David Boree
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
My little brother went to school right outside, right outside of San Francisco and his principal lived on a boat. Right. Just like a mile away from the school and everybody loved it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
It feels like it would be dank, I guess, is the word.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
That also goes along with the Bay Area.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Maybe no more pets for a while.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
That's insane what you said.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Oh, like their furry persona is their truth.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
No, no, it's, I think it's, I think we're drinking from the same well.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
No, this is the least relatable group of people I've ever heard of.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
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.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Yeah, that's just how it goes.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
You just watched Star Wars again and decided you got it figured out.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
No, no, no, no. God, to be a fly on that wall.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Yeah, I was going to say, what media are you able to get? You're getting this all straight from the source, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
And still in the process of transitioning, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
That's a heavy workload. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Like a bathroom. It's got a quarter, like, yeah. What is there? There's like a bed, a table and a sink. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Oh, my God. It's a real villain story. It couldn't get any worse than that.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
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.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
This is a cult factory for sure.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
We created a cult factory. Oh, no. They give you the base ideas and then you can just kind of franchise it how you'd like.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
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?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Rational. I gotta 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.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Yeah, that feels very techie. Yes.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
That shit's vile. That's fucked up, dude. That's truly vile.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
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.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Great. And I get it, right? No, of course. It's expensive here. I want to get some boats with my friends.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
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 had to be a shitty, shitty boat.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
I love that it all goes back to that.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
And that's the center. That's the crown jewel of the fleet.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Like comically so. Like known to be a terrible. Nothing depreciates like fucking raw salmon depreciates slower than a boat.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Oh man. Oh man. What was the timeline on him getting his money back, he thought?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Wait, oh, I didn't realize he sailed it down from Alaska.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Just get a warehouse. It's Oakland.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
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.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Yeah, that is – because you had said that before, right? Yes. That they had been – that's sort of what they're looking to be.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Exactly, it's the thing. Yeah, if you have somewhere to go, if you have anywhere to go, this can't fly.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Yeah, this is clearly like a cousin. Yes, someone. This would be so upsetting for someone to just casually talk about it like a paint and sip.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Man, imagine being in the boat community when they move in.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Cause it's something space Marines do. Cause yeah. What are you talking about? That's not a thing.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
I like to think of them on the boat, just only using one half of their body.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Watching the office. Furiously taking notes.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Yeah, let alone this extremist offshoot, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Ah, Rambo 3, let's go. Okay, okay, okay. Let's kill a ton of brown people.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
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.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Yeah, that's classic stinking thinking, as they say.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Is this a thing that can exist a lot of places? Like...
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Yeah. No, that's a bad guy. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
That's how they refer to it?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Yeah, because you're taking them, man...
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Escaping this is even putting yourself back together after living this way seems like it would be such a task.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Yeah, it's so deep. It's so deep.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Right, right. Very, very, a lot of talk of murder.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Yeah. As nice as anything else in this story has been. I think you might've been the doom here. Yeah. I think you were the whole problem. But now it's an info hazard to explain. Yes. a person's like... To explain your theories, yeah. Yeah, to a person who can't handle it, I guess.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Yeah. It isolates herself within her own group that she's created.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
I am okay. You know what? I'm deeply sad for these people who are so lost. And I'm also pretty interested because this is crazy. But I'm okay.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Craigslist is a crapshoot, you know?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Yeah, no, it's tough to get by there.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Yeah. And once again, she has like flashes of like, oh, wow, you really you really have strong morals and all that. You know what I mean?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Well, you know, the Bay is the place to do that.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Is she following this herself?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
This poor woman has been under the highest stakes this whole time.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult
Literally all that cult stuff, huh?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
From there, in 2012, she starts reading up on effective altruism and existential risk, which is a term that means the risk that a super intelligent AI will kill us all. She starts believing in all of this kind of stuff. And –
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Her particular belief is that the singularity, when it happens, is going to occur in a flash, kind of like the rapture, and almost immediately lead to the creation of either a hell or a heaven. This will be done by the term they use for this inevitable AI is the singleton. That's what they call the AI god that's going to come about. Her obsession is that
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
she has to find a way to make the singleton a nice ai that cares about animals as much as it cares about people right that's her initial big motivation so she starts emailing tomasic with her concerns because she's worried that the other rationalists aren't vegans right and they don't feel like animal welfare is like the top priority for making sure this AI is good.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
And she really wants to convert this whole community to veganism in order to ensure that the singleton is as focused on insect and animal welfare as human welfare. And Tomasik does care about animal rights, but he disagrees with her because he's like, no, what matters is maximizing the reduction of suffering.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
And like a good singleton will solve climate change and shit, which will be better for the animals. And if we focus on trying to convert everybody in this, the rationalist space to veganism, it's going to stop us from accomplishing these bigger goals, right? This is shattering to Ziz, right? She decides that he doesn't, Thomas doesn't care about good things.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
And she decides that she's basically alone in her values.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
That sounds like we're on our way. She first considers embracing what she calls negative utilitarianism. And this is an example of the fact that from the jump, this is a young woman who's not well, right? Because her hero is like, I don't know if veganism is necessarily the priority we have to embrace right now. Her immediate goal is to jump to, well, maybe what I should do
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
is optimize myself to cause as much harm to humanity and, quote, destroy the world to prevent it from becoming hell for mostly everyone. So that's a jump, you know? That's not somebody who's doing well, who you think is healthy, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Uh-huh. So Ziz does ultimately decide she should still work to bring about a nice AI, even though that necessitates working with people she describes as flesh-eating monsters who had created hell on earth for far more people than those they had helped. That's everybody who eats meat. Okay. Yes, yes. And it's ironic- It's a large group.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
It's ironic because if she really wants to be in the tech industry, she's trying to get in all these people who are in the tech industry, that's a pretty good description of a lot of the tech industry. Yeah. They are in fact flesh eating monsters who have created hell on earth for more people than they've helped. But she means that for like, I don't know, your aunt who has a hamburger once a week.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
And look again, factory farming, evil. I just don't think that's how morality works. I think you're going a little far.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Yeah, you're making... Bold thinker. Bold thinker. Bold thinker. Yeah. Now, what you see here with this logic is that Ziz has taken this... She has a massive case of main character syndrome, right? All of this is based in her attitude that...
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
I have to save the universe by creating – by helping to or figuring out how to create an AI that can end the eternal holocaust of all animal life and also save humanity, right? That's a lot on our shoulders. That's me. That's a lot on our shoulders. And this is a thing – again, all of this comes out of – both subcultural aspects, aspects of American culture.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
One major problem that we have in the society is Hollywood has trained us all on a diet of movies with main characters that are the special boy or the special girl with the special powers who save the day, right? Real life doesn't work that way very often, right? The Nazis, there was no special boy who stopped the Nazis.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
There were a lot of farm boys who were just like, I guess I'll go run in a machine gun nest until this is done. Yeah, exactly. There were a lot of 16-year-old Russians who were like, I guess I'm going to walk in a bullet, you know? Like, that's how evil gets fought, usually, unfortunately.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Yeah. Yeah, or a shitload of guys in a lab figuring out how to make corn that has higher yields so people don't starve, right? These are really how huge world problems get solved.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Yeah, it's not people who have been touched, and it's certainly not people who have entirely based their understanding on the world from quotes from Star Wars and Harry Potter. And some of this comes from just like – this is a normal deranged way of thinking that happens to a lot of people in just Western – I think a lot of this leads to –
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
why you get very comfortable middle-class people joining these very aggressive fascist movements in the West, like in Germany, it's like middle-class people, mostly like middle-class and upper middle-class people in the US, especially among like these street fighting, you know, proud boy types. It's because it's not because they're like suffering and desperate. They're not starving in the streets.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
It's because they're bored and they want to feel like they're fighting an epic war against evil.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Yeah, so there's a piece, I mean, I think there's a piece of this that originally, it's just from this is something in our culture, but there's also a major chunk of this gets supercharged by the kind of thinking that's common in EA and rationalist spaces. So rationalists and effective altruists are not ever thinking like, Hey, how do we as a species fix these major problems, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
They're thinking, how do I make myself better, optimize myself to be incredible? And how do I, like... fix the major problems of the world alongside my mentally superpowered friends, right? These are very individual focused philosophies and attitudes, right? And so they do lend themselves to people who think that like we are heroes who are uniquely empowered to save the world, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Ziz writes, I did not trust most humans in difference to build a net positive cosmos, even in the absence of a technological convenience to prey on animals. So like I'm the only one who has the mental capability to actually create the net positive cosmos that needs to come into being. All of her discussion is talking in terms of I'm saving the universe, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
And a lot of that does come out of the way many of these people talk on the internet about the stakes of AI and just like the importance of rationality. Again, this is something Scientology does. L. Ron Hubbard always couched getting people on Dianetics in terms of we are going to save the world and end war, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
It's very normal for cult stuff. She starts reading around this time when she's in college, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. This helps to solidify her feelings of her own centrality as a hero figure.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
In a blog post where she lays out her intellectual journey, she quotes a line from that fanfic of Yudkowsky's that is – it's essentially about what Yudkowsky calls the hero contract, right? It's essentially about – This concept called the hero contract, right? And there's this – this is a psychological concept among academics, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
And it's about like – it's about analyzing how we as a – how we should look at the people who societies declare heroes and the communities that declare them heroes and see them as in a dialogue, right? As in when you're in a country decides this guy's a hero, he is through his actions kind of conversing to them and they are kind of telling him what they expect from him.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
But Yudkowsky wrestles with this concept and he comes to some very weird conclusions about it in one of the worst articles that I've ever read. He frames it as hero licensing to refer to the fact that People get angry at you if you're trying to do something and they don't think you have a hero license to do it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
In other words, if you're trying to do something that they don't think you're qualified to do, he'll describe that as them not thinking you have a hero license. He writes this annoying article that's like a conversation between him and a person who's supposed to embody the community of people who don't think he should write Harry Potter fan fiction. Yeah. It's all very silly.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Again, all this is ridiculous, but Ziz is very interested in the idea of the hero contract, right? But she comes up with her own spin on it, which she calls the true hero contract, right? And instead of – again, the academic term is the hero contract means societies and communities pick heroes –
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
And those heroes and the community that they're in are in a constant dialogue with each other about what is heroic and what is expected, right? What the hero needs from the community and vice versa, you know? That's all that that's saying. Ziz says, no, no, no, that's bullshit. The real hero contract is, quote, pour free energy at my direction and it will go into the optimization for good.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Classic cis. Classic cis. It's not a dialogue. If you're the hero, the community has to give you their energy and time and power, and you will use it to optimize them for good because they don't know how to do it themselves because they're not really able to think.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Now, this is a fancy way of describing how cult leaders... Think, right? Everyone exists to pour energy into me and I'll use it to do what's right, you know? So this is where her mind is in 2012. But again, she's just a student posting on the internet and chatting with other members of the subculture at this point.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
That year, she starts donating money to MIRI, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which is a nonprofit devoted to studying how to create friendly AI. Yudkowsky founded MIRI in 2000, right? So this is his nonprofit think tank. In 2013, she finished an internship at NASA. So again, she is a very smart young woman, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
She gets an internship at NASA and she builds a tool for space weather analysis. So she's a person with a lot of potential. Very, very, as all of the stuff she's writing is like dumb as shit. But again, intelligence isn't an absolute. People can be brilliant at coding and have terrible ideas about everything else.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
I don't think at this point she is because she's super insular. She's very uncomfortable talking to people. She's going to break out of her shell once she gets to San Francisco. Now, I don't know. She may have talked to some of them about this stuff, but I really don't think she is at this point. I don't think she's comfortable enough doing that. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
So she also does an internship at the software giant Oracle. So at this point, you've got this young lady who's got a lot of potential, you know? A real career as well. Yeah. The start of a very real career. That's a great starting resume for like a 22-year-old. Yeah. Now, at this point, she's torn. Should she go get a graduate degree, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Or should she jump right into the tech industry, you know? And she worries that like if she waits to get a graduate degree, this will delay her making a positive impact on the existential risk caused by AI and it'll be too late. The singularity will happen already, you know? At this point, she's still a big, a fawning fan of Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
And the highest ranking woman at Yudkowsky's organization, Miri, is a lady named Susan Salomon. Susan gives a public invitation to the online community to pitch ideas for the best way to improve the ultimate quality of the singleton that these people believe is inevitable. In other words, hey, give us your ideas for how to make the inevitable AI god nice, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Here's what Ziz writes about her response to that. I asked her whether I should try an alter course and do research or continue a fork of my pre-existing life plan, earn to give as a computer engineer, but retrain and try to do research directly instead. At the time, I was planning to go to grad school, and I had an irrational attachment to the idea.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
She sort of compromised and said I should go to grad school, find a startup co-founder, drop out, and earn to give via startups instead." First off, bad advice, Susan. Bad advice. Just be Steve Jobs. Being Steve Jobs worked for Steve Jobs. Well, and Bill Gates, I guess, to an extent. It doesn't work for most people.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Yeah. And most people, these people aren't very original thinkers. Like, yeah, she's just saying like, yeah, go to a Steve Jobs. So Ziz does go to grad school and somewhere around that time in 2014, she attends a lecture by Alicia Yudkowsky on the subject of inadequate equilibria, which is the title of a book that Yudkowsky had wrote about the time.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
And the book is about where and how civilizations get stuck. One reviewer, Brian Kaplan, who despite being a professor of economics, must have a brain as smooth as a pearl, wrote this about it. Every society is screwed up. Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of the few thinkers on earth who are trying at the most general level to understand why. And this is like- Wow, that's-
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Please study the humanities a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. I mean, the first and most, like one of the first influential works of his modern historic scholarship is The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It's a whole book about why a society fell apart. And like, motherfucker, more recently, Mike Davis existed. Like, like Jesus Christ.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Nobody else is thinking about why society is screwed up, but Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
speech. Everything's good. Yeah. Oh, boy. Oh my God. Oh my God. Motherfucker. So many people do nothing but try to write about why our society is sick.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
This is such a common subject of scholarship and discussion.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
It would be like if I got really into reading medical textbooks and was like, you know what? Nobody's ever tried to figure out how to transplant a heart. I'm going to write a book about how that might work. I think I got it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
So, yeah. Speaking of these fucking people. Have sex with. No. Well, that's not something. No, no. I don't know. I don't know. Don't fuck. Listen to ads.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
So we've kind of left off by setting up the rationalists, where they came from, some of the different strains of thought and beliefs that come out of their weird thought experiments. And now we are talking about a person who falls into this movement fairly early on and is going to be the leader of this quote unquote group, the Zizians, who were responsible for these murders that just happened.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
We're back. So Ziz is at this speech where Yudkowsky is shilling his book. And most of what he seems to be talking about in this speech about this book about why societies fall apart is how to make a tech startup. She says, quote, he gave a recipe for finding startup ideas. He said, Paul Graham's idea. only filter on people ignore startup ideas was partial epistemic learned helplessness.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
That means Paul Graham is saying, focus on finding good people that you'd start a company with. Having an idea for a company doesn't matter. Yudkowsky says, of course startup ideas mattered. You needed a good startup idea. So look for a way in the world is broken. Then compare against a checklist of things you couldn't fix. You know, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Like that's what this speech is largely about, is him being like, here's how to find startup ideas. So she starts thinking. She starts thinking as hard as she can. And, you know, being a person who is very much of the tech brain industry rot at this point, she comes up with a brilliant idea. It's a genius idea. Oh, you're going to love this idea, David. Uber for prostitutes.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
You're fucking with me. No, no. That's where she landed. She lands on the idea of. Oh, wow. Sex work is illegal, but porn isn't. So if we start an Uber whereby a team with a camera and a porn star come to your house and you fuck them and record it. That's a legal loophole. We just found out how to have legal prostitution.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
It is really like Don Draper moment. What about Uber, but a pimp?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Oh, God. Oh, man. That is the good stuff, isn't it? Yeah. Wow. Wow. We special minds at work here. Oh, man.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Yes, yes. The Uber of pimping. What an idea. Now, So Ziz devotes her brief time in grad school. She's working on pimping Uber to try and find a partner. Right. She wants to have a startup partner, someone who will will embark on this journey with her.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
It doesn't work out. She drops out of grad school because, quote, I did not find someone who felt like good startup co-founder material. This may be because she's very bad at talking to people and also probably scares people off because the things that she talks about are deeply off-putting. I was going to say, it's also a terrible idea. Mm-hmm. And at this point, she hasn't done anything bad.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Ziz Lasoda was born in 1990 or 1991. I don't have an exact birth date. She's known to be 34 years old as of 2025, so it was somewhere in that field. She was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, and grew up there as her father worked for the University of Alaska as an AI researcher.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
So I feel bad for her. This is a person who is very lonely, is very confused. She has by this point realized that she's trans, but not transitioned. She's in like, this is like a tough place to be. Right.
Behind the Bastards
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That's hard. And nothing about her inherent personality is going to make this easier for her, right? Who she is makes all of this much harder. Yeah. She also makes some comments about dropping out because her thesis advisor was abusive. I don't fully know what this means, and here's why.
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Ziz encounters some behavior I will describe later that is abusive from other people, but also regularly defines abuse as people who disagree with her about the only thing that matters being creating an AI god to protect the animals. So, I don't know if her thesis advisor was abusive or was just like, maybe drop the alien god idea for a second. Yeah, hey, you gotta chill.
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Maybe focus on like finding a job, you know, making some friends. Go on a couple of dates. Go on a couple of dates, something like that. Maybe, maybe, maybe like, maybe make God on the back burner here for a second. Whatever happened here, she decides it's time to move to the Bay. This is like 2016. She's going to find a big tech job.
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She's going to make that big tech money while she figures out a startup idea and finds a co-founder who will let her make enough money to change and save the world. Well, the whole universe. Her first plan is to give the money to MIRI, Yudkowsky's organization, so it can continue its important work imagining a nice AI.
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Her parents, she's got enough family money that her parents are able to pay for like I think like six months or more of rent in the Bay, which is not nothing, not a cheap place to live. I don't know exactly how long her parents are paying, but like that, that implies a degree of financial comfort. Right. Yeah.
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So she gets hired by a startup very quickly because, again, very gifted computer engineer. Yeah, with a resume. Right? Yes. It's some sort of gaming company. But at this point, she's made another change in her ethics system based on Eliezer Yudkowsky's writings. One of Yudkowsky's writings argues that – it's talking about the difference between consequentialists – and virtue ethics, right?
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Consequentialists are people who focus entirely on what will the outcome of my actions be. And it kind of doesn't matter what I'm doing, or even if it's sometimes a little fucked up, if the end result is good. Virtue ethics people have a code and stick to it, right? And
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Actually, and I kind of am surprised that he came to this, Yudkowsky's conclusion is that like while logically you're more likely to succeed – like on paper you're more likely to succeed as a consequentialist. His opinion is that virtue ethics has the best outcome. People tend to do well when they stick to a code and they try to – rather than like anything goes as long as I succeed, right?
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We know very little of the specifics of her childhood or upbringing, but in more than 100,000 words of blog posts, she did make some references to her early years. She claims to have been talented in engineering and computer science from a young age, and there's no real reason to doubt this. The best single article on all of this is a piece in Wired by Evan Ratliff.
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And I think that's actually a pretty decent way to live your life.
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Yeah. It's a reasonable conclusion for him, so I don't blame him on this part. But here's the problem. Ziz is trying to break into and succeed in the tech industry. And you are very unlikely to succeed at a high level in the tech industry if you are unwilling to do things and have things done to you that are unethical and fucked up. I'm not saying this is good.
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And this is the reality of the entertainment industry too, right? When I started, I started with an unpaid internship. Unpaid internships are bad, right? It's bad that those exist. They inherently favor people who have money and people who have family connections. You know, I had like a small savings account for my job in special ed. But that was the standard.
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It's like there were a lot of unpaid internships. It got me my foot in the door. It worked for me. I also worked a lot of overtime that I didn't get paid for. I did a lot of shit that wasn't a part of my job to impress my bosses, to make myself indispensable so that they would decide like we have to keep this guy on and pay him. And it worked for me.
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And I just wanted to add, because this is not in the original thing, a big part of why it worked for me is that I'm talking about a few different companies here, but particularly at Cracked, where I had the internship, like my bosses, you know, made a choice to mentor me and, you know, to get me, you know, to work overtime on their own behalf to like make sure I got a paying job.
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which is a big part of like the luck that I encountered that a lot of people don't. So that's another major part of like why things worked out for me is that I just got incredibly lucky with the people I was working for and with. That's bad. It's not good that things work that way, right? It's not healthy.
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That said... If I am giving someone – if someone wants what is the most likely path to succeeding? I've just got this job working at this production company or a music studio. I would say, well, your best odds are to make yourself completely indispensable and become obsessively devoted to that task, right? That's – I don't tend to give that advice anymore.
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I have, and I have had several other friends succeed as a result of it. And all of us also burnt ourselves out and did huge amounts of damage to ourselves. Like I am permanently broken as a result of, of, You know, the 10 years that I did 80 hour weeks and shit, you know, now you're sounding like somebody who works in the entertainment industry. Yes.
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And it worked for me. Right. I got up. I got it. I succeeded. I got a great job. I got money. Most people, it doesn't. And it's bad that it works this way. Ziz, unlike me, is not willing to do that. right? She thinks it's wrong to be asked to work overtime and not get paid for it. And so on her first day at the job, she leaves after eight hours and her boss is like, what the fuck are you doing?
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And she's like, I'm supposed to be here eight hours. Eight hours is up. I'm going home. And he calls her half an hour later and fires her, right? And this is because the tech industry is evil, you know? Like, this is bad. She's not bad here. It is like a thing where it's, she's not doing by her standards.
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He found a 2014 blog post by Ziz where she wrote, My friends and family, even if they think I'm weird, don't really seem to be bothered by the fact that I'm weird. But one thing I can tell you is that I used to de-emphasize my weirdness around them, and then I stopped and found that being unapologetically weird is a lot more fun."
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What I would say is the rational thing, which would be if all that matters is optimizing your earning power, right? Right. Well, then you do this, then you do do whatever it takes. Right. Um, so it's kind of interesting to me, like that, that she is so devoted to this, like virtue ethics thing at this point that she fucks over her career in, in the tech industry.
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Um, cause she's not willing to do the things that you kind of need to do to, to, to succeed, you know, in the place that she is. Um, But it's interesting. I don't, like, give her any shit for that. So she asks her parents for more runway to extend her time in the Bay, and then she finds work at another startup. But the same problems persist.
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Quote, they kept demanding that I work unpaid overtime, talking about how other employees just always put 40 hours on their timesheet no matter what, and this exemplary employee over there worked 12 hours a day, and he really went the extra mile and got the job done, and they needed me to really go the extra mile and get the job done.
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Yeah. I'm so sad that this is part of what shatters your brain. Like that really bums me out. So first off, she's kind of start spiraling and she concludes that she hates virtue ethics. This is where she starts hating Yudkowsky, right? This is, she doesn't come break entirely on him yet, but she gets really angry at this point because she's like, well, obviously virtue ethics don't work. Right.
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Exactly. Exactly. So this is a very damaging thing to her that this happens. And again, as much as I'm blamed Yudkowsky, the culture of the Bay Area tech industry, that's a big part of what drives this person to where she ends up, right? So, that said, some of her issues are also rooted in a kind of rigid and unforgiving internal rule set.
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At one point, she negotiates work with a professor and their undergraduate helper. She doesn't want to take an hourly job, and she tries to negotiate a flat rate of 7K. And they're like, yeah, okay, that sounds fair. But the school doesn't do stuff like that. So you will have to fake some paperwork with me for me to be able to get them to pay you seven thousand dollars.
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And she isn't willing to do that. And that's the thing where it's like, I know I've had some shit where this was like there was a stupid rule. And like in order for me or other people to get paid, we had to like tell something else to the company. Like, that's just knowing how to get by.
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Now, it's important you know, Ziz is not the name this person is born under. She's a trans woman. And so I'm like using the name that she adopts later. But she is not transitioned at this point. Like this is when she's a kid, right? And she's not going to transition until fairly late in the story after coming to San Francisco. So you just keep that in mind as this is going on here.
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You just, you can't get by in America if you're not willing to lie on certain kinds of paperwork, right? That's the game.
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He's the king of that shit. So at this point, Ziz is stuck in what they consider a calamitous situation. The prophecy of doom, as they call it, is ticking ever closer, which means the bad AI that's going to create hell for everybody. Her panic over this is elevated by the fact that she starts to get obsessed with Rocco's basilisk at this time. Oh, no. I know. I know. Worst thing for her to read.
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Come on. What they call it, an info hazard? An info hazard, right.
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Yep. And a lot of the smarter rationalists are just annoyed by it. Again, Yudkowsky immediately is like, this is very quickly decides it's bullshit and bans discussion of it.
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He argues there's no incentive for a future agent to follow through with that threat because by doing so, it just expends resources at no gain to itself, which is like, yeah, man, a hyperlogical AI would not immediately jump to, I must make hell for everybody who didn't code me. Like, that's just crazy.
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Yeah. Only humans are like ill in that way. That's the funny thing about it is it's such a human response to it. Right, right. Now, when she encounters the concept of Rocco's Basilisk at first, Ziz thinks that it's silly, right? She kind of rejects it and moves on.
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But once she gets to the bay, she starts going to in-person rationalist meetups and having long conversations with other believers who are still talking about Rocco's Basilisk. She writes, I started encountering people who were freaked out by it, freaked out that they had discovered an improvement to the info hazard that made it function, got around to Lieser's objection.
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Her ultimate conclusion is this. If I persisted in trying to save the world, I would be tortured until the end of the universe by a coalition of all unfriendly AIs in order to increase the amount of measure they got by demoralizing me. Even if my system two had good decision theory, My system one did not. And that would damage my effectiveness.
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And like, I can't explain all of the terms in that without taking more time than we need to. But like you can hear like that is not the writing of a person who is thinking in logical terms.
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Those are the stakes. This is where your head is. She feels like she's dealing with... That's... It is... I talk to my friends who are raised in very toxic evangelical...
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subculture chunks of the evangelical subculture and grow up and spend their whole childhood terrified of hell that like everything you know i got angry at my mom and i didn't say anything but god knows i'm angry at her and he's going to send me to hell because i didn't respect my mother mother like that's what she's doing right exactly exactly she can't win there's no winning yes yes and again i say this a lot we need to put lithium back in the drinking water
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Hey everyone, Robert here. Just a little additional context. As best as I think anyone can tell, if you're curious about where the name Ziz came from, there's another piece of serial released online fiction that's not like a rationalist story, but it's very popular with rationalists. It's called Worm.
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She is the therapy-needingest woman I have ever heard of at this point. Oh, my God. She just needs to talk to a lot of people. Again, the thing that happens to cult members has happened to her, where the whole language she uses is incomprehensible to people. I had to talk to you for an hour and 15 minutes so you would understand parts of what this lady says, right? Exactly.
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Because you have to, because it's all nonsense if you don't do that work.
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Yeah, so she ultimately decides, even though she thinks she's doomed to be tortured by unfriendly AIs, evil gods must be fought. If this damns me, then so be it. She's very heroic. She sees herself that way, right?
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She's a woman of conviction. You really can't take that away from her. Those convictions are nonsense. No, that's the problem.
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It's like David Icke, the guy who believes in literal lizard people and everyone thinks he's talking about the Jews, but no, no, no. It's just lizards.
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And like David, he went out, he's made like a big rant against how Elon Musk is like evil for what all these people he's hurt by firing the whole federal government. People were shocked. And it's like, no, no, no. David Icke believes in a thing. It's just crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Those people do exist. Yeah. Here we are talking about them. And here we are talking about them.
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Some of them run the country. But actually, I don't know how much all of those people believe in anything.
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Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of people who believe in something, our sponsors believe in getting your money.
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Ziz is a character in that that's effectively like an angel like being who can like manipulate the future, usually in order to do very bad things. Anyway, that's where the name comes from. So smart kid, really good with computers, kind of weird and, you know, embraces being unapologetically weird at a certain point in her childhood. Hey, everybody. Robert here.
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We're back. So she is at this point suffering from delusions of grandeur, and those are going to rapidly lead her to danger. But she concludes that since the fate of the universe is at stake in her actions, she would make a timeless choice to not believe in the basilisk, right? And that that will protect her in the future, because that's how these people talk about stuff like that.
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So she gets over her fear of the basilisk for a little while. But even it like when she claims to have rejected the theory, whenever she references it in her blog, she like locks it away under a spoiler with like an info hazard warning. Rocco's basilisk family skippable. So you don't like have to see it and have it destroy your psyche.
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Did not have this piece of information when I first put the episode together, but I came across a quote in an article from the Boston Globe that provides additional context on Ziz's childhood quote.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. The concept does, however, keep coming back to her, like, and continuing to drive her mad. Thoughts of the basilisk return, and eventually she comes to an extreme conclusion. If what I cared about was sentient life, and I was willing to go to hell to save everyone else, why not just send everyone else to hell if I didn't submit?
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Yeah, yeah, yes. Um... So what she means here is that she is now making the timeless decision that when she is in a position of ultimate influence and helps bring this all-powerful vegan AI into existence, she's promising now ahead of time to create a perfect hell, a digital hell, to punish all of the people who don't eat meat ever. She wants to make a hell for people who eat meat.
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And that's the yeah, that's the conclusion that she makes. Right. So this becomes an intrusive thought in her head, primarily the idea that like everyone isn't going along with her. Right. Like she doesn't want to create this hell. She just thinks that she has to. So she's like very focused on like trying to convince these other people in the rationalist culture to become vegan. Right.
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Anyway, she writes this, quote, I thought it had to be subconsciously influencing me, damaging my effectiveness, that I had done more harm than I could imagine by thinking these things. Because I had the hubris to think info hazards didn't exist and worse to feel resigned a grim sort of pride in my previous choice to fight for sentient life, although it damned me.
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And the gaps between do not think about that, you moron, do not think about that, you moron. Pride which may have led to intrusive thoughts to resurface and progress to resume. In other words, my ego had perhaps damned the universe. So I don't fully get all of what she's saying here, but it's also because she's like just spun out into madness at this point.
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Yeah, and it is deeply... I've read a lot of her writing. It is deeply hard to understand pieces of it here.
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In middle school, the teen was among a group of students who managed to infiltrate the school district's payroll system and award huge paychecks to teachers they admired while slashing the salaries of those they despised, according to one teacher. Ziz, the teacher said, struggled to regulate strong emotions, often erupting in tantrums.
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She is for sure at war with herself. Now... Ziz is at this point attending rationalist events by the bay, and a lot of the people at those events are older, more influential men, some of whom are influential in the tech industry, all of whom have a lot more money than her.
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And some of these people are members of an organization called CIFAR, the Center for Applied Rationality, which is a nonprofit founded to help people get better at pursuing their goals. It's a self-help company, right? It runs self-help seminars. This is the same as like a Tony Robbins thing, right?
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We're all just trying to get you to sign up and then get you to sign up for the next workshop and the next workshop and the next workshop, like all self-help people do. Yeah, there's no difference between this and Tony Robbins.
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So Ziz goes to this event and she has a long conversation with several members of CIFAR who I think are clearly kind of... My interpretation of this is that they're trying to groom her to get a new... Because they think, yeah, this chick's clearly brilliant. She'll find her way in the industry and we want her money, right? Maybe we want her to do some free work for us too, but let's...
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we got to reel this fish in, right? So this is described as an academic conference by people who are in the AI risk field and rationalism, thinking of ways to save the universe because only the true, the super geniuses can do that. The actual, why I'm really glad that I read Ziz's account here is I've been reading about these people for a long time. I've been reading about their beliefs.
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I felt there's some cult stuff here When Ziz laid out what happened at this seminar, this self-help seminar put on by these people very close to Yudkowsky, It's almost exactly the same as a Synanon meeting. It's the same stuff. It's the same shit. It's the same as accounts of big self-help movement things from the 70s and stuff that I've read. That's when it really clicked to me, right?
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Oh my goodness, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is... I'll be interested to see how the audience reacts to this one. Talking about some of the most obscure, frustrating internet arcana that has ever occurred and recently led to the deaths of like six people. Um... My guest today, as in last episode, David Boree. David, how you doing, man?
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Quote, here's a description of one of the... Because they have speeches and they break out into groups to do different exercises, right? There were hamming circles. Per person, take turns having everyone else spend 20 minutes trying to solve the most important problem about your life to you. I didn't pick the most important problem in my life because secrets.
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I think I used my turn on a problem I thought they might actually be able to help with. The fact that it did, although it didn't seem to affect my productivity or willpower at all, i.e. I was inhumanly determined basically all the time, I still felt terrible all the time. That I was hurting to some degree, relinquishing my humanity.
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I was sort of vaguing about the pain of being trans and having decided not to transition. And so this is a part of the thing. You build a connection between other people in this group by getting people to spill their secrets to each other. It's a thing Scientology does. It's a thing they did at Synanon. Tell me your darkest secret, right? Exactly, yeah.
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She's not fully willing to because she doesn't want to come out to this group of people yet.
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I wish I'd had this when David was on, but definitely sets up some of the things that are coming. She goes to the U of Alaska for her undergraduate degree in computer engineering. In February of 2009, which is when Alicia Yudkowsky started Less Wrong, Ziz starts kind of getting drawn into some of the people who are around this growing subculture, right? And she's drawn in initially by veganism.
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Wow. Yeah. The hamming circle doesn't sound so bad. If you'll recall, and as you mentioned this, it was really good that you did it in part one, Synanon would have people break into circles where they would insult and attack each other in order to create a traumatic experience that would bond them together and with the cult. Yeah. These hamming circles are weird, but they're not that.
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But there's another exercise they did next called doom circles. Quote, there were doom circles where each person, including themselves, took turns having everyone else bluntly but compassionately say why they were doomed using blindsight. Someone decided and set a precedent of starting these off with a sort of ritual incantation.
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We now invoke and bow to the doom gods and waving their hands saying doom. I said I'd never bow to the doom gods, and while everyone else said that, I flipped the double bird to the heavens and said, fuck you instead. Person A, that's this member of CIFAR that she admires, found this agreeable and joined in.
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Some people brought up that they felt like they were only as morally valuable as half a person. This irked me. I said they were whole persons, and don't be stupid like that. Like, if they wanted to sacrifice themselves, they could weigh one versus seven billion. They didn't have to falsely denigrate themselves as less than one person. They didn't listen.
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When it was my turn concerning myself, I said my doom was that I could succeed at the things I tried, succeed exceptionally well, like I bet I could in ten years have earned to give like ten million dollars through startups, and it would still be too little too late, like I came into this game too late. The world would still burn."
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And first off, like this is, you know, it's a variant of the synonym thing. You're going and you're telling people why they're doomed, right? Like why they won't succeed in life, you know? But it's also one of the things here, these people are saying they feel like less than a person.
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A major topic of discussion in the community at the time is if you don't think you can succeed in business and make money, is the best thing with the highest net value you can do
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taking out an insurance policy on yourself and committing suicide oh my god and then having the money donated to a rationalist organization that's a major topic of discussion that like like ziz grapples with a lot of these people grapple with right because they are obsessed with the idea of like oh my god i might be net negative value right if i can't do this or can't do this i could be a net negative value individual and that means like i'm not contributing to the solution and there's nothing worse than not contributing to the solution
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I am not aware. There are people who commit suicide in this community. I will say that. There are a number of suicides tied to this community. I don't know if the actual insurance con thing happened, but it's like a seriously discussed thing. And it's seriously discussed because...
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All of these people talk about the value of their own lives in purely mechanistic, how much money or expected value can I produce? That is a person and that's why a person matters. The term they use is morally valuable. That's what means you're a worthwhile human being if you're creating a net positive benefit to the world in the way they define it.
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And so a lot of these people are – yes, there are people who are depressed and there are people who kill themselves because they come to the conclusion that they're a net negative person, right? Like that is a thing at the edge of all of this shit that's really fucked up. And that's what this doom circle is about is everybody like flipping out over –
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And telling each other, I think you might only be as morally valuable as half a person, right? People are saying that, right? That's what's going on here, you know? It's not the synodon thing of screaming like you're using the F slur a million times or whatever, but it's very bad. Yeah.
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For one thing, I don't know. My feeling is you have inherent value because you're a person.
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It, it's, it's so, it's such a bleak way of looking at things.
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Or, you know, convention center. Um, you know, there's different kinds of public spaces. I don't know. Like, yeah, honestly, if you've been to like a fucking anime convention or a magic, the gathering convention somewhere in the Bay, you may have been in one of the rooms they did these. And I don't know exactly where they hold this. Um,
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Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
So the person A mentioned above, this person who's affiliated with the organization that I think is a recruiter looking for young people who can be cultivated to pay for classes, right? This person, it's very clear to them that Ziz is at the height of her vulnerability. And so he tries to take advantage of that. So he and another person from the organization engage Ziz during a break.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
So Ziz becomes a vegan at a fairly young age. Her family are not vegans, and she's obsessed with the concept of animal sentience, right? Of the fact that like animals are thinking and feeling beings just like human beings.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
uh ziz who's extremely insecure asks them point blank what do you think my net value ultimately will be in life right and again there's like an element of this it's almost like rationalist calvinism where it's like it's actually decided ahead of time by your inherent immutable characteristics you know if you are a person who can do good quote i asked person a if they expected me to be net negative they said yes
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
It is going to. It is going to. A lot of frustrating things are going to happen. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
after a moment they asked me what i was feeling or something like that i said something like dazed and sad they asked why sad i said i might leave the field as a consequence and maybe something else i said i needed time to process or think and so she like she goes home after this guy saying like yeah i think you're not life's probably net negative value uh and sleeps the rest of the day uh and she wakes up the next morning um and comes back to the second day of this thing uh and
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Yeah. Ziz goes back and she tells this person, okay, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to pick a group of three people at the event I respect, including you. And if two of them vote that they think I have a net negative value, quote, I'll leave EA and existential risk and the rationalist community and so on forever. I'd transition and move probably to Seattle.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
I heard it was relatively nice for trans people. and there do what I could to be a normie. Retool my mind as much as possible to be stable, unchanging, and a normie. Gradually abandon my Facebook account and email. Use a name change as a story for that. And... God, that would have been the best thing for her.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Oh man. She sees this as a nightmare, right? This is the worst case scenario for her, right? Because you're not part of the cause. You know, you have no involvement in the great quest to save humanity. That's worse than death almost, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
You know, that's the logical thing to do. Yeah. It's so fucked up. It's so fucked up. And also if she's trying to live a normal life as a normie and she, she refers to like being a normie as like, just trying to be nice to people. Cause again, that's useless. So her fear here is that she would be a causal negative if she does this. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
And a lot of this is based in her interest in kind of foundational rationalist – a lot of this is based in her interest of a foundational rationalist and EA figure, a guy named Brian Tomasek. Brian is a writer and a software engineer as well as an animal rights activist. And as a thinker, he's what you'd call a long-termist, right, which is – pretty tied to the EA guys.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
And also the robot God that comes about might put her in hell.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Yeah. After every, for every decision. Right. Yeah, and the thing here, she tells these guys a story, and it really shows both in this community and among her how little value they actually have for human life. I told a story about a time I had killed four ants in a bathtub where I wanted to take a shower before going to work. I'd considered, can I just not take a shower?
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Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
And presumed me smelling bad at work would, because of big numbers and the fate of the world and stuff, make the world worse than the deaths of four basically causally isolated people." I considered getting paper and a cup and taking them elsewhere. And I figured there were decent odds if I did, I'd be late to work and it would probably make the world worse in the long run.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
So again, she considers ants identical to human beings. And she is also saying it was worth killing four of them because they're causally isolated so that I could get to work in time because I'm working for the cause.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
And it's, it's so it's, it's wild to me, both, This like mix of like fucking Jane Buddhist compassion of like an ant is no less than I or an ant is no less than a human being. Right. We are all these are all lives. And then but also it's fine for me to kill a bunch for me to go to work on time because like they're causally isolated. So they're basically not people.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
And again, it's getting a lot clearer here why this lady and her ideas end in a bunch of people getting shot.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
There's a samurai sword later in the story, my friend. That's the one thing this has been missing. Yes, yes. So they continue, these guys, to have a very abusive conversation with this young person. And she clearly, she trusts them enough.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Yeah. Yeah. And she tells them she's trans. Right. And this gives you an idea of like how kind of predatory some of the stuff going on in this community is. They asked what I do with a female body. They were trying to get me to admit what I actually wanted to do is the first thing in heaven.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Heaven being there's this idea, especially amongst like some trans members of the rationalist community that like. All of them basically believe a robot's going to make heaven, right? And obviously, like, there's a number of the folks who are in this who are trans are like, and in heaven, like, you just kind of get the body you want immediately, right? So...
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
They were trying to get me to admit that what I actually wanted to do as the first thing in heaven was masturbate in a female body. And they follow this up by sitting really close to her, close enough that she gets uncomfortable. And then a really, really rationalist conversation follows. They asked if I felt trapped. I may have clarified, physically? They may have said, sure.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Afterward, I answered no to that question, under the likely justified belief that it was framed that way. They asked why not. I said I was pretty sure I could take them in a fight. They prodded for details, why I thought so, and then how I thought a fight between us would go. I asked what kind of fight, like a physical unarmed fight to the death right now? And why? What were my payouts?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
This was over the fate of the multiverse, triggering actions by other people, i.e. imprisonment or murder was not relevant. So they decide to – they make this into – again, these people are all addicted to dumb game theory stuff, right? Okay, so what is this fight? Is this fight over the fate of the multiverse?
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Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Are we in an alternate reality where like no one will come and intervene and there's no cops? We're the only people in the world or whatever? Yeah. So they tell her, like, yeah, imagine there's no consequences legally, whatever it is you do, and we're fighting over the fate of the multiverse.
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Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
And so she proceeds to give an extremely elaborate discussion of how she'll gouge out their eyes and try to destroy their prefrontal lobes and then stomp on their skulls until they die. And it's both, it's like... It's nonsense. It's like how 10 year olds thinks fights work.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
These are all the same people using different words to describe the aspects of what they believe. His organization is the Center on Long-Term Risk, which is a think tank he establishes that's at the ground floor of these effective altruism discussions. The goal for the Center of Long-Term Risk is to find ways to reduce suffering on a long timeline.
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Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
It's also, it's based on this game theory attitude of fighting that they have, which is like, it's, you have to make this kind of timeless decision that any fight is you're, you're just going to murder.
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Yes. So it would have to be the most violent. Yes. Yes, because that will make other people not want to attack you as opposed to like what normal people understand about like real fights, which is if you have to do one, if you have to, you like try to just like hit him in the hit him somewhere that's going to shock them and then run like a motherfucker.
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Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Like if you have to, like ideally just run like a motherfucker. But if you have to strike somebody, you know, yeah, go for the eye and then run like a son of a bitch, you know, like. But there's no run like a son of a bitch here because the point in part is this like timeless decision to – anyway, this tells you a lot about the rationalist community.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
So she tells these people, she explains in detail how she would murder them if they had a fight right now.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Sitting super close, having just asked her about masturbation. Here's their first question. Quote, they asked if I'd rape their corpse. Part of me insisted this was not going as it was supposed to, but I decided inflicting discomfort in order to get reliable information was a valid tactic. In other words, them trying to make her uncomfortable to get info from her, she decides is fine.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Also, the whole discussion about raping their corpse is like, well, if you rape, Obviously, if you want to have the most extreme response possible that would make other people unlikely to fuck with you, knowing that you'll violate their corpse if you kill them is clearly the light.
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Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Okay, sure. I love rational thought.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Sorry, this is so crazy. It's so nuts. So then they talk about psychopathy. one of these guys had earlier told Ziz that they thought she was a psychopath. Oh, he told her that?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Doesn't mean what it means both to actual clinicians, because psychopathy is a diagnostician, or like what normal people mean. To rationalists, a lot of them think psychopathy is a state you can put yourself into in order to maximize your performance in certain situations. Right. Again, there's some popular books that are about the psychopath's way, the dark triad.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
These are the people who led societies in the toughest times. You need to optimize and engage in some of those behaviors if you want to win in these situations. Based on all of this, Ziz brings up what rationalists call the Gervais principle. Now, this started as a tongue-in-cheek joke describing a rule of office dynamics based on the TV show The Office.
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Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
When you said it, I was like, there's no way. Yes, it's Ricky Gervais, yes. And the idea is that in office environments, psychos always rise to the top. This is supposed to be like a negative observation. Like the person who wrote this initially is like, yeah, this is how offices work. And it's like why they're bad. You know, it's an extension of the Peter principle.
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And these psychopaths put bad, like dumb and incompetent people in positions below them. It's trying to kind of work out why in which offices are often dysfunctional. Right. It's not like the original Gervais principle thing is like not a bad piece of writing or whatever. But Ziz takes something insane out of it.
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Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
I described how the Gervais principle said sociopaths give up empathy as in a certain chunk of social software, not literally all hardware-accelerated modeling of people, not necessarily compassion, and with it happiness, destroying meaning to create power. Meaning, too, I did not care about. I wanted this world to live on.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Tomasek is obsessed with the concept of suffering and specifically obsessed with suffering as a mathematical concept. So when I say to you, I want to end suffering, you probably think like, oh, you want to go help people who don't have access to clean water or who have worms and stuff that they're dealing with, have access to medicine. That's what normal people think of, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
So she tells them she's come to the conclusion, I need to make myself into a psychopath in order to have the kind of mental power necessary to do the things that I want to do. And she largely justifies this by describing the beliefs of the Sith from Star Wars because she thinks she needs to remake herself as a psychopathic evil warrior monk in order to save all of creation. Yeah, no, of course.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Yep. So this is her hitting her final form. And true to fact, these guys are like, they don't say it's a good idea, but they're like, okay, yeah, that's not the worst thing you could do. Sure. You know, like. I think the Sith stuff kind of weird, but making yourself a psychopath makes sense. Sure. Yeah, of course. I know a lot of guys who did that. Um, that's literally what they say. Right.
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Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
And then they say that also, I don't even think that's what they really, they say that because the next thing they say, this guy, person a is like, look, The best way to turn yourself from a net negative to a net positive value. I really believe you could do it, but to do it, you need to come to 10 more of these seminars and keep taking classes here. Right? Right? Of course. Right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Here's a quote from them or from Ziz. She's conditional on me going to a long course of circling like these two organizations offered, particularly a 10 weekend one. Then I probably would not be net negative.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
I don't actually know. I don't, I don't fully know with this. It's possible. Some of these are like, some of the events are free, like, but the classes cost money or, but it's also a lot of it's like there's donations expected or by doing this and being a member, it's expected you're going to tithe, right? basically. That's what I was thinking.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
It seems like they're investing into her more than they're worried about this money at the top.
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Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
She is. She gets actually really uncomfortable. They have an exercise where they're basically doing – they're playing with love bombing, right, where everyone's like hugging and telling each other they love each other. And she's like, I don't really believe it. I just met these people. So she is starting to – and she is going to break away from these organizations pretty quickly.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
But this conversation she had with these guys is a critical part of like – why she finally has this fracture because number one this dude keeps telling her you have a net negative value to the universe right and so she's obsessed with like how do I and it comes to the conclusion my best way of being net positive is to make myself into a sociopath and a Sith Lord and
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Excellent. Excellent. All right, folks. Well, that is the end of the episode. David, thank you so much for coming on to our inaugural episode by listening to some of the weirdest shit we've ever talked about on this show.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
You know, maybe try to improve access to medical care, that sort of stuff. Thomas thinks of suffering as like a mass, like an aggregate mass that he wants to reduce in the long term through actions. Right. It's a numbers game to him, in other words. And his idea of ultimate good is to reduce and end the suffering of sentient life. Right.
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Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to I was initially going to kind of just focus on all of this would have been like half a page or so, you know, just kind of summing up. Here's the gist of what this believes. And then let's get to the actual cult stuff when like, you know, this starts bringing in followers and the crimes start happening.
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Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
But that rolling or the that Wired article really covers all that very well. And that's the best piece. Most of the journalism I've read on these guys is not very well written. It's not very good. It does not really explain what they are or why they do it. So I decided – and the Wired piece is great. I know the Wired guy knows all of the stuff that I brought up here. It's an article.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
You have editors. He left out what he thought he needed to leave out. I don't have that problem. And I wanted to really, really deeply trace exactly where this lady's, how this lady's mind develops and how that intersects with rationalism. Because it's interesting and kind of important and bad. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Critical to his belief system, and the one that Ziz starts to develop, is the growing understanding that sentience is much more common than many people had previously assumed. Part of this comes from long-standing debates with their origins in Christian doctrine as to whether or not animals have souls or are basically machines with meat, right, that don't feel anything, right?
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There's still a lot... of Christian evangelicals who feel that way today about like, at least the animals we eat, you know, like, well, they don't really think it's fine. God gave them to us. We can do whatever we want to them. And to be fair, um, this is an extremely common way for that.
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People in Japan feel about like fish, even whales and dolphins, like the much more intelligent, they're not fish, but like the much more intelligent ocean going creatures is like they're fish. They don't think you do whatever to them, you know? Um, This is a reason for a lot of the really fucked up stuff with whaling fleets in that part of the world. This is a thing all over the planet.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
People are very good at deciding certain things we want to eat are machines that don't feel anything. It's just much more comfortable that way. Now, this is obviously like you go into like the pagans would have been like, what do you mean animals don't think or have souls? Animals think, you know, like they're like you're telling me like my horse that I love doesn't think, you know.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
That's nonsense. But it's this thing that in like early modernity especially gets more common. But there are also – this is when we start to have debates about like what is sentience and what is thinking. And a lot of them are centered around trying to answer like are animals sentient? And the initial definition of sentience that most of these people are using is can it reason? Can it speak?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
If we can't prove that a dog or a cow can reason, and if it can't speak to us, then it's not sentient. That's how a lot of people feel. It's an English philosopher named Jeremy Bentham who first argues, I think that what matters isn't can it reason or can it speak, but can it suffer? Because a machine can't suffer. If these are machines with meat, They can't suffer.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
If these can suffer, they're not machined with meat, right? And this is the kind of thing, how we define sentience is a moving thing. You can find different definitions of it. But the last couple of decades in particular of actually very good data has made it clear, I think inarguably, that basically every living thing on this planet has a degree of what you would call sentience.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
If you are describing sentience the way it generally is now, which is a creature has the capacity for subjective experience with a positive or negative valence, i.e. can feel pain or pleasure and also can feel it as an individual. It doesn't mean – sometimes people use the term effective sentience to refer to this, to differentiate it from like being able to reason and make moral decisions.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
You know, for example, ants, I don't think can make moral decisions, you know, in any way that we would recognize. They certainly don't think about stuff that way. But 2025 research published by Dr. Volker Nehring found evidence that ants are capable of remembering for long periods of time violent encounters they have with other individual ants and holding grudges against those ants. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
They're just like us. And there's strong evidence that ants do feel pain, right? We're now pretty sure of that. And in fact, again, this is an argument that a number of researchers in this space will make. Sentience is probably – something like this kind of sentience, the ability to have subjective positive and negative experiences is universal to living things or very close to it, right? Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
It's an interesting body of research, but it's fairly solid at this point. Again, I say this as somebody who hunts and raises livestock. I don't think there's any solid reason to disagree with this. You can see there's a basis to a lot of what Thomas is saying, which is that what matters is reducing the overall amount of suffering in the world.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
If you're looking at suffering as a mass, if you're just adding up all of the bad things experienced by all of the living things, animal suffering is a lot of the suffering. So if our goal is to reduce suffering, animal welfare is hugely important, right? It's a great place to start. Great. Fine enough. You know, a little bit of a weird way to phrase it, but fine. Hmm. So here's the way.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Problem, though. Thomas, like all these guys. spends too much time, none of them can be like, hey, had a good thought. We're done. Setting that thought down. Moving on. So he keeps thinking about shit like this, and it leads him to some very irrational takes. For example, in 2014, Tomasek starts arguing that it might be immoral to kill characters in video games.
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And I'm going to quote from an article in Vox. He argues that while NPCs do not have anywhere near the mental complexity of animals, the difference is one of degree rather than kind, and we should care at least a tiny amount about their suffering, especially as they grow more complex. Man.
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Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
And his argument is that, like, yeah, it doesn't matter, like, individually killing a Goomba or a guy in GTA V, but, like, because they're getting more complicated and able to, like, try to avoid injury and stuff, there's evidence that there's some sort of suffering there. And thus, the sheer mass of NPCs being killed, that might be, like, enough that it's ethically relevant to consider.
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Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
If you're telling me we need to be deeply concerned about the welfare of cows that we lock into factory farms, you got me. Absolutely. For sure. If you're telling me I should feel bad about running down a bunch of cops in Grand Theft Auto.
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There's like, this is the, I mean, and he does say like, I don't consider this a main problem, but like the fact that you think this is a problem is, it means that you believe silly things about consciousness. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so this is I think the fact that he gets he leads himself here is kind of evidence of the sort of logical fractures that are very common in this community.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
But this is the guy that Young Ziz is drawn to. She loves this dude. Right. He is kind of her first intellectual heartthrob. And she writes, quote, my primary concern upon learning about the singularity was how do I make this benefit all sentient life, not just humans? So she gets interested in this idea of the singularity. It's inevitable that an AI god is going to arise. And she gets into the
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
You know, the rationalist thing of we have to make sure that this is a nice AI rather than a mean one. But she has this other thing to it, which is this AI has to care as much as I do about animal life, right? Otherwise, we're not really making the world better, you know? Right. Now, Tomasek advises her to check out Less Wrong, which is how Ziz starts reading Eliezer Yudkowsky's work.
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I would say the word yape. Yape is our greeting word. Yape has several meanings. When you meet someone for the first time, you say yape. When you greet someone and when you say goodbye, instead of saying goodbye, you also say yape. So you can use that also. Like during the weekend, there was a tournament, fishing tournament.
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And if you were fishing and you caught a, you have a big fish on the line, and you really, you're about to land the fish, but the line snapped. So what do you say? You say, oh, . Not hello to the fish, but you just say yape because you lost a big catch. So it can be used that way.
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Like when you lose someone or someone passed away, you miss that person, yape, so and so, he was here, but no one could hear, so you can say yape. So it has several meanings, but the deeper meaning of yape is, On the map, the Marshall Islands look like the little dots that appear in my photos of the beach at Majuro.
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Thanks. I agree that I'm pretty good. How much better I am than how many people in this room?
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You see that like common ad where he's talking about AI, but he's like, we taught Proust to a dog. He's got a turtleneck on.
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I feel bad about this, too, because it's a good app. I have also used it. I saw the guy in the hat, and I was like, oh, it's the VLC from on your desktop. And then I was like, that's stupid. I don't need to talk to the man. He's wearing a hat and a cape. And I'm glad that you followed through as a journalist, pushed aside your instinct to be like, do not approach a stranger in a cape.
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This is finally someone is serving the community of people that think that if you find a zip tie on your car door handle, MS-13 is going to take you.
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You know, they're like, finally, someone's going to do something about it. Create a disposable piece of plastic.
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David Roth. So there's a lot of... I guess I gather less than in years past that this was at one point basically a car show. There was not a lot of transit stuff this time around. I didn't get to see very much of it, but I did have... And I guess this is both my best and my worst experience, the most powerful transit experience of my life. So I live in New York City.
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I take the subway pretty much everywhere I go. And it has its ups and downs. For the most part, it's good. It moves like 1,200 people through a tunnel at 30-odd miles an hour. And for the most part, everybody leaves everybody else alone or watches videos on their phone and stuff. But I knew that there had to be a better way. And at the Las Vegas Convention Center... I got to experience it.
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You're familiar, Elon Musk, serial entrepreneur. Yeah. So he invented something called the Hyperloop, which is a car that goes through a tunnel that's the exact same size as the car at 11 miles an hour. And it takes, there's someone has to drive it. And also someone has to help you get into the car, but you can fit up to three additional people into the car. So that ratio. That's everyone I know.
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Yes. Right. So yeah, you got two people moving three people, 200 yards at the speed of like a brisk walk.
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I mean, this was the sort of thing that, there had been tunnels. They were mostly used by animals, voles, miners. Yes, right.
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Yes, but no one had thought about it as a transit sort of thing. It was more of like a place where you would go if you needed to get copper. Of course. But in this case, so this is like where it's good to have, and I guess every CES is like, this was my first, to be reminded, that there are visionaries out there who are like, what if you put car through hole?
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What if, uh, instead of a thing that moves multiple people at once, you had a thing that took exactly the same number of people to move that number of people slightly more than one person. Yeah. So that was cool. I mean, it's just like fun to see like where this stuff is going. And I really wonder if we're not going to start seeing things like cars on the streets of American cities.
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Uh, you know, like it could be, okay, Dave, okay. I mean, most of the, obviously, this is the tough thing we've gone last. There's like three or four good things. You all said them. I thought the accessibility tech stuff was the stuff that made me feel good about what was going on here. And there was a great deal of stuff that made me feel like pretty bad about what was going on here.
Behind the Bastards
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Up to and including like the surveillance stuff. Beyond the, you know, like, advanced Samsung-powered snitch tech so that nobody... Whatever, your boss can tell if you're really looking at the Zoom that you're on.
Behind the Bastards
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Don't really love that, personally. But for me, a lot of the smart home stuff is real drag.
Behind the Bastards
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Like, just in the sense that it clearly... First of all, beyond being, like, sort of unnecessary, there is a level of just...
Behind the Bastards
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willingly giving over your agency over the small moments that make you know human life human life and just being like I would really love it if just like an artificial intelligence could pick my pants out for the day I'll simply stand here waiting for that to happen yeah just fucking grim actually like didn't really care for it I feel like you gotta like what are you using that time to do
Behind the Bastards
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This is your first one? No, I'm a fucking sports writer, man. Oh, man. I'm out here because Ed got me a folding bed.
Behind the Bastards
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Oh, yeah. Well, I'm very tired. Yeah. This is the thing with like, I think as far as I can tell, it seems like it's a loop where you more or less like you start out, it's too much. You get big eye right away and then you just sort of feel zombified. But then we have talked to people over the last few days that are like, you know, I remember like 14 CES is ago. That was pretty good.
Behind the Bastards
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Like, and they're also tired and also deranged by this point.
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Like, and I guess it's, I don't know. Do you remember like when the last one was that you felt like even sort of that stirring?
Behind the Bastards
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Not out of reverence, but because power was going to go out.
Behind the Bastards
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No, I mean, like it's not an accident that my apartment is basically going to be in the year 2005 forever. Like, I mean, it's expensive to do all this stuff. This was the bit that,
Behind the Bastards
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with so many of these demos, like just you start to notice how incredibly grandiose the residences in which all of this stuff is being sort of like postulated as being useful is it's like the, like Lexus December to remember sales event type energy, just a big fucking lives.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. This also, we've talked about this on Ed's show that like, there's a lot of stuff here that feels like, like the first 15 minutes of a George Romero movie, like just getting you set. for eventually there's going to be a lot of disembowelings and hideous, shambling zombies. And smart home, not a bad horror movie concept. I don't think it's a great consumer concept.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, if you were to be like, this is the thing that keeps your apples fresh for a long time, that would be great. I would just don't.
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Yes. As a journalist, it's our job to ask these questions.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, we do discuss whether the ability to bring red leaf lettuce back to life does have any repercussions in a pet cemetery sort of way for your possibly dead loved ones. David. It's me, sorry. Yeah. A lot of good points.
Behind the Bastards
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I mean, I think Gary and Edward both made the point about the sort of sociopathic thread of a lot of this, just sort of like an inability to understand not just what people might want from a technology, I think, which is to feel...
Behind the Bastards
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I mean, there probably are people, I imagine, that's like, if you were the guy, the dude that's like trying to age himself backwards, you know, he's like... Brian Johnson, yeah. Brian Johnson, we love Brian. Oh, yeah, yeah, we love Brian. But he, like, I feel like he would have been walking through this clapping his hands with delight the whole time.
Behind the Bastards
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It's not bad. It's a high quality plot. But that, it felt like it was that, that there was a lot of this sort of like an optimization unto like transcending being human at all. And I don't think, I mean, again, there probably are people that want that. They certainly have money. I don't imagine that, I think what most people would like
Behind the Bastards
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I mean, you don't expect technology to make you feel more human, but something I've been thinking about a lot, we've been talking about this a lot on Better Offline, but there's a passivity that a lot of this sort of seems to be forcing onto people where you're just like sort of things are happening to you that make your life more efficient and convenient. And I don't think that I want that.
Behind the Bastards
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I mean, I'm older than and poorer than the market that I think they're aiming for with this, but... It's certainly old enough to remember, as you said, like finding music. Like that's a thing that, you know, your friends tell you about it. And in my case, I mean, again, just being in my middle age, you like go to a store and you flip through shit.
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Like there's the distinction between finding something and being given something or being fed something like you're a foie gras goose and it's just getting sort of piped into your brain and life and being. And I think it's an important distinction. I think that little bit of agency of having some sense of, doing the things that you want to do.
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Like I would imagine that, well, I don't have to imagine it technology that helps you do that as opposed to doing it for you. I think that I don't want stuff that makes me feel less human. I don't want stuff that makes me feel more like I'm in a fucking matrix pod. And I think that a lot of the stuff that was out there seemed targeted towards the, uh, matrix pod dwelling community, uh,
Behind the Bastards
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Defector.com. Let me do that without crushing my water bottle.
Behind the Bastards
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That's a load-bearing piece of content. Defector.com is the website.