Part Two: The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
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What led to the birth of Ziz LaSota?
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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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.
How did Ziz's childhood shape her beliefs?
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. 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. 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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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What led to the birth of Ziz LaSota?
0:04–4:07
2
How did Ziz's childhood shape her beliefs?
4:07–12:41
3
What role does Rationalism play in Ziz's life?
12:41–31:34
4
How did Ziz's views on AI evolve?
31:34–53:26
5
What was Ziz's first startup idea?
53:26–1:05:46
6
How did Ziz navigate the tech industry?
1:05:46–1:14:12
7
What is the significance of virtue ethics in Ziz's journey?
1:14:12–1:31:56