beyond real estate into a more grandiose realm. We are trying to build a cabal, she wrote. The aim was to find abnormally intrinsically good people and turn them all into Jervais sociopaths, creating a fundamentally type of group than I have heard of existing before.

Sociopathy, Lissota wrote, would allow the group members to operate unponed by the external world. Yeah, because you had said that before, right? That's sort of what they're looking to be. Yeah, they're obsessed with this idea of, which is initially like kind of a joke about the office, but they're like, no, no, no, it actually is really good to have this sociopath at the top who like moves and manipulates these like lesser like fools and whatnot and puts them into positions below them. Like, that's how we need to,

what we need to be in order to gain control of the levels of power. Oh, man. We have to make ourselves into Ricky Jervais, sociopaths. 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 regularly having conversations with people outside of your bubble. Exactly. It's the thing. Yeah. If you have somewhere to go. Yeah.

If you have anywhere to go. go, this can't fly. Yes, yes. If you've got a friend who's like a nurse or a contract, you have drinks with once a week and you just talk about your ideas once, they're going to be like, hey, this is bad. You need to stop. You're going out of bad road. Do you need to stay with me? Are you okay? Yeah, this is clearly like a cousin. Yes, someone. This is, would be so upsetting for someone to just casually talk about it like a paint and sip or what. Like Ricky Jervis? Yeah, Ricky. So by this point, their breaks with mainstream rationalism had gone terminal.

Gwen criticized the rest of the central rationalist community for, quote, not taking heroic responsibility for the outcome of this world. In addition to the definitely accurate claims of sexual abuse within rationalism, they alleged organizations like 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 who will be like, no, there's a very high population of trans people within the rationalist community. So people disagree about this.

It's not my place to come to a conclusion. But this is one of the things that Ziz says about the central rationalist community. Ziz had concluded that transgender people were the best people to build a cabal around because they, quote, from Ziz's blog, had unusually high life force. Ziz believed that the mental powers locked within the small community of Sympatico rationalists they'd gathered together were enough to alter the fate of the cosmos. if everyone could be jailbroken into sociopaths. And these are all double goods as well.

Well, no, she's the only double good, actually. She becomes increasingly convinced that they're all just single good, right? And this is like her beliefs about heroism from the last episode. If you've got the community and the hero, the community's job is to support the hero, right? Like no matter what she says. It was like blind support, right? Blind support no matter what. And a lot of the languages is using here, in addition to being, you know,

rationalist language. This is all like Scientology, mixed with gaming and fantasy media. She talks about the need to install new mental tech on she and her friends, which is like tech is like a Scientology term, right? Like that's like a big thing that they say. She and her circle start dressing differently. Ziz starts wearing like all black robes and stuff

to make her look like a Sith or some sort of wizard. Her community adopts the name vegan, anarcho-transhumanism, and starts unironically referring to themselves. as vegan Sith. Man, imagine being in the boat community when they moved in. Yeah, just like... What the fuck is going on?

I just wanted... I'm just an alcoholic. What's happening? I just wanted to be like Quint from Jaws. Oh, no. I'm just here because my wife left me. I think I might die a different way than a great white attack now. This is looking bad.

Yikes. Oh, man. So around this time, Gwen claims she came up with a tactic for successfully separating and harnessing the power of different hemispheres of someone's brain. The tactic was unihemispheric sleep. And this is a process by which only one half of your brain sleeps at a time. In a critical write-up published as a warning before the killings that are to come, a rationalist named Apollo Mojave writes,

normally it is not possible for human beings to sleep with only one hemisphere. However, a weak form of UHS can be achieved by stimulating one half of the body and resting the other. Like hypnosis or fasting, this is a vulnerable psychological state for a person. Entering UHS requires the sleeper to be exhausted. It also has disorienting effects, so they are not quite themselves. And I disagree with them that they're not just actually sleeping with only one hemisphere. And in fact, I think they may have taken this idea from Warhammer 40,000. That's so funny.

Because it's something space Marines do. Because, yeah, what are you talking about? But yeah, that's not a thing. Like, you know, that's, like, yes, if you don't let you don't let you. yourself sleep for long periods of time and like kind of let yourself zone into a meditative state, you'll get a trippy effect. Like you will become altered. You're altering your state. And you can, like, this is why Colts deprive people of sleep. You can fuck with people's heads a lot when they're in that space. But this isn't what's happening. I like to think of them on,

on the boat just only using one half of their body. Right, right, like one eye open. Watching the office. Furiously taking notes. So this is how that write-up describes the process of unihemispheric sleep. One, you need to be tired. Two, you need to be laying down or sitting up. It is important that you stay in a comfortable position that won't require you to move very much. In either case, you want to close one eye and keep the other open.

Distract the open eye with some kind of engagement. Eventually, you should feel yourself begin to fall asleep on one side. That side will also become numb. The degree of numbness is a good way to track how deep into sleep the side is. Once into UHS, it is supposed to be possible to infer which aspects of your personality are associated with which side of the brain. And the goal of unihemispheric sleep is to jail break the mind into psychopathy fully, right? In Zizz, that's how Ziz describes it.

That's the goal. That's the goal. That's their goal. You've got to make ourselves into psychopaths so we can save the world. But it also gets used. You can use it to like, I have this thing. I don't like that I react this way in this situation. So get me into this sleep pattern and you like talk me through and we'll figure out why I'm doing it.

And they describe it as using tech to upgrade their mental capabilities, right? So they're just kind of brainwashing each other. They're like fucking around with some pretty potentially dangerous stuff. And again, drugs are definitely involved in a lot of aspects of this, which is not usually written up. but you just have to infer, given that there's some disagreement, there's some disagreement around all this, but it seems accurate to say that Gwynn is the one

who came up with a human, unihemispheric sleep idea, but a lot of the language around how this tactic was used and what it was supposed to do came from Ziz. And again, the process is just sleep deprivation, right? This is cult stuff. It's part of how Colts brainwash people, but it also wouldn't have seemed inherently suspicious

to rationalists, because part of that subculture, being part of that subculture and going to those events had already normalized a slightly less radical version of this behavior, as this piece in Bloomberg explains. At house parties, rationalists spent time debugging each other, engaging in a confrontational style of interrogation that would supposedly yield more rational thoughts. Sometimes, to probe further, they experimented with psychedelics and tried jailbreaking their minds to crack open their consciousness and make them more influential or agintic. several people in Taylor, and this is one of the sources, fear had similar psychotic episodes. One died by suicide in 2018 and another in 2021. So in the mainstream rationalist subculture,

they are also trying to like consciously hack their brains using a mix of like drugs and meditation and like social abuse. And people kill themselves as a result of like the outcomes of this. This is already a problem in the mainstream subculture. Yeah, let alone this extremist offshoot, right? Mm-hmm. Yep. In her own writings at the time, Ziz describes hideous fights with Gwynn, in which Gwynne tries to mentally dominate and mind control Ziz.

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

to mind control Ziz and Ziz threatens Gwen back and this starts a verbal escalation. And the way Ziz describes this escalation, which is again, these are two sleep deprived, traumatized people fucking with each other's heads on a boat. But the way that is Ziz describes the escalation. cycle is going to be important because this has a lot to do with the logic of the murders that are to come. I said that if they were going to defend a right to be attacking me on some level and treat fighting back as a new aggression and cause to escalate, I would not at any point back down. And if our conflicting definitions of the ground state where no further retaliation

was necessary meant that we were consigned to a runaway positive feedback loop of revenge, so be it. And if that was true, we might as well try to kill each other right then and there. In the darkness of the Caleb's bridge at night, where we were both sitting lying under things in a cramped space, I became intensely worried they could stand up faster. Consider the idea from World War I, mobilization is tantamount to a declaration of war. I stood up, still, silent, waiting. So you see. First off.

And there's other people there as well. Yes, yes. 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 we'll kill each other. So we should just kill each other now. Like when you are taking your advice and how to handle social conflict

from the warring European powers that got into World War I, maybe not a good, like, positive example. It's just so... Like, even in understanding how they got there, it still is such a stress. Like, even having all this back, it's still like, really taking some leaps.

It's, yeah, I mean, just having a fight with your friend and then opening your locket, which has like Kaiser Wilhelm and the czar in it and going, what would you guys do here? Ancestors guide me. And again, you know, part of what's going on here is this timeless decision theory bullshit, right? Ziz believes that she makes it clear at this point when they start having a conflict that the stakes will immediately escalate to life or death. Gwyn 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, Gwyn yields, and Ziz concludes that the technique works, right? So then her man must be what she thinks it is.

Her man is strong, and this is a good idea for handling all conflicts, right? So I'm going to increasingly teach all these people who are listening to me that this is the like escalation loop that you handle every conflict with, right? Great stuff. One of the young people who got drawn as is at this time was Maya Pasek, who blogged under the name Squirrel in Hell. She wrote about mainstream rationalist stuff, citing Gikowsky and Elon Musk. But in her blog, there's like a pattern of depressive thought. In one 2016 post, she mused about whether or not experiencing joy and awe might be bad because it biases your perception. So this is a young person who I think is dealing with a lot of depressive issues.

Yeah, that's classic stinking thinking. as they say. Right. And maybe the community's not super helpful to her. She was working to create a rationalist community in the Canary Island. 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 a thing that can exist a lot of places? Like, sure. Yeah. I mean, yeah, if you've got cheap rent, you can get a bunch of like weirdos who work online to move into a house with you. Right. Fair. Yeah. Like that's always possible. She found Zizz's blog and she starts commenting on it. She's particularly drawn to Ziz's theories on mana and Zinn's theory

and Gwynn's theory about hemispheric personalities. In one of her most direct cult leader moments, Ziz reaches out directly to this, to Maya, as she's like posting on her blog and emails her saying, I see you like some of my blog posts, truly a sinister opening. Yeah, no, that's a bad guy. My true companion, Gwyn and I are taking a somewhat different than Miria, that's the organization, one of the rationalist organization. Is that what they call each other? That's how they refer to it.

True companions. True companions, okay. At this point. Or taking a somewhat a different approach than the merey approach to saving the world. Without much specific technical disagreements, we are running on somewhat pointed to by the approach. As long as you expect the world to burn, then change course, right? So basically, we still expect the world to burn so we can't keep doing what the other rationalists are doing.

And she lays out to this girl she meets through a blog post. her plan to find abnormally intrinsically good people and jail break them into Jervais' sociopaths. She invites Maya to come out, and it's, I don't think this happened, but they do start separately journeying into unbucketing, and Maya gets really into this uni-hemispheric sleep thing. And Ziz is kind of like coaching her through the process. She tells Maya that one of her hemispheres is female, because Maya is a trans woman, and Ziz tells her one of your brain hemispheres, each of which is a separate person, is female. but the other is male and quote, mostly dead.

And your suicidal impulses are caused by both the pain of being trans and also the fact that there's this dead man living in your head that's like taking up half of your brain's space. And so you really need to debuck it in order to have a chance of surviving, right? Okay. So she needs to be jailbroken to be free. Right. To be free. And Maya will basically replace her sleep entirely with this unihemispheric 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 2018. She posts a what is essentially a suicide note that is very rationalist in its verbiage, literally titled Decision Theory and Suicide. And this is the first death directly related to Ziz 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 C-FAR events, and people will argue constantly about whether or not a low-value individual, it's better for them to kill themselves, right? Is that like

of higher net value to the world? And it was also used as like a threat to stop women who were abused by figures in the community from speaking up. And this is from that Bloomberg article. One woman in the community who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals says she was sexually abused by a prominent AI researcher. After she confronted him, she says, She had job offers rescinded and conference speaking gigs canceled and was disinvited from AI events. She said others in the community told her allegations of misconduct harmed the advancement of AI safety. And one person suggested an agintic 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 to kill yourself if you're going to be a net harm to the cause of AI safety, which you will be by reporting this AI resource. who molested you, right? Yeah, because you're taking them, man. Yeah. Shit. 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

either kill themselves or have suffer severe trauma as a result of this, all of this. Escaping this is even putting yourself back together after living this way. It seems like it would be such a test. ask. Again, and like any cult, part of the difficulty is like teaching yourself how to speak normally again, how to not talk about all this stuff, right? Yeah, not identify as a vegan Sith, but I can't work. Right, right. Because like I got to say, like, there's, and people who are really in the community will note like a dozen different other concepts in terms in addition to like vegan Sith and Jervais sociopaths and shit that I'm not talking about that are important to Ziss's ideology. But like, you just can't like, I had to basically learn like the, like a different language to do these episodes. And I'm not fluent in it, right? Like, you have to triage like, what, what shit do you need to know? Yeah, it's so deep.

It's so deep. 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 we've, this person, Maya, has likely killed themselves at the start of 2018.

And Ziz 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 unihemispheric sleep might be dangerous, but that explaining hemispheric consciousness to people was an info hazard. She believed that people who were single good like Maya were at elevated risk because learning that one of the whole persons inside them was evil or mostly dead could create irreconcilable conflict leading to depression and suicide.

And she comes up with a name for this. She calls this Passix Doom. That's what she like names the info hazard that kills her friend who she's like fucking with their head. So that's nice. Yeah. As nice as anything else in this story has been. I think you might have been the doom here.

Yeah. I think you were the whole problem. But now, but now it's an info hazard too. explain a person's like to explain your theories. Yeah. Yeah. To a person who can't handle it. Yeah.

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

Yeah. It isolates herself within our own group that she's created. Well, 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. Yep. Good stuff.

Yeah. Anyway, how are you feeling? Got to give the plug? I am, I, I, I am okay. I'm, I'm, I, you know what? I'm deeply sad for these people who are so lost. Mm-hmm. And I'm also pretty interested because this is crazy, but I'm okay.

I'll be right. Great. Happy to, happy to, happy to, happy to, happy to see that. Well, everybody, this has been behind the bastards, a podcast about things. that you maybe didn't think, maybe didn't need to know about how the internet breaks people's brains. But also, a lot of people surprisingly close to this community are running the government now. So maybe you do need to know about it. Sorry about that info hazard. We're back. Oh my gosh, it's behind the bastards. A podcast where Robert Evans ruined his life by reading too many blogs

by internet poisoned nerd rationalist people, and I deeply regret everything I've done. How are you doing, David? I'm good. I am concerned for you. This is a difficult place for you to spend a week. 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. Yeah, exactly.

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

Something has to be done. Oh my God. Yeah. This is, it's so wild. Yeah. 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? A very, very small boat. Yeah. Barely a boat. Even a big boat. Yeah.

Let alone barely a boat. And talk to like, you know, 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

poison their brains with the same things I've poisoned my brain with. Like, please go find people who don't know all of the weird internet things you do and spend more time with them. Aggressive on the people like Garrison. 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 yourselves. Save yourselves. It doesn't have to be like this. 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 Passick suicide on Ziz.

And this is really when a lot of folks in rationalist circles start breaking off and calling, like saying like, hey, this is what Ziz and Gwinter doing, they've made like a cult, right? And again, I don't think they're really off base here, but also they tend to ignore all of the suicides in the rationalist community. I was going to say they are in a cult. Yeah. You know, it's more because cult is, I think like you get like they're in a, there's a cultic milieu that rationalism forms, which is like the substrate. Right. You know, if a cult is like a plant growing up from it, like rationalism is this soil that is extremely optimized for growing cults. I think that might be closer, you know, although it's also one of those things where if you're just trying to explain this story, you can just say it's a cult.

You can say it's this weird Bay Area cult about science and AI and shit. Like, that's probably close enough. Yeah. A few things happen in quick succession after this point. One is that a story broke later in 2018 confirming Zizz's suspicion that. that the 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 19, and he was close to 40. The allegations here remind me a little of the ones against Neil Gaiman. You've got a very powerful man accused of coercing much younger women into extreme BDSM situations and plying them with drugs. Obviously, none of this is, I don't think any of this has been litigated, so I will continue to refer to them as allegations. I don't know exactly what happened here. But this breaks, right?

And it's a big deal within the community. Rumors spread that CFR had kind of tried to like hush the whole mess down in order to protect this guy. They conducted an internal investigation. We all know, like when the cops do an internal investigation, right? That's always reliable. No, trust us to figure it out. We'll police ourselves. That's rational.

This internal investigation exonerated dill and including. the line, he is aligned with C-FAR's goals and strategy and should be seen as an ally who embodies a rare kind of agency and a sense of heroic responsibility. There's those words again. Agency, heroic responsibility, dating a 19-year-old when you're 40 and giving her drugs. Good stuff. People respond with outrage. See-Far eventually banned Dill from future events. They kind of cave. And Ziz would describe Dill later as a true. true negative. That's someone who both half of halves of their brain are evil. Double bad. Yeah, double bad. Now, at this point, she still thought Yidkowski 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. I was going to say, at this point, has Yidkowski, is he like, is she still, are they on good terms? Is he still acknowledging? No. I don't think she's ever on close terms with Yidkowski. She is speaking and communicating directly with Anna Salomon, who is like one of Yadkowski's, like, top people quite a lot. I don't think she's super close to Yadkowski. Like, I'm sure they're at the same events and stuff several times. 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 try to force a conversation with Anna Salomon outside of CFR HQ about this and other discovery she and Gwyn had made on their boats. And Ziz, like, writes in the blog post about it that, like, she felt it was going pretty good and Anna was listening to her. There are context clues that I don't think Ziz picks up on that, like, oh, no, Anna immediately felt uncomfortable and, like, you were assaulting her, like, coming up to her and just, like, kind of barraging her with all of this nonsense. And she did not want to have this conversation.

And she kind of pretended to be agree with you in order to in this because she's not sure if you're dangerous, which, to be fair, you are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Soon later at a CFAR board meeting, Anna recommended that Ziz be disinvited from joint Miri-C-Far events. And both of these are separate organizations, but basically the membership overlaps are like a circle, right? Her reasoning for not wanting Ziz at events is that Ziz wore, quote, black clothes took supervillains as role models and came up with dangerous plans.

Yeah. Yeah. More that's correct. I forgot that she was also wearing black robes. She's also started dressing like, oh. The 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 Caleb nearly hit other ships while drifting, like the anchor gets fucked up. I don't know that they probably don't know how to use it because, like, they're... The Navy got, he let... Is he still involved? He's gone. He is in, he's bounced. He had at least the judgment to cut his losses.

So they don't even know how to work boats particularly? They do. Gwen is, I think Gwen's actually reasonably competent with a sailboat. Oh, because Gwen had to sailboat. Right. And she trained,

and Ziz gets trained up. And these are both smart enough people that I suspect they're competent with a sailboat, but like a 24 foot sailboat and a 94 foot tugboat. Very different. That's like I'm good with driving my Prius. Give me that fucking 18 weather with two, with two fucking. storage containers on the back,

shipping containers on the back. I could probably back that thing into a parking space, no problem. They're just different, you know? Damn, damn, damn, do, damn. Right, and what's very funny, these accounts of, like, boat cops getting on the Caleb and talking to Zizians,

they're like, these people must be sovereign citizens, which is like a totally different kind of thing. And to me, I'm like, they don't sound at all. Like, but to them, it, like, this mix, because it's this mix of anarchist theory, right? Because these people are anarchists, so they're telling these cops why they don't think the cops have any authority. But they're also like insulting them with these like logical arguments based on obscure rationalist doctrine. And these cops are heavy jargon. Right.

Heavy, heavy jargon. These cops are just like, okay, so we got some sovereign sits, some sob sits here. All right. Yeah, yeah. They're out of boat. It's a 284. Now we know what to do. Yeah, yeah. And again, this is like the Bay Area. I think cops in the Bay Area are, 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 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. And to be fair, the boat is leaking diesel into the bay.

Like, see, it is a problem, right? That's a negative. In 2019, another scandal hits the rationalist community. The story broke that a former employee had blackmailed the company over a dispute. and use donor funds to pay. This got stacked on top of the scandal that Dill had just created. And as is, and many of her comrades saw it, the issue was not whether this employee had been mistreated,

but that Merey hadn't made the proper timeless decisions to ensure they couldn't be blackmailed. Per an article for the Rolling Stone, quote, in their view, this not only represented bad decision theory, but called the organization's entire existence into question. In other words, it's not whatever happened with this employee. It's that you didn't make the timeless decisions to make it so that anyone would be scared to try to blackmail you

because they'd know that your response would be so intense. That proves you don't have what it takes to really save the world because you're not ruthless enough to just jump to killing people like us. You're not a psychopath. You're not a fucking psychopaths, right? And we need psychopaths. Which is good. To save the world.

We love psychopaths. We aspire to it. And one of the big problems within the rationalist community is people talk about different mental health conditions as if they're like tools in a toolbox. Like, you can go into a psychopathic mode, and that's really good for accomplishing these things. So you could go ADHD. You can make yourself autistic in this.

They talk this way, right? I'm not saying this is not how anything works. I'm not comparing autism and psychopathy. I'm just saying this is how they talk, right? Yeah, they go sicko mode and then save the world. Right. And I was like, no, that's not, none of this is accurate to like the way brains are. Like, that's just not how anything works.

You can't just be like, I'm going to turn off by autism today. I got some shit to me. No, that's not how it were. 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 so. I think there's some issues there that do. Anyway, and a lot of this is, yeah, it's just, this soup is not exclusive to Ziz.

So Ziz is banned now from Miri-C-Far events. And her whole crew is increasingly radicalized against the organizations. They have also, you know, it's both where like C-Far has good reason to not want Zizz around, but also all of Ziz, most of Zizz's complaints about rationalists like C-Far and Miri are very valid, right? Yeah. Yeah. You're both right about each other.

It's like how Elon Musk and Peter Thiel would shit talk each other. Exactly. You both do have each other's number. Yes. No, everybody's got a point. Everybody's got a point here. I just kind of wish you would all go away. Yeah.

In November of 2019, 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 is in mainstream rationalism, right? They are having their big party next to Bohemian Grove. Ziz had sent an open letter in like a letter to Yadkowski a few days earlier, urging members of both organizations to quit in the interest of saving the world, basically saying these groups are in so compromised, they can no longer

add effectively to the things we're trying to do to our important work. So you should all leave and kind of the subtext is and do what me and Gwen are doing, you know. Start a cold. So on the day of this event, Ziz, Gwen, and two others in their circle drive up to this like this location out in the woods with a box truck, a shuttle bus, and a Prius. and they block the entrances and exits of the venue with their vehicles. And they jump out wearing black robes, guy fox masks, and black gloves. Now, this is not a violent protest.

There's no evidence that they intended violence. They had walkie-talkies. One person had a can of mace, but like, you know, people carry mace that's not suspicious. And all they're trying to do is distribute flyers, lying out their case against CFAR 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 wearing black robes. And they're wearing and guy fox masks.

The police get called immediately. And as best as I can tell, it does, maybe I'm wrong. It seems like the C-Far Miri people like new, because they, there's like sent out an email saying, hey, maybe don't come or like if you do, just like be, note that these weird people are here. But the venue owner, like the people running the venue call the cops is what it seems like happens. There are different allegations here. I don't precisely know. But for whatever the case, two false pieces of information are given to the cops when 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 who make these allegations. It was definitely an employee at the venue who were 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, right? Because he was scared of these people. A county 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 his thought is there's a mass shooting brewing. Right. So 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' account, which he relayed to me in the fall of 2023 at a local Starbucks, the protesters were speaking in unison. Just stuff I didn't really understand, but it was somewhat rehearsed, he said. The group had printed flyers outlining their complaints against CFR and Miri. They alleged that Miri had paid out blackmail using donor funds to quash sexual misconduct allegations and that Seafar's leader discriminates against trans women. Other allegations were more esoteric. Seafar does not appreciably develop novel rationality mental tech.

The path to avoiding extinction, they wrote, involved escaping containment by society through mental autonomy and interhemispheric game theory. So some random sheriff's deputy is not going to understand what's going on here. What the fuck are you talking about? He and his men default to the thing that cops do when they get confused, which is they get violent, right? Quote, he and Ricks ordered the protesters to get on the ground. As they did, each one called out demanding a same gender pat down, like one might request

at an airport. All three were trans women, but Parks says he couldn't discern their genders because of the robes and masks. Regardless, they were not going to get that luxury at that time, he told me. It's like, well, we don't know if you're a boy or a girl, and we got to handcuff you. Parks' deputy subdued the three in prone positions, what Parks calls a high-risk style takedown, requiring more force than a normal handcuffing style. So there's several articles I've read will refer to a discrepancy between how the Zizzians and the cops describe these events. I've read both accounts.

I really don't see a gap. What I see is the cops describing their violent and dehumanizing behavior as like, this is the normal way to respond, and the Zizians describing it as dehumanizing and traumatizing. The only question here is like the moral quality you give to the cops tackling a bunch of people basically who don't have weapons because they got a phone call, right? Which like if you're a cop, you're like, well, this is the only way to act. And if you're, I think most people like, you're like, well, probably could have just talked this situation down. I don't see where an arrest. Like, yeah. Gwyn later writes this about the experience.

When we arrived, a staff member called the police and falsely told them we had a gun and that we were going into buildings and that that we were too afraid to get off the phone. Your report said there was an active shooter with a duffel bag. None of us had a duffel bag. Police arrived with their guns out and we were immediately arrested within about 10 minutes of us arriving. After which we were sexually assaulted. In my case, I was groped and I had my pants pulled down and then sat on by an officer in a mounting position. They are mocked and derided. Like, as they're naked, cops are making comments about their bodies.

It's like a really, like, 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. Yeah, that's part for the course. Yeah, and it's also the fact that they are specifically the police are making fun of them for being trans is very much in line with what statistics say about trans people and police violence. A 2013 report from the Anti-violence Project found that trans individuals are seven times likelyer to experience violence while interacting with the police than cisgender people. So I have no trouble believing Gwen's accounts here, even though, again, I treat her with proper scrutiny in most areas. This all seems like what cops do.

Now, the other big discrepancy where the 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. It's like their legal names type thing. They don't talk when they're arrested, right? Which is a very normal thing for like a protest. They say absolutely nothing and they have no 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, that's just the only name available. But it escalates this situation, right? And it is worth noting that a number of outlets do continue to 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 of this is going to like, this is this court case is going to wear on. They get charged initially with felonies.

Bayless set at like 50 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 they will be fighting because they're going to counter sue over these arrests. And both the trauma of the arrests, their anger over them and the fact that there's the stress of this years-long court battle is going to have this extremely deleterious effect on everybody's mental health when they're already not doing well. Right around. It's great stuff. Yeah.

Right around this. time. The Rash, the Zizians move, they stop doing their fleet thing, right? 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 94-foot tugboat. Nobody can handle a tugboat, right? Like, it's too big to do much with. And they probably could have figured something out, but they decide the opportunity cost of figuring out how to dispose of this boat is, it will distract from their important work. So it's okay for it to sink and cause like a modest environmental crisis by leaking diesel into the bay. Basically, Ziz decides that the value of all the sea life that it kills is less than the

value of them continuing their work, which at this point, if you're keeping track, is trying to figure out how to live out of box trucks. So that's what they're doing now. And this is where a guy named Curtis... They got a worse living 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. It's really a real estate story. It's a real, just like Superman 1. So, enter Curtis Lind. Lind is a guy. He was like a, he made his career doing shipping. He lived in a boat in and around where Zizz and her friends were living at sea and they met each other through that. He like sells them an anchor.

But he's also like pushing 80. and so he's got, he's interested in, like, getting out of the boat life because it sucks, and he's got a plot of land that he's got a house on, and he's got extra space that he's interested in renting out. There's not like full houses, but there's like some shipping containers, and I think like some RV, like 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 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 slum lord, right? And I mean, the line is thin, right? The line is thin, right? 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? This is why I have enough money to live in a boat where I would go crazy. Or a box truck.

Or a box truck. Ah, to live in a box truck. The joy. The glory days. Yeah, we're back. We're talking about how good it is to live in a box truck. Good stuff. Do we know roughly how big the group is at this point?

I think at any given time there's between like six and nine people, you know? Okay, okay, so very small, very small. 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. Or they even live in other states, but they're always in contact with multiple members of the group through the internet.

This is a very like geographically decentralized group, although there is that like core inner circle who are all together on this land. And for a while, things are okay there. The Zizians pay rent. Ziz continues to write blog posts and run her followers through unihemispheric sleep sessions to upgrade them. And, you know, again, 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 a paper called like zizians. Info that first identifies them as a cult and describes like their unihemispheric sleep tactics. And it's written because this person is in the

community and wants to stop other people from falling in with ziz. And I think they have good intentions here. They like see the danger. They also, one of the issues with the document is I don't think they see some of the danger of other rationalists stuff. 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 degree of like accountability. Just like there are people who will like report on and they hold see far as feet to the fire when people get accused of abuse. So the document alleges that Ziz had started telling her followers she was the, basically she's

the only double good or intrinsically good person there and one of the only intrinsically good people on the planet. UHS sessions tended to reveal that other people in the community are just single good. And per Zizz's theories about the hero contract, they can only accomplish maximum good by feeding their energy and resources to the hero Ziz. 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 yurk in my head. Did you ever read animorphs as a book, David?

Wow, yes. As a kid? That's what that's a reference to is those worms that control your brain and that's another picture. Right, yeah, yeah. That's, yes. I know, deep cut, deep cut. Whoa, that unlocked a part of my brain that I have not used it for it.

Right, right. A bunch of people are now like having like the severance moment, but like remembering every scholastic book fair they ever went to as a kid. Oh, man. Oh, man, all they got to do is hit goosebumps. I know, I know. Oh, 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 her half brains of her followers. And then she has to be willing to murder them if they ever do anything bad. Because if they ever do anything bad, then it means that the evil side could take over and it could do like mega bad. Right.

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

Yeah, I think you crossed over. I think we'd probably cross that KT boundary, right? Yeah, yeah. Box trucks saying you got to kill some people? Yeah, saying you got to murder people because they're the devil, the yurkin's side. brain, yeah. It might be a little bit of cult weather. Hmm, feels like a cult outside.

So some Zizians, not implicated in any crimes, have attacked this piece, this Zizians. Info thing as being inaccurate and basically a rationalist hit job. And again, there's some reason for suspicion here. But most of the claims made in it, I have backed up through reading the individual, like, sources. One of the issues of that a lot of people writing about this will credit Ziz with all of the unihemispheric stuff. And that's mostly Gwynn.

So there's a point worth making. Around this time, a woman 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 or more established rationalist, when Ziz was kind of new to the community, had sent Ziz an article on the Jervais principle for the first time, which had spawned her ideas about needing to jail break people into psychopop. 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, abuse of stuff in the community.

I don't know, true 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 seems like, from what I can tell, Jamie, who is dating Alice at the time, is in direct contact with Ziz and interested in her, but also is not communicating with Ziz under her real name. She is making a bunch of sock puppet accounts on her blog, and she is specifically commenting and trying to engage Ziz in different conversations, pretending to be multiple different people to quote-unquote sabotage the hold. She believed another woman in the community, Emma Borhanian, had on Ziz. And Borhanian is that former Google engineer.

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. Yeah, not a lot of straight conversation, huh? No. Now, Emma Borhanian, who Jamie alleges his life. Jamie's girlfriend.

No, Jamie's dating Alice Monday. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Borhanian is this former Google engineer who's been with Ziz since the rationalist fleet days. And Jamie thinks that she's controlling Ziz. and she has like this bad influence that's leading them in a bad direction. And I've read Borhanian's blog too because, of course I had to. Emma is, she was as long-winded as is, fewer pop culture references. She wrote a lot about narcissism.

But unlike most of these people, she tended to like use a, or she's like, I don't know, I don't understand the kind of point she's trying to make about narcissists, but she's very interested in the idea of like how narcissists work. Jamie didn't like Emma and she claims that because Emma and another member of the community had started shit-talking Alice to Ziz and convinced her that Alice was double evil. So Jamie creates all these sock puppet accounts

to argue with Ziz with the goal of fucking with her head and making her distrust Emma. Quote, I adopted a variety of different personas, many of whom claim to have beliefs I've never held her endorsed for the sake of determining how Ziz would react to these characters. So this isn't... And then what?

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

It's just, oh man. They just dig deeper 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, some problematic ways of discussing it. But this is the importance of like turning out from your weird little subculture right now and again.

And like. Yes, definitely. Because at this world, how often are they interacting with the world like in general? Very rarely. And most of the people they do interact with are like these other people. who are kind of on the edge of dropping out of society living on this guy's property, this 80-year-old man's property and box trucks? The guy who wants to.

Those are their normies. Yeah. So while Jamie and Ziz are fighting online COVID hit, and with it comes that eviction moratorium in the state of California. So Ziz and her friends, they stop paying rent 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 2021, Ziz posts this to her blog.

Housing in places like the Bay Area is a hierarchy of rent seekers, and the rent seekers above landlords rule by rule surplus, selective enforcement, fear, uncertainty, and doubt, corruption. It's all a complex, and it makes landlords incredibly vulnerable to blackmail from someone who can do even a little bit of investigative work. It's bad praxis to pay them rent. So, again, she's... I get it?

I get it? but this is also going to lead you to a bad place. And this is where we get to divergent stories. Curtis Lind, the landlord story, is that he was very supportive of these people and of trans people in general, taking one Zizian out to shop for her first bra. His friends and family say he was a decent guy.

And I actually, when I started talking about writing these episodes on Blue Sky, someone chimed into say, they had known him too and that he was a nice person. I don't know. To Zizz, he was a landlord. And there are claims from the Zizians that he was verbal. abusive and transphobic. By the end of 2021, after a year and a half of unpaid rent,

Lind had started working on the process of having police evict them. He and other residents claimed that the Zizians had become aggressive, acting as if the property was theirs now, threatening other people, basically squatting on it and, like, being violent at times, including, like, throwing rocks at Lynn's cabin and brandishing knives at other people. So there are allegations. Yeah, yeah, they have taken to like threateningly playing with knives while talking about how they will not leave the property or pay rent. And you get 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 aren't double good and who aren't aware of the great work, they're not working towards the cause. They're a causal is the term they're used. Their lives don't really have value. If you're not working for the cause, Ziz earlier will decide. It's not like they're doing outreach, right? It's not like they're trying to convert their neighbors or anything like that. 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. Oh, with the ants. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this. These people don't have a lot of value for other people, right? Now, the court case over the protest arrests dragged on, and in November of 2021, Ziz and her friends who'd been arrested filed a countersuit against Sonoma County, as well as several individuals associated with Seafar and the venue. By the time 2022 starts, the pressure is on for Ziz and the people living with her to figure out what they're going to do next. They do at some point work out a deal with Curtis, while he'll give them a little more time to fix their RV if they promise to 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. Perwired, quote, Lasota 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 fall into the past and future, ultimately your only recourse is to kill them.

One Lesota ally wrote in a long blog post citing Ziz's philosophies. In the comments, Lesotha wrote, I am so fucking glad to finally have an equal. Great stuff. In spring of 2021, one of the rationalist fleet veterans close to Ziz, Jay Winterford, who went by the named Flutter Shy, killed themselves. Winterford had written about seeing Zizz's techniques as a way to deal with his childhood trauma, and Lesotho wrote on her blog about her repeated attempts to fix and upgrade him.

Now, Ziz wrote about this person and calls him a death night. And as best as I can tell, a death night is a Zizian term for someone who snaps and murders a bunch of people. She calls Hitler a death night, but she also uses the term for mass shooters. And she claims Winterford, quote, tried very hard to convince me and then us to join them in service of the goddess of rape and death. Straight up declared intentions to kill us. did a bunch of horrible shit, like said they were going to do even more horrible shit.

I spent about seven months most of every day in a desperate and mutual mental battle, trying to get in their head somehow understand this death drive thing I couldn't simulate in my own mind that made no sense and out predict them like all their lives in the world depended on. And basically, this person's talking about doing like a mass shooting or some other terrorist attack against the rationalist community in Ziz's name. And Ziz claims that she's like, she spends seven months trying to stop them from doing this. And then finally, they just kill themselves rather than killing anybody else. And again, they frame Ziz Framz is like their heroic battle to stop this person from

murdering other people and damaging the cause. But like, I don't know, maybe, maybe like this person needed professional help when they started talking about wanting to do a mass killing. When it's wanting to murder a bunch of people, maybe they needed help. Like, not your help. I don't know if anyone needs Ziz's help. No, no, Ziz does not even need Ziz's help. And she weaves this person's death into this very, this messianic hero's journey for herself, posting this in the summer of 2022.

Since posting this, I have been tortured, survived seven assassination attempts, three more attempts to do me permanent bodily harm. Four people individually decided they had the sole rights to be my death love arch nemesis, as if they'd be alone, accidentally exposed myself to one one one hundredth of my hell and one committed suicide. Others utterly mentally cracked. No one knows what she's talking about with these assassination attempts or anything. Someone may have given her a mean look at a grocery store. And she decides, right? Like, that's the mindset.

She spins out. Right. Yeah. Rationalists who had declared as a cult leader considered all of this further evidence that she was dangerous. Again, rationalists also convince people to kill themselves to be illogic traps, but like, they're not wrong to point this out. Now, I brought up Jamie Zashko. Alice Monday a little earlier. They had moved out of the bay in late 2020 and headed to Vermont,

where Jamie, who had some family money, bought land and a gun. In February of 2022, she made a blog post with the subtitle, I trolled Zizz, and now she wants to murder me. In it, she claims she talks about how, like, yeah, she made all these fake accounts, and in late 2021, she and Ziz finally start talking under their real names, and Ziz talks about these trolling messages from the fake accounts Jamie had made, and, like said, that they really fucked with her head.

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-girlfriend, it's a little unclear, Alice Monday, my old mentor. Like, you have to kill this person for me in order to make this right. Here's what Jamie writes. During her last phone call, Ziz informed me that the only way I could gain her trust and make up for what I did was to murder Alice, preferably sometime soon. Ziz helpfully suggested I use a gun with a potato as a makeshift suppressor, and then I might destroy the body with lie, and then told me that after, I should video call Liz and show her the body before I destroy it,

so she could get proof positive that I'd really done it. And if I didn't do it, Ziz planned to drive across the entire continental United States to murder me. Great. The Dias cast. The Dias cast. Now, Shit. Jamie says that Ziz wants Alice dead because she thinks Alice is a mentor, and she's got this whole Sith thing.

going on. So she's like, guess what the Sith always kill their mentor. So I have to kill Alice or I can't get powerful enough to save the world. Great.

It's crazy. I love philosophy. In a story that has escalated so crazy, it is wild to hear it where it's like, okay, this is where it starts,

the wheels start to really fall off. This is where that border patrol officer's death becomes inevitable. Yeah. Because now you feel like Zizz has backed herself into a corner where someone's going to die.

Yes. Like you're 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 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. I mean, how could someone rationally even? How could you? How could you? How could someone even get there? It's so insular. You think about something like, 5150, this flutter shy person, right?

Or 50-150s is. Does that make it better? Probably not. Probably just makes them even more paranoid and angry and convinced to do violence. It becomes the 11th assassination attempt or whatever, yeah. I don't know how you fix this at this point. No, no, it's, it might be, I think it might be too far gone. Yeah, there's, I'm sure there's some possible way that,

this could have been fixed, but it's not clear to me. And who would be the person? Who does it? Right. Who would be the person to do it? Maybe get George Lucas in there. George. Yes.

Hey. Oh my God. That's so. So ladies have taken your movies way too seriously. We need you to fly out and talk them out of committing murders. This is going to sound crazy. There's a bunch of people in a box truck wanting to kill in your name. Or Ricky Jervase.

Yeah, Ricky Jervase. Get Ricky Jervase and George Lucas on a fucking chopper. Get him in here. Blackhawk, 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. He's living in a box truck. Oh, no, oh no. So he's writing, it's not even fan fiction. He's writing canonical Star Wars. He's writing canonical Star Wars stuff down about that. rationalist towers. 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 is at other people in this community. High man. And after Ziz is like, hey, look, very high mana. Ziz is like, look, I'll have to kill you if you don't kill Alice, you know, and you

know I'll do it because it's a timeless decision. Jamie counters in a very effective way by saying like, making a blogger. post saying, Ziz said all this, I am not suicidal. If I die, it's her. And also letting Ziz know, quote, I have friends who will avenge me. Murdering Alice or me now is tantamount to committing suicide by proxy. So they have this like checkmate, counter checkmate chess match in blog posts that gets interrupted in March when Gwynne fakes her death. Probably to escape the litigation, they're all about. Oh, yeah. Gwyn, get out of here. Gwynn does make the good decision, sometime after faking her death, she bounces from this whole community.

She does get out of there. There was just no way this story was going to end without somebody faking their own death. Oh, Sophie, so excited for you. This story doesn't even end. This story like late middles with two death fakings. Because in September of 2022, Zizz fakes her death in a boating accident on the black signet. Emma calls the cop, says that she fell overboard. The Coast Guard, they work so hard to try to find her and save her that they get fatigue waivers so they can work all night.

But they find nothing because she's not dead. Is she on the black sing? I don't know where she actually was. But she doesn't, she's not dead. Zizz is declared dead. And of her family prints an obituary. Gwynne's death faking is a little less successful. like their lawyer in court after they come in with legal evidence that Zizz is dead.

Gwen's lawyer here's like, I really don't think they're dead. I think they're faking it. Oh, oh, man. Wow. What a snitch-ass lawyer. These lawyers don't like them and they don't like their lawyers. Wow. That's where they fucked up.

You can't. Your lawyer has to ride for you. Yeah. Look, Elron Hubbard knew this about having a cold. Who's writing for this? Who even, who knows what the fuck they're talking about? Right, how do you even talk with these people at this point? When they're asking for counsel, oh, here's what's going on.

The sanest decision one of them has made is to fake their death. Honestly, maybe we need more lawyers in this story. Maybe they could have saved me. Maybe a couple of lawyers additional could have fixed this. So I don't know precisely. Also, they have lawyer money? No, these are public defenders. Oh, okay.

Yeah. So, Gwyn clearly fakes their death just to clearly. clear themselves of their legal problems. I think Ziz does it for that, but also she and her closest friends are now plotting the murder of Curtis Lend. We don't really, yeah, that's the landlord. Now, 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 behind it? I think they want to stay on the land. I think they also, their escalation logic is that if he is having the cops evict us, that is a situation that could end in our death. so he's trying to murder us. So the logical thing for us to do is to kill him now to protect us both from him and from other people. And then have sex with his body?

I don't think they're going to do that. But they are at least aware of that as an option. So the reality of what happens next is a little bit in dispute. But what no one disagrees is that on November 13th, 2022, this is like right after midnight. Curtis Lind is stabbed repeatedly and impaled with a samurai sword. He also during the same altercation, shoots and kills Emma Borhanian and wounds another member of the group. In one Tumblr post, a zizian with the username, a flower by another name,

gives what I think is probably a representative example of how the Zizians want to depict what happened next, what happened here. Kurt? Quote, Curtis Lind and his ex-CIA best friend, Patrick McMillan, spent months threatening Emma and her friends. Unlike what the papers claim, Emma and her friends weren't squatters. They were tenants who were struggling to find jobs or a place that would lease to them after Mirik and Seafar called a SWAT team on them in 2019. Now, I don't know if McBilland was in the CIA, and I don't know if he and Curtis threatened these ladies, but I will say the preponderance of evidence suggests they were in fact squatting. This account blames them on not being able to make rent on their legal bills, but by this

point they had been squatting for like two years in change. I don't know if Lind was transphobic. I don't know if he alienated them from their neighbors by telling them that they were in a cult. I don't know if that's true or if they alienated their neighbors by being very off-putting and aggressive. This Zizian account claims that other individuals started threatening to call the cops on the Zizians. And thus, quote, it was an unending nightmare for them of terrifying insane threats from every corner. Now, the author of this document says they weren't there themselves, but heard like other members of the community explain what happened.

And they said that Lind made specific threats in the fall of 2022, which culminated in one member of group buying a bulletproof vest and wearing it at all times. I don't trust this account. And among other things, it lies about the nature of their 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 Kin the Cowboy on Twitter.

And he notes, in this timeline of events, the last sentence is not true. There's no record of any lawsuit being filed in 2022 with any of the Zorroids. Zizians as plaintiffs and with Curtis Lind as a defendant. So they claim basically this guy was aggressive and threatening us and one day he attacked us, right? Quote, that morning he decided to stop them. He walked all the way from his trailer to their trucks while they were packing their things and opened fire.

Lynn shot Emma point blank through her heart and lung. She collapsed to the ground and immediately her lung began filling with her heart's blood. She died within 20 seconds, violently coughing up chunks of her lung tissue in a futile attempt to clear her airways. Somni was shot six times. rushing in a futile attempt to save Emma's life. The vest saved her life, but she was still hit through the neck and stomach. She acted only in self-defense.

That's the Zizian claim here, that he just walks in as they're getting ready to leave and starts shooting them, right? Yeah, that's stupid. Now, that's their claim. This leaves out a very important fact, which is that Curtis Lind is stabbed 50 times. Fifty. Yes. Lynn's account is somewhat less simple.

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

but he says this is how his account of like the attack itself is that after this, after he gets threatened with a knife, he goes and he buys a pistol and he gets a license to carry. And then right before the sheriffs are supposed to show up to evict them, one of the Zizians named Surrey shows up and she tries to get him to like come help turn the water off in her trailer. So he goes over to there to turn the water off. And as he bends over to do that, he gets hit with something that shatters the right side of his skull. Quote, and the next thing I remember is standing up with three of them right next to me, you know, or around me. And I was bleeding from numerous puncture wounds. I think around 50. I couldn't see out of my right eye,

had been punctured three times. The back of my neck had some severe cuts like someone was trying to cut my head off. You know, I had no idea what was happening or when this 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, 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 evidence, I think Lynn's account is the real one of what happens here. I think they

ambush him and stab him repeatedly, and he shoots and kills one in self-defense. obvious, like, again, he has a samurai sword entirely through his back. Can we acknowledge that this man took 50 to the chest and a samurai sword? Yeah. It'll make them like that anymore. 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, 70 stabbed. wounds. It's nuts. Stabbings are very hard to predict. Tricky, tricky. It's also so worrisome because now they've done it, right? They've crossed that line. They've crossed that line and one of them has died, right? Yes. So the stakes are as high as they had always thought that they were. And when the box trucks are cleaned out after they get arrested, the ones who had carried out the attack, because Zizz is on the property, and I think

Gwyn is too still at this point, but Ziz does not participate in the attack and like cops recognizes and know that she's faking her death and don't arrest her, which is one of like the weird things. They're familiar enough to know that. Yeah. I think this is that because like they've been called before because of these people. Yeah, I think 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 also worth noting that when they, after this arrest, when like their box trucks are being cleaned out, they find tubes, 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. I'm sure courts will try. We'll see how well they are able to do this in a court. My suspicion is that Ziz orchestrated this attack and convinced her friends to do it

or convinced them to convince themselves to do it and justified it using the same escalatory logic that they used on everything else. On her blog with discussing theoretical acts of deadly violence, Ziz referred to what she called Quirle's algorithm from the Harry Potter rationalist fan pick these people all love. and she quoted this line from the book describing the mental state she believed was necessary to survive a life-threatening situation. Intent to kill. Think purely of killing. Grasp at any means to do so. Censors off. Do not flinch. Kill. Again, this Harry Potter book really has now not... It really goes all the way back to that. Yeah. Be careful what you write, authors. You might get someone impaled by a samurai sword.

Of course they had a samurai sword. Of course, they had a samurai sword. I'm sure they bought them all from the Budkeh catalog. So Ziz had also written in late 2021 and a comment on her blog, I get so many people lining up to commit suicide by Ziz. And then she hyperlinks to the Wiki for Suicide by Cop. And her meaning is that anyone acting in a way to, like, harm her or her goals is killing themselves because she has to kill them now, right?

And there's a good medium post by someone named Sefa Shapiro that traces around how this time, how around this time, Ziz's online writing becomes increasingly obsessed with the idea of using deadly violence to make oneself less vulnerable, right? That you, again, you have to always be ready to kill in order to protect yourself. So the police arrest two of her friends, Somni and Surrey Dow, who are the two surviving Zizians who take in the attack, and they take them to jail. Per a California law, these two are not just charged with trying to kill Curtis, but with the murder of their friend Emma. It's like if, you know, three people rob a liquor store and one of them kills someone, the other two will get charged with murder because someone died in the commission of a crime

that they were involved in, right? It's just California state law. A lot of people get life sentences as a result of this. Usually not in this exact scenario. But. No, no. Usually not. Somni was placed in a men's jail and complained.

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

They're like making these like weird rationalist arguments in their court cases and like that's all going down while Ziz and the remainder of her inner circle kind of go on the run. Right. Because, you know, now they've been involved in a murder. Right. Gwynn seems to go fully into hiding at this time. I don't know if that's because of the murder or just because she had finally had enough of Ziz and all of her talk about killing. But in any case, she goes to ground around this point. Now, well, all this is going on.

I hate to keep bringing in new people, but there's a bunch of them. 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 Zizz follower named Daniel Blank up in Vermont at this point. And Jamie has gotten increasingly into Zizz's ideas. Blank is one of the people. We know he delivers several documents to the court on Somni's behalf.

during this whole, like, after they go get charged with murder. And he's like a guy who has like a job and, you know, stuff going on in his life. And then like a month after this shooting, stabbing, he drops out of society, cuts ties with his family, and quits his job to go live with Jamie. And like, it's kind of a little unclear of exactly what's happening. But my belief is basically Jamie and the people who are around her who are up in Vermont, who are Zizians, are being before Ziz gets there, told to prepare. pair for Ziz because they want to get access to money and a private property, a compound,

right, where they can both not be on the run, have a living space, and continue to work on their ideas. That is what I think is happening. And Daniel Blank is someone who has been following Ziz online, gets convinced to drop out of his life, cut ties with everybody, move in with this person, Jamie. And it looks like they're kind of working to like ready a situation for Ziz and the 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 31st, 2022, Jamie Zashko's parents, who were 72 and 69, respectively, are murdered in their home. Oh, my God. On the property of Vermont? No, 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 lindstabbing, we do not have an obvious explanation. There is a ring video that shows an unknown vehicle pulling into the driveway followed by screams. Some investigators think they hear someone yell mom before another person yells, oh my God, oh my God. But other people who have viewed the recording say it's unclear if that first word is mom. I have not seen this recording, so I can't tell you what's accurate. But Zashko's parents were worth several million dollars and had a sizable estate to inherit.

Yeah, you said that she had bought the property initially off of family money, right? Right. She's got some amount of access to it. Right. And her last, right before these people are murdered, Jamie's mom messages with Jamie earlier that same day about savings bonds that Zashko is due to receive. In blog posts from 2021, Zashko had written about her parents and repeatedly accused them of being abusers. One specific accusation she makes is that they snuck meat into her food and forced her to eat it after she expressed a desire to go vegan. So she has talked extensively online about her parents being fundamental. evil people. We know that at this point, she lives with Daniel Blank and that their phones go dark right around the time of the murder, as if they had like placed them in a Faraday bag, basically. 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. Because one of the things about the murder is that whoever did it had some degree of knowledge of the property and an ability to get on it without forcing an entry, right?

So obviously the cops, they're going to think who's the next of kin, right? So police visit them on their property in Vermont and talk to Blank and Jamie. Jamie, they ask if she has a gun. Jamie says yes, and she shows them a handgun that she owns. That is the same caliber as the one used in the shootings. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean much. It's a nine millimeter. Ten of nine millimeters out of the bottom.

Right. There's one thing the cops will point out is that Zashko owned the same type of bullet, the same make of bullet as those used in the shooting. But again, like, I, I, the bullets I use keeping my carry gun are hydra shocks, which is like what cops 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 someone can't, you don't want to have like the man shredder zombie rounds or some shit. So the fact that like a common defensive caliber murder these people was in the gun.

That's not a smoking gun, if you'll forgive it. But it also is like, that's not nothing either, right? 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 kill them.

But again, they haven't been charged. There's a lot of suspicious shit about this. She also lies to a relative's claiming she couldn't have driven to Pennsylvania from Vermont because you didn't have a working car. And we know she did. So, you know. Yeah, it's very suspicious over here. I don't think it's unlikely that she may have been basically tasked with killing her parents

to get access to her money for the cause, their money for the cause, right? That's kind of my suspicion, you know. And she was partly told it was okay because they were abusive. And so, like, you maybe have to do. this in order to protect yourself and other people from abusers, which is a kind of logic they have, too. On January 13th, right after midnight, Pennsylvania State Troopers raid a hotel near the Philadelphia airport where Blank and Zashko are staying. A Vermont judge had issued a warrant for their home, but the police had not found the gun they believed was the murder weapon. They touched that

weapon when they're in Vermont, but they don't have a warrant for it, right? So they don't get to take it. 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 111. I'm being arrested. Damn.

Smooth. Smooth. These rationalists and they're brilliant crimes. The cops obviously get interested in this and they recognize Daniel's name and they find on surveillance footage that she has handed a bag to him outside of his room. in the night before, right?

And they recognize his name because they visited Zashko and Blank in 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 is Ziz. So. Oh. Right. Yeah.

An article by the San Francisco Chronicle explains what happened next. Blank put his hands behind his back and walked out of the room, obeying police commands. but Ziz did not do any of that. He had his eyes closed. A trooper testified using masculine pronouns. He would not speak. He was just laying almost unconscious or as if he was dead on the ground. He had to be carried out.

Again, this is misgender. I don't know if it's intentional or if Ziz was like acting and like portraying themselves as masculine because they're on the run, you know, at this point in time. 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 9mm. handgun was found in the room along with ammo.

$40,000 in cash is found in Zashko's Subaru. And again, she doesn't get charged with murder. They let her out very soon. And she just leaves. The cops are shot because she, they have to give her back her car and the $40,000, which she abandons. She and Blake just leave the car and $40,000 in cash. I don't think they're making good decisions at this point,

is my only explanation for you. David. How? Maybe 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? Now, during this same time, several other Zizians are at least suspected to have been coming

in and out of like Pennsylvania during the area around the murder. It is unclear how many people, if they were, if the Zizians killed this husband and wife, It's unclear how many of them were there. And again, no one has been charged. But it's at this point that another Zizian enters the playing field. This person goes by the name Ophelia. They are a German citizen. They have like a legal residency in the U.S.

Their last name is Bokholt. They used to work at James Street, or Jane Street, which is where Sam Bankman-Fried 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 go to Vermont hours, like, really, like, they fly in, like, right before the murders. 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. 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 you're making the money, if you're succeeding at a tech company, you're in finance, but it all feels empty to you because it kind of is.

If someone's like, you can save the cosmos, maybe you'll give up your whole life in order to do that, right? Yeah. So Blank and Zashko are released in short order. As I said, they get out of jail quickly. But Ziz stays in custody for a while. And bail is said, I think, 50,000 initially. Are they aware of the fake death and everything?

Yes. They are aware she has faked her death. California shows no interest in sending police out to get her, which is like it is a crime. This is the bail is set very high for two misdemeanors. And police justify it in like the court documents by saying Zizz had recklessly created a dangerous situation by making the police move her. per that argument, that article in Wired, quote, behind these arguments and even the charges themselves lay a deeper motive. Unable to charge for the Zashko murders, but suspecting that Lassota,

Michelle Zashko, that's Jamie, and Daniel Blank could be tied to them, prosecutors were trying desperately to hold Lissota while the police gathered evidence. Obviously, you realize we don't give a shit about this case. One local official familiar with it told me. What they were interested in was Lissotas involvement in the homicide. So the authorities here have recognized this is all centered around this person, But it's very difficult for us to hold them legally responsible at this stage. We can't even arrest anyone for the murder yet.

We don't have enough. And, you know, it's, I'm not going to, again, pretend to know precisely what happened, but I think it's pretty clear Ziz 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 Zizzes bail is eventually reduced. She winds up in the wind immediately. Like the authorities are like, she's got to immediately bounce and we'll lose her.

And that's exactly what happens. Zashko and Blank, it's kind of unclear exactly what they do initially after this. But we know Jamie reaches out to her aunt and begs for help. And her aunt is like, did you kill my sister? And Jamie says no and blames the murders on less wrong, which is a leaser's like blog. So she's blaming the rationalist community. She claims that she's being targeted and that like the Seafar had committed and 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 know what the fuck these people are doing for most of this period. In February of 2020, she's no longer blogging either. She's not. No, no, no, no, no, no. But she's still communicating. She was just responding to people.

Yeah. And she is communicating with people still, but I think it's primarily through more like direct means. In February of 2023, a community alert is posted by someone named Sefa 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 post lays out a lot of what I've described in these. episodes, but there's still no public awareness of the Zizians. Everything happening here is so weird. The circumstances around the murderers are so murky that, like, most law enforcement kind of shrugs it off. And there's not like a public. These people are so fringe. It's very difficult to even

talk about them, right? Yeah. How do you qualify that on the nightly news? Yes, exactly. Yeah. This is all going to change. In February of 2024, Jamie Zashko purchases three handguns, I think, from a Vermont gun store. A few months later, in May of 2024, a 20-year-old woman named Teresa Youngblood disappears from her home in Seattle. Youngblood is one of the scattered community of people who still obsessively followed and interacted with Ziz

and her inner circle's teachings. Her parents feared that she was in a controlling relationship with someone. And months after disappearing, she applies for a marriage license with another rationalist who's obsessed with Ziz named Maximilian Snyder. Now, like most Zizzi's, Snyder has a very impressive academic record.

He was a national merit scholar who attended Oxford University. Then he starts posting on less wrong, like all the others. He is initially a fan of Yadkowski, but at some point he gets convinced that Zizz's vegan Sith radicalism is the true path. In the summer of 2023, just months earlier, he won $11,000 from an AI alignment contest, and he won that award under his legal name, but he also goes by Audeer. It's kind of unclear to me what the situation is there. the same time, he tried to raise money for Zizz when she was briefly behind bars. I don't know

if this guy, Snyder, this person, if Snyder marries Youngblood because they're actually in love, they had gone to high school together. But I think there may have been some sort of weird legal reason that Ziz wanted them married. Again, very unclear, but they don't stay together physically very long. By January of 2025, Teresa is in Vermont looking at rural properties for purchase alongside Ophelia, the German quant trader, right? Well, Max Snyder is in like California. And reading between some lines, I think because Ophelia and Teresa aren't involved in any of the court cases, Zizz is using them to help actually scout out and find an isolated compound where they can hide out, right? Like they are doing the groundwork of figuring out a place for them to live. They are acting

as the legal individuals who can kind of handle everything for the folks who are legally compromised. Later investigation would show that Bacolt and Youngblood had been 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 of your lives and come devote yourselves to the cause, right? Okay. And these three are the ones who follow. Bokholt, Youngblood, and Snyder, right? Because they all cut ties with their families, cut, you know, with their jobs and leave home around the same time.

While they're looking for rural pront compounds, Bokholt and Youngblood wind up in a hotel in Lindenville, Vermont. An employee reports them to the police because they're wearing body armor and other tactical gear, and at least one of them is openly carrying a pistol. Something is very weird here because they're approached not just by Virginia State Police, but by a Homeland Security Investigations officer. And there's evidence that. that Homeland Security spends like a week, is surveilling them for like a week before the shootout that happens.

I don't know what Homeland Security thought was happening. They may have just seen, we're on the border, obviously shit's escalated there. This is a foreign citizen with an American citizen. They're wrapping their electronics in tinfoil. They've got guns. They're driving around being very suspicious and tactical gear.

Maybe they just thought it was like some run-of-the-mill terrorism bullshit. It's worth checking out. Right. So they are surveilling. these people. And I think Youngblood and Bokholt realized they're being surveilled, right? And that, that, that starts that escalatory loop in their head of Zizian logic where, well, if the police confront me, there's only one way to respond, right? Yeah. Two days later, prosecutors in California asked the judge in the Curtis Lind case to speed up the process of going to trial. He's in his 80s. He's got a bad memory. And he's the only witness of the attacks. They say it's necessary. We need to do this quickly. So the next day, January 17th, before this can happen, before Lynn can go to trial, a masked assailant assaults Lind near his property and slits his throat, killing him. Maximilian Snyder, Youngblood's husband, will be arrested days later in Redding, California for the murder.

Fuck, because they had been separate. Oh, man. So there's like, there's a possibility that says it's sent after the marriage. Now, he doesn't, he hasn't pled yet, at least as of the time we were. record this, but he sent a letter in jail to at Leisure Yadkowski trying to make him become a vegan. He also, priorities in order. Oh, fuck. He also claimed, quote, I am not 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. Sure. Yeah, okay. Okay, man. You just decided to kill this guy for no reason. Dog, you are. Oh, man. This guy who happened to have a relationship with this very small group of people.

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

But she definitely starts shooting, right? Right. And Border Patrol agent David Malin dies. Bacolt is killed in the immediate shootout before she can draw a weapon and both of the firearms used in this shooting were guns purchased by Zadji by Jamie in early 2024, right?

So again, all of these things are, it's very easy to connect them if you like know all these people but it takes so long to trace out. For all their talk of murder, in practice, they're not very good at it, huh? No, I guess they, I mean, they didn't plan for this shooting to happen, right?

It's just that their kind of escalatory logic made it inevitable. After all this, authorities finally start putting the whole story together. A manhunt has launched, and on February 16th of 2025, Ziz, Jamie, and Daniel Blank are finally caught. After the shootout, they seem to have started living in box trucks again, one of which was registered to Youngblood. Yeah, back to What You Know. And again, one of these is Youngblood, like the box truck is registered 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 going to call the cops. You're in a road. You're in a wizard's road. You look like a wizard. I don't need any of this. Ultimately, they all get arrested and charged with everything the cops could throw at them, which is like a legal possession, carrying a firearm, stuff like that, right?

Inside the other box truck, state troopers found Jamie and Ziz, according to the charging documents, dressed all in black and wearing gunbells. with ammunition. So yeah. And that's the situation where we are now. That's it. The story's done. No.

Oh, man. Yeah. So this is basically where we are. Ziz asked for pretrial release. Didn't get it. No. Not shocked about that. Quote, speaking whole, and this is from a Seattle PI article.

Speaking Holwell. 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 a judge, I might starve to death if you do not intervene. I need the jail to be ordered to have a vegan diet. It's more important than whatever this hearing is. So I don't think this whole court process is going to end super well for Ziz. No.

But I also, it's very hard to tell like, what are you going to charge? Like, I'm legitimately like very, like, I, like, I. I'll be fascinated to see what the charges are here. Yeah, it's exciting to know that we can see this play out real time. Yeah. This was weird. Yeah. Hell yeah, it was.

Hell yeah, was. Great. Anyway. But, like, I would like to know how things fucking shake up. Yeah. Maybe we'll revisit this when my brain has healed. I need to go, like, read about Hitler someday. to calm down.

Yeah, you need to go talk to your neighbor. Yeah, I need to go talk to my neighbor. That's a better suggestion. Thank you, yeah. Not just keep reading my Hitler books and coming up with theories. That's how you get double bad. That's how you get double bad. Exactly.

That's how it happens. Oh, buddy, you got to go on a run, go talk to your neighbor, go pet a goat, you know. Everyone else. Go talk to somebody, you know, pet an animal, walk. Yeah. You know, in the woods or something. Maybe stay away from boats for a while, just a kid. 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. Just stay out of the fucking water. Oh, man. Fuck. God.

Wow. How do you feel at the end of this? David. Yeah, David, how are you doing? This is your first experience on our show. What's up? How's the vote? I honestly don't know.

to tell you that I don't know how I feel I'm gonna have to really gonna have to kick this around for a couple of days but this is interesting Yeah interesting as hell Yeah it's That's one way to describe it

That's one way to describe it This is a wild time David do you have anything you want to plug For the listeners? Yeah I produced my own comedy special It's available on my Patreon Patreon.com Backslash David Boree, G-B-B-O-R-I-E.

It's called Birth of a Nation, spelled with a G, because that's my last name, and I think it's funny. But yeah, check that out. I have a podcast. My mama told me I also have one called All Fantasy Everything, where we draft fantasy things that aren't sports. But yeah, check that stuff out. Oh, shit, that sounds really cool. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. That sounds so much better for you than everything we've talked about today.

It's different than this. It's different than this. And it reminded me I need to set my fantasy basketball line up, so thank you, sir. Oh, there you go. It's time. It's time. Check it out, everybody. All right, that's been the podcast.

Don't do any of this. Don't do any of the things in this episode. Please. Bye. Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia. or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, appa podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, YouTube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now.

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