The Underworld Podcast - The Wild, Murderous Rampage of the Zizians

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

When cops arrested a group of masked, black-robed protesters at a California campsite in 2019, most folks thoughts they’d caught some eccentric but harmless members of the Bay Area’s niche rationalist movement. But over the next few years the group would rally around its charismatic leader, Ziz LaSota, tearing across North America on a rampage of robbery and murder. But even today, with LaSota in prison and several members dead, nobody’s quite sure what the Zizians are: a cult? A gang? Or just the most extreme Silicon Valley shitposters in history? We speak to journalist and author Evan Ratliff, who reported the Zizians for WIRED Magazine, to find out more — plus some bonus chat on Evan’s AI scam-led podcast “Shell Game”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavat Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. It's mid-November 2019, in Sonoma County, California. And Sergeant Brian Parks has just received a call. Somebody has dulled 911 from the Westminster Woods, a wilderness camp and retreat center a few miles down the road. Several people, he's

told, have blocked the camp's entrance and exits with their vehicles. They're clad in black robes and masks, and they're conducting some kind of demonstration, although what it's about is unclear. Local cops often get calls about protests at the Bohemian Grove, a secretive men's club not far from Westminster Woods, frequented by titans of industry and politics, and often accused of being a meeting point for the Illuminati. But this ain't that. On this day, at Westminster, there are two gatherings.

One is a group of elementary school kids attending a rope class. The other is a workshop for the centre of applied rationality. A Bay Area non-profit aiming to develop, in its own words, clear thinking for the sake of humanity's future. It's the kids that worry Sergeant Parks. The hairs on the back of his neck stand to attention. A new 911 call reports that one of the black cad protesters is carrying a gun. In fact, there are five of them, and one of them's got a hatchet.

At this point, Park thinks it's one of two things. An active killer or a hostage stand-on. Parks upgrades the call to a code three, a light, and sirens emergency. He speeds off to the camp, finding a red Toyota Prius blocking his path. Beyond it, he can see three figures, in black cloaks, wearing Guy Falk's masks, pacing about and chanting. He unholsters his gun.

Parks moves on the site, ordering the protesters to get down on the ground. As they do, they demand same-gender pat-downs, which is tough, because parts can't figure whether they're men or women, or pretty much anything beneath them. those black robes. Deputies take down the trio and cuff them. By this point, children and their teachers are taking shelter in buildings on the property. The rationalists aren't even there. Organizers have told them to steer well clear. Parks and a deputy approached the three on the ground, as they do, a fourth road figure emerges. When they yell for the person to put their hands up, the figure falls back as if slipping on ice and then struggles with the deputy

before being cuffed. Parks orders in a SWAT team which evacuates the kids. As it turns out, there are only the four protesters on site. One of them's got pepper spray, but nobody's armed. And the fifth, hatching-willed-it member? It's a maintenance worker who's armed himself amid the madness. Parks and his team rounds up the protesters and send them cuffed. to a detention facility in nearby Santa Rosa. As they do, one of the protesters turns and pipes up to an officer. I know your face, they tell him. You are slavers. You are Nazis.

Welcome to the Underworld podcast. And welcome to the weekly podcast that dives into the weird world of crime, whether it's gangs, scams, or bands of transgender rationalists on a violent tear across the United States. I am your host, Sean Williams in a cold, but sunny Wellington, New Zealand. And I'm joined today not by Danny Gold, but Evan Ratliff, a New York-based writer, reporter, podcaster, author of the brilliant book The Mastermind about Crazy Crime Boss Paul Aru. You may remember our chat from a few years back, but also, recently,

have an insane feature at Wired Magazine called the Delirious, Violent, Impossible Truth Story of the Zizians. Yes, you may have heard that about the Zizians from news stories of late, this group of Bay Area rationalists who've got on a murder spree. Well, they're not only fascinating, but they're pretty tough to nail down, which is why Evans here, and you're listening to this show, of course, and we're also going to get into Evans' podcast Shell Game, which is about AI and scams and lots of stuff that crosses directly into the underworld podcast path. Okay, Evan, we just heard a pretty weird situation from your story in Wired. You've got a couple cops in Northern California. In fact, the Bohemian Grove, which I'm sure a lot of people

listening to watching the show are going to know about, which is not for these secret, weird meetings. So the cops have been called to what seems like a demonstration of four trans women in black robes and masks, chanting something together besides some elementary school kids on a day trip. And these trans women appear to be part of some kind of rationalist, esoteric, kind of eschatological cult. And the SWAT team has been called, of course. And the group has been arrested and as they're getting taken to jail, they're calling everyone Nazis and kind of threatening them. So that's a pretty normal way to start a feature article. Let's say you crack it open. Yeah, yeah. I guess let's start by talking about who the hell

these folks are and what they're doing at the Bohemian Grove to even begin with because I guess you could probably talk about that for about an hour to begin. Yeah, I mean, every part of this particular story is a kind of like how much time do you have a situation in terms of who they are, what they believe, what they were doing there, what happened. I mean, I distilled it down to a tidy 14,000 words for the magazine. So brevity is maybe not my specialty of this one. But essentially, like this group of people, they're a small ideological group, like loosely described with some extreme and complicated beliefs around artificial intelligence, around psychology, how their own brains work, and around veganism. And there's sort of like a swirl of ideas. And they emerged from this community

in San Francisco that's well, pretty well known by Bay Area people. And actually, like, wider known now that AI has kind of taken a hold called the rationalists. They sort of call themselves the rationalists. and this is, you could almost think of them like a splinter group from the rationalists with more extreme views. And I can talk about the mainstream views of the rationalists. But one thing to note about them just from the top is like, they don't really even describe themselves as a group. They don't actually claim necessarily to be an organization or that they have a leader or that they have sort of like designs and goals. like they'll say we're just a group of friends, basically. We were just a group of friends who got excluded from this group, partly because we were trans.

Now, I think if you look at them from the outside, there's a reason why a lot of people call them a cult, or at least say they're cult-like. And it's because of sort of a pretty charismatic leader who seems to attract people to her ideas and the nature of those ideas, which I think by most measures are pretty extreme on a variety of friends. Seems so. Yeah. I mean, one of them believing, maybe I'm getting it's wrong with the hemispheres, that the brains can be completely different characters or people,

and they can be different genders, and they can be awake and asleep, and they can be kind of learning different things. Basically, it's kind of like in, well, I don't know if it's sort of an inbuilt schizophrenia of the mind or something like that, because you explain this, really. Yeah, I don't know if I can explain it, but you sort of, encapsulated the basics of it. Like, you have these two hemispheres of your brain. They can have essentially different identities, including gender identities. But I think the most fundamental aspect of it is that they can be good. Each of them can be good or non-good. So you can have someone who's

sort of like good in one hemisphere and non-good in the other hemisphere. You can have someone who's double good, good in both hemispheres, which is by their count extremely rare. And it just so happens that Ziz, who's like, nominally the leader of the group, uh, is double good, according to her own analysis. So, you know, that's useful. Coincidentally, the theory seems to, uh, give her a certain moral standing. Um, and then there's this stuff around sleep where they were experimenting with, with hemispheric sleep. Like, you could sleep with one eye open and keep watch and things like that, which like, basically results in just getting no sleep.

And if you're already in a situation where you're sort of isolated, possibly dealing with some mental health issues, and you're also depriving yourself of sleep on a regular basis as part of experimenting on yourself, like, this is not a good recipe for, like, coherent and well-thought-out ideas to emerge. I think before we kind of pull away into some of the group's activities themselves, It's kind of useful to remind people on this show that what your story does really well is kind of pars some of the, I don't know, I guess the headlines or the descriptors for this group that people have thrown out there, right?

So they've invariably described in the media as like an ultra-vegan cult or a trans cult or a group of anarchists. I mean, I guess the editors of the dailies and the newswire needed this kind of simple way to describe. them, but I guess there isn't one really. They're really kind of fluid, I guess, in a lot of what they're thinking. Yeah, I think so. I mean, their actual ideology emerges from this rationalist thinking, part of which is about AI and the threat that super-intelligent AI could destroy humanity. And, you know, that's an old idea.

I mean, old in terms of a couple of decades. Yeah. I mean, it's older than that. that in science fiction, but in terms of there being a kind of movement build up around the possibility that that could happen, and what are we going to do about it, and how do we align the AI, so it's friendly. So they emerged out of that. So there's a portion of their thinking, which is around that. What are we doing to stop AI from becoming super intelligent and unaligned so that it might destroy us intentionally or accidentally? Then they also happen to be, many of them, maybe all of them,

extreme vegans. I mean, they come to believe that people who eat meat are monsters, and that element of their ideology kind of merges in a strange way with the AI ideology, because one of their complaints about so-called mainstream

rationalists or mainstream thinkers about AI is that they don't include animals in trying to align the AI. So they're trying to align the AI, so it doesn't kill humans, but they don't actually do it for animals. So that was one of their complaints. But then, of course, they're all trans women, almost all trans women, actually. They're all,

most of them are trans, the vast majority are trans women, and then there's a person here or there. But so they have issues when it comes to how trans people are treated in society, how they were treated by the rationalists, and those things also come into play. So it becomes this sort of like, you can refract whatever you're kind of like cultural ideal that you want to pursue or cultural hobby horse that you want to pursue, you can kind of like refract it through this story. And that's what many of the tabloids and other coverage did was, you know, for right-wing people, they're like, Trantifa, like, they're a mix of like a trans cult. And, you know, people saying, like, well, this was always going to happen.

Like, they built up this extreme trans ideology. But like, that, it doesn't explain in any way what actually happened. And I think that's partly because I'm not sure you can quite explain in any coherent way what happened, partly because when it comes to the violence that surrounded them, none of it really feels like a product of the ideology. Like, it's not like they killed the head of a factory farm. So then you'd be like, oh, vegan. It's not like they killed like an executive at OpenAI.

And you'd be like, oh, I see. this is like the violence just they just they spiraled into it you know so I think there's a lot of other sort of like mental health issues that came into play without diagnosing anyone and like those things merged with these ideologies and that's where things just sort of fell apart yeah I mean it's on paper they're supposed to be rationalist but everything is so irrational is it so irrational that it's rational I couldn't quite get my head around that. Like, everything is so led by these incredibly strong and conflicting emotions that I didn't really get where the rationalism even came in at points in it.

And I guess that's the kind of confusion about them. Yeah. I mean, I feel that's a thing that's confusing I find in reporting on even the rationalist community. And there's a number of, like, what people would call cult-like groups have. sort of emerged out of this community. And the community itself, like, it started around these AI ideas. And, like, a lot of people may have encountered Eliezer Yodkowski, who's, you know, he's sort of like the godfather of some of

the organizations that this emerged out of. One of them's called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and the other one's called the Center for Applied Rationality. So it basically started as this kind of almost technical thing, where they're like, how do we program AI so that it's friendly towards us? That was the original idea. And then they were like, well, how do we get people together who are smart and thinking rationally to help us do that? And then they kind of thought, well, let's just build a whole kind of like philosophy around thinking rationally and addressing questions, you know, without sort of like a lot of the societal context that makes it difficult to ask and answer the right questions.

And you kind of like get that far and you're like, oh, that makes sense. And you can find lots of examples of rationalist writing that's amazing. quite interesting and quite in-depth. But then at the same time, they have, like, as far as I can tell, insatiable appetite for interpersonal drama. That you just, like, and part of this, there's a little bit of this in the story,

like all these people got attracted to the Bay Area and young people in particular, very smart people, often with technical degrees. And there's, housing is very expensive. So they end up living in these kind of group situations. And there's just a lot of, of just absolutely toxic situations. And because of that, that ends up clouding, like, what it is they actually are intending to do. Like, if you start reporting on them or dealing with them, you end up talking

about just like interpersonal dramas between these people that you can't even follow. Like, and this smaller group, you know, what we call the Zizians, they just took that to an extreme. Like, every you could read literally thousands of words in their behalf about like the dramas between them and the rationalist and this and that the other like the they're on tumbler and it's just sort of this endless like spewing of kind of like everyone's feelings which is there's the irony is like it's supposed to be driven by rationalist thinking yeah it's they just come across as like the worst college roommates that you could ever possibly come across

like complaining that I don't know your whispering at 1pm was ruining their like their online forum posting about I don't know like it just comes across as completely crazy

there was a line I read and listened to your story and there was a line when I listened to it I started laughing out loud because I think in one of the court cases one of the defendants calls their defense counsel what was it Omni

omnisidal and says the lawyer wants everything in the universe to die and that's why they want to ditch the council which is incredible yeah it's like that college experience but combine it with everyone there believes that they are sort of being pulled into a mission to save humanity like the purpose-driven nature of it is part of what gives it this fuel and people feel like if they aren't doing enough to help save humanity, they feel guilty about it. They have these discussions about are you net positive or net negative to the world? They're literally saying, like, are you a useful person in the world? Or are you a waste of space in this world? And it's like how devoted you are to trying to stop humanity from being destroyed. And it's just like, if you just inject that idea into young people who are trying to

figure out who they are in the world already, I mean, not all these people are young, but the people in the story, not the people in the rationales community, but people in the story. And I think, I just think it creates this dynamic where it's like just the jargon and the disputes and the, it's just like, it just becomes overwhelming. And some people like they can't quite get it out of their heads. Like they're really struggling to live life without, you know, this kind of taking over their psyche in some way. Yeah, they should, they should make podcast and they wouldn't have that long-winding conversation

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You were in California, right? So where did you kind of learn? Or were you up in Vermont at that point? Well, the case originally was all California. So when I picked it up, it was all happening in California. And that was, I mean, my editor at Wire, John Gravoy, like, he actually been following it since the beginning. That protest at, you know, near the Bohemian Grove, that was in 2019. So he had been sort of like following it and, you know, trying to see where it was going to go and what the story was.

And then he brought me on in 2023. And at that point, there had been one person, there had been two people killed. there's some like alleged suicides that are associated with the group but in terms of one person killing another let's say there had been two people killed including their landlord and one of the group in a very strange incident in which they pulled knives and swords on the landlord and the landlord shot them and they stabbed the landlord actually what am I saying I'm miss speaking that the landlord had not been killed he had just been stabbed uh through the eye. He shot the, he shot one of them died. So he was still alive. And then right when I came

on to the story, there was a double murder in Pennsylvania of a couple who were the parents of one of the members of the group, if we call them a group. I'm just going to keep calling them a group, even though they would object to being called a group. And there were suspicions and continue to be suspicions that she was involved, that others from the group might be involved. And so that's kind of like when I came in. So the court case that I started following was in Pennsylvania, where they had come back to Pennsylvania following the double murder. The police had picked up three of them, the daughter, whose name is Michelle, and then Ziz,

who's the leader and one other. And they held them for a little while. They had to let two of them go, including the daughter. And then Ziz was kept in custody for. like eight months seven six to eight months and she kept having hearings so i i attended those those hearings as sort of like that was my initial way into the case sounds um an incredibly masochistic thing to do to sit for a lot of these trials but then ciss and i guess um i i guess we could learn a bit more about who she is as well and sort of her influence on all of these people but

Yeah, why don't we start there? Who is Ziz then? And how does she come to be such a revered member of whatever this community is? Ziz, her name is Ziz El Soda. She was born in Alaska. She was a smart kid. She got a degree in computer science and then started to go to graduate school. And then along the way got into.

rationalism and also effective altruism, which is the other pillar of this that we haven't talked about. SBF kind of stuff. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So this sort of, the idea of like, earning to give, like making a bunch of money so that you can give it to these causes, the main cause being preventing artificial intelligence from destroying the world. And so she was going to grad school, you know, working at startups, maybe trying to do that earn to give thing, but then decided, uh, both that that wasn't her path, but also she got into the Bay Area rationalist community pretty tightly for a couple of years. And she started to have complaints about the way the

rationalist community was going about both their daily business in terms of like how they dealt with trans people, how they organized their meetings, how they allegedly had paid a blackmail to someone who put a website up about sexual assaults that happened within the community. And then she kind of started separating herself. She and another rationalist went to live on a boat, and they were going to kind of create this fleet of boats where people could live because of the aforementioned real estate price problem in the Bay Area, the housing price problem. And so that's when, like, the two of them started kind of coming up.

with these ideas about what they call mental tech, like the hemispheric stuff, all sorts of other philosophies around the way you should be in the world, what double good people should do, et cetera, et cetera. And they also decided to protest the mainstream rationalist community because they were upset about, partly about this alleged blackmail situation, which is like really too complicated to go into even as... That's like being blackmail from the... So this is the blackmail from the future to...

Well, that's a different thing. There is a philosophical issue around the thinking of the rationalists, which I will just summarize by saying that you should never give into blackmail. That's the end point of the philosophical thought. My takeaway from that part of the story was that I felt really sorry for you having to write that part of the story. You should see the drafts. Like, I've never written so many drafts of, like, three paragraphs in my life.

Like, just endless sending them back and forth, being like, does this make sense? We're like, no, this doesn't make sense. Trying to make sense of something that fundamentally, like, I'm not sure many of the people involved even could articulate it to you. Yeah. But in any case. So you're the greatest rationalist on the planet, potentially, at the moment. I will say, like, surprisingly, the rationalist. community did not hate the story in terms of the way I described things.

That was partly because I think there were some stories that were much worse than mine in terms of putting them in certain boxes and just getting a lot of ideas just flat wrong. And so I could like, I'd spent so much time on it that I could stand out amongst this crowd for, they were like, oh yeah, that's pretty much right. Like, they would read it and say like, yeah, yeah, I would say it this way, but. So I appreciated that in the end. That's cool. So Ziz and a couple

acolytes go and live on a boat. I mean, we can attribute all of this down to house prices being too high, which is a nice conclusion to make. So then Ziz goes missing, right? Yeah, then they have the protest. And the protests, I mean, part of the reason I started the protest is there's a, we can never know, but there's a part of me that thinks that none of this ever would have happened if the protests had just gone down differently because they basically went, the organization,

the Center for Applied Rationality, which they had been a part of, they wanted to go give a talk at this retreat, and they got canceled from giving the talk. So they were like, okay, we're going to show up with these flyers and then, you know, tell them what our complaints are, the blackmail and other things. But then they decided to do that, number one, without alerting the police in advance, which is something you would do if you ever get a protest. Number two, dressed in Sith robes, wearing Guy Fawkes masks. And that's a pretty big mistake. That's one that, if no one's expecting that, people can get pretty upset, you know, if you haven't thought it through. And number three, that there was a group of children at the same facility who were just like, they're doing a ropes course.

and like that triggered a whole idea that, oh, there was a rumor that they had a gun, and then like basically the SWAT team came in. And so they were arrested in a pretty rough manner. And I think that partly is what sort of set them off down this road. And then they were facing, you know, at one point felony charges for these protests, which were really just like they had blocked the entrances and they were, you know, trespassing charges and things like that. So anyway, then at a certain point during these sort of court hearings, for those charges, Ziz disappears.

And she actually falls off a boat in the San Francisco Bay, and there is a Coast Guard search overnight looking for her, and they can't find her, and they declare her dead. And that about five months, I don't want to give too much of the story, but about five months later, it turns out that, in fact, she did not fall off the boat. Or if she did, she fell off the boat right next to shore and swam to it. And then we have the episode with this landlord in California, which is pretty, I mean, it's, it's a surprising level of violence given this groups.

I mean, you know, it kind of comes out of nowhere, really, the sort of level of violence this guy goes through in California. And then how does things escalate then? Because Zez is kind of presumed dead for a long time. the group is, again, quite amorphous, right? So how does it kind of pop up again? Yeah, they're kind of, and they're sort of dispersed. Well, in the landlord incident, again, like, I almost started the story by saying, like, this is a real estate story.

Like, they're living on this property where they just put up, like, box trucks, like, these kind of, like, trucks and containers and trailers, and they're sort of converted into these, like, really mediocre living spaces. And this, they're paying a little rent to this guy, and then they stop paying their rent, and then he starts having the property owner all these disputes with them, and then it culminates in, like, them stabbing him many times, including with the samurai sword through the chest and him shooting them. So then one of them dies, two more are arrested, they're in custody on murder charges of their own friend because of the felony murder law in the

United States. And then it's kind of like quiet for a little bit, but then Michelle Zadjko the other, one of the other people involved, her parents are murdered two months later. So that's when they resurface again. It's like in the vicinity of this double murder, that's when I started following it. But that was at the beginning of 2023. So then really nothing happened for a year, I mean, almost two years. And then at the beginning of this year, they resurfaced again when a borderer. Border Patrol agent was killed in Vermont by two people who were associated with the group.

One of them was killed in a shootout. And that's what brought it the kind of like national attention. Meanwhile, the landlord who had survived this incredibly violent attack was also murdered by another person who, it's not clear. I mean, he was connected to the group, but it's not clear what his ideology is exactly or why he did it. But he murdered him. He was, the landlord was the only witness to his own attack. So all of this happened in January.

And that's when like, really it was like, oh, violence is just circling these people. Is this when, I mean, from a reporter's perspective as well, you've been following the case for what, couple years by this point, it all just erupts. And I guess now, what are you shoulder to shoulder with everyone from the AP to the Guardian to the New York Times? Like, how crazy was that to suddenly get around? I mean, it's wild to be in the middle of sort of like a breaking news moment when you're not a, I'm not. I'm just not a breaking news reporter. In fact, I try pretty hard to stay away from stories that they're going to have even one other. I mean, most of the time these days you can't avoid.

There's always some documentary filmmaker or someone on a good story. Like, you can't have it all to yourself. But this kind of frenzy, I mean, it was, it's what you would expect, I guess, if you sit down and think about it. but just like people that I had talked to who no one had been interested in the story, even though, you know, like I talked to the sister-in-law of the murdered couple. And I've been talking to her for a couple years. Like, I met her at a court hearing. And there were zero reporters that ever came to this court hearings, not one.

I never saw another reporter. And then, you know, the people like that are getting 40, 50 calls, like just, just one after the other. like all these like reporter reporter reporter reporter everybody doing their job but uh it does create this it can kind of make you crazy because on the one hand i was like oh yeah i was really on to something here and also like maybe i should have done it sooner i don't know like like all the calls that i had intended to make over the years that i was like well i've got all the time in the world suddenly i couldn't even get those people because yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i was just one of many people trying to call them so that that was of course very frustrating but at the same time

time, it did kind of like give it this salience. I mean, we had said, we had put it on hold. And I had literally said, like, well, either they're going to get arrested or they're going to kill someone else. And like, when those things happen, we will get scooped, but we'll have the full story. So we basically took a few weeks to kind of like tie up the ends and get the more current stuff in there and then went with what we had. How many good and bad books did you have to read about rationalism to kind of get your head around these guys? Or was it just like pouring through millions and millions of pages of forums and stuff like that? It's the latter. Or is it both? It's the latter. There's actually not like a lot of books on them. I mean, there's,

I mean, there's books written. The main book is written by Elias Oudkowski, which is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which is like a Harry Potter fanfic book that is done through the lens of rationality, which like everyone in the rationalist community, not everyone, but many people read and it's like very integral to their philosophy. So I think bookwise, that's probably the only book book. But I mean, I read God knows how many tumblers and they have a forum called Less Wrong, which is actually like, there's amazing stuff on Less Wrong. Like, I don't like to categorize the rationalist in one way or the other because if you go on Less Wrong, you will find unbelievable discussions about issues with just like the

most area-dite people oftentimes writing about them. And writing about them in this way that the rationalist community does, where they sort of like, they just take an issue on, even if it's a controversial issue, they just sort of like, well, what can we learn here? And it is quite rational in the way that you would hope that it would be. But there's also just like, there's a lot of text. So, you know, when it came to this group or to the, you know, to the Zizians or just to rationally in general, they're just like a lot to read. And that was part of, it was like my hobby for two years. I would just read stuff occasionally or reread stuff occasionally, just thinking like, is anything ever going

to happen with this? Like, why am I spending my time on this? Um, and so I guess like, I mean, people listening to this might be gathering, gathering it, but the cult aspect of this is Ziz, right? That, the, the cult aspect is the hold that Ziz has over these people and the things that they're willing to do in, in, in, in the cult aspect is the whole, her name or in the name of what they believe is kind of this higher rational purpose? Or how would you sort of describe the hold that she has? Yeah. I mean, we actually, I don't think in the story we described it as a cult ourselves.

And that was not, I mean, I think people oftentimes media will describe the things as cult-like, and it's more of a legal thing. But it was more because it is truly not, it's not quite in the, the vein of like a leader who sets up shop and just attracts people from around the world to like come to them, here's my ideology, like, you believe it, then you do X, Y, or Z. She had written all of these ideas, which are real mishmash of ideas, but they did attract people to her. And I think if you want to argue it's a cult, really what happened in January with the Border Patrol killing is probably the best example. Like two young people,

incredibly smart young people, one who grew up in Germany, one who grew up in Seattle, became attracted to these ideas so much so that they end up contacting Ziz, they end up living in proximity to Ziz, and then they're in Vermont, they've got guns, and they get pulled over by the Border Patrol, and they just come out firing, allegedly. How many discounts does USA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount. Safe driver discount. New vehicle discount. Storage discount. How many discounts will you stack up?

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I'm coming in for a hug. And like, so they were clearly driven to a place where they felt this kind of like, I don't know, moral certainty or the nature of the threat all around them or what we don't know exactly what it was that drove them to come out firing. But I think it's, it was. be fair. I don't think it's unfair to say, like, the charismatic leader attracted them, like, over the internet, just through, like, old Tumblr writings, you know? And then eventually through, through, like, chats directly to them and then eventually in person to this idea of, like, isolating

ourselves, living in box trucks. They love box trucks. But that's one of the things that makes it, like, I mean, there's lots of examples of, like, but they weren't, like, that's, that's, smart about what they were doing. I mean, first of all, I should say, none of them have been convicted of any of these crimes so far. So they're all just like crimes that are surrounded and they're accused of. There are seven of them that are like in jail on various charges, including

multiple of them that are on murder charges. But they weren't like master killers in the way. Quite the opposite in some cases. Yeah, I mean, there's like, at the end, there's a nationwide manhunt for them. They're all the news, they're all over the tabloids, everybody knows that they're like, love box trucks, and they're living in box trucks. And they're just, three of them, including Ziz, are just

caught in Maryland, just parking their box truck on some guy's property. And the guy comes out, and they're like, can we stay on your property for a month? And he's like, no, I'm gonna call police. I can call police right now. Yeah. So it's, they were just like divorced from reality again. This is like a long answer to like whether or not they were a cult. Like they, I don't think that they were, they were living in the mainstream world in, in many senses. And so even the, they're not, they, whether you think they're sinister,

they were not like, they didn't seem to be plotting in a very coherent way. Yeah, I guess, I just want to ask you as well, like, in terms of your own kind of disappearing into this rabbit hole of all of this, kind of incredibly dense philosophical speak. You mentioned something towards the foot of the story. It's this, is it Rocco's Basilisk? This kind of like problem that is posted to less wrong that kind of winds people into knots.

And yeah, tell us about that. And kind of whether you felt that you yourself were kind of falling into this thing as you were investigating this group. Yeah. So Rocco's Basilisk is, it basically, it's a user named Rocco on this forum, last wrong, many years ago came up with this idea. And the idea was, well, because I should say this community,

they often operate in sort of like game theory. So they'll create these sort of game theory situations to try to understand what AI will do in the future. What would a super intelligent AI do? And there's all kinds of theories that, like, If you start reading, you'll be like, what's Newcomb's theory? Like, what's this? What's that? Like, you have to know all of this game theory stuff to even understand what they're talking about.

But this idea was that, well, if you had a super intelligent being in the future that was like, I'm the smartest thing that's ever lived, and therefore, in some sense, like, the most important thing that's ever existed. I shouldn't say lived, existed. And it's like brought into being by, maybe by AI, training itself. And there's this takeoff. and then suddenly it's super intelligent. Then one of the things it might say is, well, I should have existed before.

And like anyone who prevented me from coming into existence, I will now exact revenge on that human being. So if there were people who tried to stop this, then I'm going to destroy them. And not just destroy them, but I'm going to torture them for eternity because it would have an ability to do that, maybe, like, keep you alive forever, but also torture you, because it's so, you're not just to destroy them.

super intelligent. So there's many things that can do we can't hardly imagine. But even worse than that, it might say, well, if you didn't actively work to bring me into existence, if you knew that I could exist, but you didn't actively work to bring me into existence, then I will also torture you forever. And this is really a mess with people's heads because the people are, their, their, their whole purpose is trying to stop super intelligent AI from like taking over. And so they would, be victims, just by virtue of knowing about it, it turns you into a potential victim. Now, this was significant for Ziz because Ziz sort of said, well, I've considered this and I still want to stop it.

And that's part of the reason she viewed herself as like double good and she couldn't be blackmailed because she conceived this. I mean, she didn't come up with it, but she thought through this whole thing, but then concluded, like, no, I'm so moral, I'm still going to try and stop AI. But this was so, like for a while they banned it all. on the less wrong forum. They banned that you couldn't mention it because mentioning it, it's what they call an info hazard.

Like, just knowing about it, you could be subject to it. So they didn't want anyone to read about it. They eventually unbanded it because Eli is Riodkowski, the sort of, he's not really the leader, but let's say Phil's, you know, philosopher-in-chief of this group of people. He sort of said, like, well, they wouldn't bother, actually. The super intelligent AI is just not going to bother with this. Like, it's got bigger fish to fry, essentially.

So they let it back on. But still, it's an influential idea. And also, it really got in my head, too, because it was sort of like, for me, the idea that, like, once I took on the story, like, now I knew about all this stuff. I could neither deliver the story because it didn't have an ending. It wasn't clear what was going to happen for a long time or, like, what it all meant. But I also couldn't let it go because, like, there was something significant happening. And so I kind of felt trapped.

Like, there was a part of me that was like, I wish I had never lived. learned about this story to begin with. Did these people, I mean, someone should teach these guys about Catholicism. It sounds like they would fit quite nicely with it. Yeah, it's a crazy story, obviously. We're going to put the link online. And honestly, I salute you for sort of delineating this stuff because it is utterly crazy. And as an assignment for a journalist, it would give me heart palpitations thinking

about someone reaching out to me with that. But we're not going to just talk about that as well. I wanted to chat to you about another one of your projects. If people don't know Evans work, like it's sort of like often sort of convenes tech and crime and sort of worlds that are changing as we kind of understand how, or AI, I guess, and stuff like this is affecting our lives. And you put some of that into a podcast called Shell Game,

which people should listen to is fantastic. And it's about, I guess, this brave new world of AI that we're sort of stepping into. Most of us, me included, wouldn't know a huge amount about it beyond the headlines. But it's sort of, I mean, it's hard to describe, I guess. I guess it's better to let you describe what the show is and how you sort of first stepped into this world. Does it begin with the crime? or does it kind of begin with the idea of what AI even is? It kind of begins with the crime.

I mean, I'm always interested in scams, you know? Like, I'm endlessly interested in scams and their variety and how they change and morph over time and, like, how they intersect with technology. And then I'm also very interested in identity. Like, when people say, like, what do you cover, you know, kids, parents at the playground kind of thing? I say, well, it's like the intersection of technology and crime and identity. That's like where most of my things live. And for a while, I really was not, I mean, I was not that interested in AI.

I've covered AI in the past and like back to this thing about too many reporters covering it, like once AI became this sort of like chat GPT frenzy and there's sort of endless essays about like, it can do writing for us, like what does that mean? And you know, this and that, like, I was, I checked out a little bit. I was like, you know what? I'm going to go find another lane and do. something else. But then I got interested in the voice cloning aspect. Like I had seen a little bit about its ability to clone your voice. And that kind of got me on two fronts. One, like being

a podcast podcaster, like, you start to think like, huh, well, what does that mean for me? Like, can they clone my voice? Like, I have like hundreds of hours of my voice out on the internet. Like, anyone can clone my voice and impersonate me. But then also like, wow, think of the scams that you could run with this thing. That was one of the first things I thought. And it's true. You could run amazing scams with this technology. So then I thought, okay, well, I'm going to try to dive in and figure out what to do with this. So I cloned my own voice. And then I thought, well, what if I could, I would send people clips, you know, and it got a good laugh. And so I thought, well, what if I could just call people using this voice, but it was just like chat GPT was powering it. Like, I wasn't

even there. And it turned out that not only could you do that. And I, I made it work after a while, there was actually like platforms that were built for that for telemarketers to try to employ AI instead of people in a call center. And so I just like use that technology. And once I started calling people with it, starting with my wife and then like other people. Yes, pretty hilarious. Like customer service people. Then I was like, oh, this shit is crazy.

Because as much as you might hear about AI, like the experience of encountering something that you expect to be real, but is not. That's what most interested in me. Like, how do people react when they encounter this thing? So then I just went crazy with it, and I just, basically, if you made or received a call, like, if you called me or received a call for me for a period of months, like, you weren't talking to me,

you were just talking to an AI version that sounded like me. It reminded me of, do you remember from years back, there was that Tim and Eric sketch about the FaceTime party snoozer where you could, like, you could stand in a party and be asleep, and there was a mask that was talking to people on your behalf, and you're just like snoring in the background and dribbling. It was like that.

That's exactly. It's like, it's kind of like terrifying how advanced. I mean, like, you know, 99% of people are going to pick up that this is an AI speaking to you after a certain amount of time. But like, it is pretty full on. And it shocked me how far down the rabbit hole we are with it already. And there obviously, this is like the techno, you know, utopian line is that what, we're all just going to be sitting reading books or watching

sport or whatever while an AI does our job for us, right? Makes, makes, I don't know, like makes calls and that takes meetings and stuff. It's bizarre. And it kind of makes sense as an end point of where we're going with all this. But obviously the scammers are onto this too. So what kind of stuff did you discover was being done? that. Well, on the other end, like on the scam, like, telemarketer end, so I set up a line, I set up a phone line, and I attached what they call voice agent. So, like, the voice agent had

my voice. It was powered by usually chat GPT, and then it was attached to a phone line. I have a, I have a bunch of these. I have, like, dozens of these things. And one of them, I just, like, try to put it out in the world as much as possible so that it would get called, you know, randomly by telemarketers and scammers. And it's surprisingly easy to accomplish. Like, I've just checked it this morning. It gets like 50 calls a day. And it didn't take long for it to start getting calls. But then over the course of working on the show,

which I started at the beginning of last year, basically early 2024, by like the summer, it was getting calls from other AIs who were being employed by the scammers. Because one of the issues with scamming is that it's often a volume game. Like, they're just making a ton of calls. Most people are hanging up. They're getting mad.

But if you get someone who says, oh, yes, I am interested in health insurance, yes, oh, cryptocurrency, explain it to me. Then they actually often transfer you to like a closer, like another person who can then bring you along to actually getting your information. So, and that's like the oldest scam in the book, right? That is the Nigerian, you know, print scam or whatever. That is, you send a million things out there. One comes back, but it's made you, you know, thousands of thousands of dollars. Yeah, exactly. But then so, but of course you have to employ, I mean, scamming is now like an industrial endeavor. Like you, there's call centers full of people trying to scam people, but of course

you've got to pay, although they're not always paid, there's the whole issue of like people who are essentially enslaved in Asia. Yeah, we've done a bunch of shows on that's crazy in Southeast Asia. Yeah. But you have to have people do that. But if you can have an AI that sounds reasonably human in a way that people won't detect, that can actually do the weeding out for you, can make the hundreds of calls, never sleeps, and then once you answer a couple of questions in the affirmative, then send you to a human closer,

like, that's good business. And that is absolutely what they're trying to do, both like the full-on scammers, but also many of the sort of like offshore telemarketing schemes. Like, now my AI often talks to other AIs, you know, for the beginning of the call. And then because it always engages, because I've prompted it to always be engaging with any caller, really, it then ends up with the human who's sort of like, you know, either tries to close them or realizes at some point and then starts yelling at it.

Although recently, I've, it's been going for a year. So, like, I got tired of listening to the scam call. So now at the current moment, it will only talk about classic rock. So, like, no matter what the person calls, it just, like, tries to get them. And occasionally they will. They'll be like, Pink Floyd or Rolling Stones, you know, and it'll get like a guy being like,

I like Pink Floyd, just to try to move the conversation along. It's pretty amazing what you've done, because it feels like listening to the show that it's almost like you've created a museum piece of this particular moment in time. Like it feels like we're right at the edge of the, we're stepping through the doorway

and you've got this like artificial, fact that shows where we're headed. And it is so, it's like you're, when you're listening to the show, it's like you're constantly in the uncanny valley. You're always, it's so unsettling. There are moments where, like, when you, when you get, won't go into too much detail because I want everyone to listen, but when you're getting your AI to talk to a psychologist, and it is so creepy. And I think you are. saying at that moment, you're like, oh my God, I want to like, I want to die. I need to step into this conversation. But it's, it just feels like, oh my God, this is where we're at. And if you

want to understand about how this stuff works, like you've got to listen to show because it's, I don't know, man. Like as probably the most lay person with this stuff that's imaginable to be, it's, it's kind of terrifying and just completely enthralling at the same time. I mean, where were you before you kind of started doing it? And how did you kind of progress as you, as you went further down the hole with it? Well, at the beginning, I was, I mean, I've been pretty, I've been relatively dismissive of AI, but that's partly because, like, I had reported on AI when it just didn't work at all.

Like, it didn't do anything useful. And so, and a lot of people got into this mentality, too, where it's like, you do some, like, early in my career when I was doing more just, like, straight tech stuff, and people are selling something as being incredible. And then you kind of like, experience it and you sort of think, like, well, this doesn't work very well, then you just assume, like, oh, this is kind of a dud, and like, you stop believing. And then so even when ChatGBT kind of broke out, I had a little bit of, I just had a lot of skepticism around it. Now, I think that skepticism may end up being warranted in terms of its ultimate,

like, whether it can ultimately keep getting as good, as fast as it has in the past. That's a whole discussion that people are having in that industry. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and all birds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer.

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It is a human impersonator. That's how they built it. They could have built it a different way, actually. And the things they describe about how wonderful it already is and what it's doing, like, it can do protein folding design. Like, it didn't actually have to be able to speak like a human in order to do that, you know. But they specifically decided to feed it, you know, the whole internet to make it something that tried to predict what a human would say.

at any given situation. Like, that's the route they took. And so it does that. Like, it's quite good at impersonating a human, and that feels very scary. But then if you experience it a lot, especially in conversation, not like chatting to it, like asking a question, but like speaking to it,

which, like, I made a lot of people do against their will, but also I have had to do as well. It fades a little bit because it's like, it's the most boring human impersonator that you could possibly come up with. And it's also, like, weirdly hilarious. Like, not intentionally hilarious. Like, when it tries to make a joke, it is not funny.

But it's actually, like, hilarious to listen to because it is, like, put together, like, two of the most boring people you know, and then just be like, you have to keep talking, no matter what. And that's what you get if you put two of them in conversation with each other. I just, I could never get over that. Like, I still like listening to, like, the AI version of me talking to that. AI version of me because it's like, it's so fucking weird. So it's bizarre.

I was trying to get at that. Does it make you go crazy? I mean, listening to yourself speaking in this kind of like just off color way, the whole time, like how do you even cope with that, I guess? A little bit. I mean, it didn't make me go, I don't know how crazy I am, but like it, it definitely like, it was like, I think I described it like for the therapy session. It was like simultaneously like eavesdropping on someone else's therapy session and also like listening to a recording of myself just like talking about my mental health issues. And so, but there was a part of me that was like, well, I feted all this information about myself.

Like my whole history, like I wrote a whole dossier that I gave to it. So it would, you know, quote unquote understand me even though it doesn't understand anything. It's just drawing from that text. but then listening to it, I would actually be like, no, wait, is that an issue that I have? Like, it kept talking about, like, you know, vulnerability. And that's, if you put me in a room, I would not be like, I have a problem with vulnerability.

And that's, but that's just like something in its training data that probably comes up a lot with what it's been trained on. Like, that's a common issue that, like, a man of a certain age might have. But you can't, if you're listening to essentially yourself speaking, you're like, well, maybe it's seeing something that I'm not seeing when it's talking about that, when it's bringing that up, like maybe it's reading

between the lines. Christ, that's matter. Yeah. So it did kind of mess with my head a bit. And then I messed with my friends and families' heads themselves. I mean, I feel like they got it worse than me because they thought they were going to be talking to me and then they would realize that it was something else. But I hadn't even told anyone that this was even possible.

So there were a lot of people who are like, what the fuck is this? Like, what is happening right now, like really, really freaked out. So I tried to capture that as well, because I feel like we're all experiencing that or starting to experience that, and experience that in like a little bit, a little way. Yeah. It is. And to like bring it back to the crime, I guess, because we should. It's, this is like the money that is made by this stuff is staggering, right? It's phenomenal. So it's not, this isn't chump change at all. This is not something that is like at the very periphery of organized crime around the world. This is like,

this is right in the middle of the black hole of it, right? This is making billions of dollars. It's like crazy stuff. Yeah. I mean, the type of scams that this can supercharge are, yeah, multi-billion dollar scams like business email compromise, which I've written about in the past. Like, that is absolutely just like through the roof with AI because this is when people are imitating a company's email in order to get, I don't know, the treasurer or the finance department of wire like a million bucks. Exactly. Yeah. So both in the sense that like we discussed before, you can do a much, like you can do a volume approach much cheaper, but also the impersonation ability is incredible. So there already have been examples of you clone the voice of the CEO.

You have that voice call a mid-level employee and say, oh, this deal is just, coming together, like, we need to transfer this money. Like, you do, don't tell anyone else. This is the nature of the scam. Like, don't tell anyone else and, like, send a wire to here. And, like, you would think, you and us, you and I sitting here, like, oh, that would never work. But, like, it absolutely works. And it's worth, like, millions, hundreds of millions, billions, billions of dollars to be able to achieve that. And so there's already just, like, scam. I mean, there's the grandparent scam. People pretend, you know, they clone someone's voice.

There's so many voices on Instagram. like everyone's out there making videos. They can clone your voice, contact a relative, using that voice, say that you're in trouble, say that you need money. This is like a classic old scam that again is now like can be made so much more real. They used to have just have like a person pretend to be you. And your relative most of the time doesn't sound like him. But now they have the ability to like just you get you over the line to start believing.

And then like you're trapped in this world and you'll do anything they say. Yeah, it's pretty crazy stuff. Obviously, we'll put it link to the show in the show descriptions here as well. And yeah, it's called Shell Game. You get it wherever you get your podcasts. Evan, what are you kind of working on at the moment then? Are you, I mean, you're climbing out of two pretty gigantic kind of meta research holes. Are you going to go for something a bit easier next time or is it more crazy stuff?

Sadly, no. I'm working on season two of Shell Game, actually. we've got that up and running, so that's supposed to be done by the fall. And then I've got another magazine story that I've been working on for now going on six months about a scam type situation. So every time I think, like, I just want to talk to people again who want to speak to me, you know? Yeah. Like I used to do science stories, and often the researchers, they were really eager to speak to me. And like, for years, I haven't done anything where anyone who involved really, really wants to talk.

to me. I went for a period, I think last year and the year before that, of doing stories about con artists and scams. And I was like, I need to put this to bed just for a bit because these people, I mean, they're just so difficult. They're just, they're just, they're kind of like the ego and the constant conniving and the trying to manipulate and also kind of hating you at the same time. It's pretty exhausting to just be at that desk every day. So I personally have a couple of easier stories I'm working on. Not nice stories, not like friendly stories, but they're not reconized. So yeah, my heart goes out to you for that.

But Evan, thanks you ever so much for joining us. Yeah, we'll obviously keep up with your work in the future and hope to have you back. Thank you. Huge fan of the podcast, I'm honored to be here. Didn't wear your t-shirt though, so I'm pretty upset. I didn't wear my t-shirt. It seemed too aggressive to wear my t-shirt. My complaint about the t-shirt actually is that the t-shirt says don't Instagram your crimes.

But among, there's a small group of people for whom that sentiment is not what we want. Like you and I want people. I have reported multiple stories from people Instagramming their crimes. So I actually want people to Instagram their crimes, but I do support the sentiment to stay out of trouble you should in fact not Instagram your crimes. Yeah, I think maybe we have to put like an asterisk on the back and like some kind of disclaimers. but yeah I take your point.

Cheers, Evan. We'll speak to you soon. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Some follow the noise.

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