Behind the Bastards - CZM Rewind: The Zizians: How Harry Potter Fanfic Inspired a Death Cult & The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader
Aired: 2025-12-30
Duration: 02:46:59


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[00:01:15]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
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=== The Weird Zizian Subculture (15:45) ===

[00:02:33]  You would be good at it, though.
[00:02:35]  I don't think I would be, Sophie.
[00:02:37]  I do.
[00:02:39]  But I'm like biased because I think you'd be good at most things.
[00:02:42]  No, my only marketable skill is spending 30 hours reading the deranged writings of a quasi-cult leader who was somewhat involved in the murders of multiple people very recently, largely because she read a piece of Harry Potter fan fiction at the wrong time.
[00:03:01]  Yes.
[00:03:04]  We have a fun one for you this week.
[00:03:06]  And by a fun one, we have a not at all fun one for you this week.
[00:03:11]  And to have just a terrible time with me, we are bringing on a guest, the great David Bore, co-host of My Mama Told Me with our friend of the pod, Langston Kerman.
[00:03:24]  David, how you doing?
[00:03:26]  Oh, man, I cannot complain.
[00:03:28]  How you doing?
[00:03:28]  There's nothing going on in the world.
[00:03:32]  Oh, yeah.
[00:03:33]  Yeah, I got up today and read that great new article by Francis Fukuyama.
[00:03:38]  History is still stopped, so everything's good.
[00:03:42]  We're done.
[00:03:43]  I haven't looked at any news yet, purposefully.
[00:03:45]  So I'm, you know, it could be awesome.
[00:03:48]  It could be going great out there.
[00:03:49]  It's great.
[00:03:50]  It's great.
[00:03:50]  The whole Trump administration got together and said, psych, it was all a bit.
[00:03:55]  Man.
[00:03:56]  Just an extended ad for the Apprentice season 15.
[00:04:00]  You mean his country is not a business?
[00:04:02]  No.
[00:04:04]  They handed over the presidency to, I don't know.
[00:04:07]  I don't know.
[00:04:08]  Whoever you personally at home think would be a great president.
[00:04:11]  I'm not going to jump into that can of worms right now.
[00:04:15]  LeBron Ramon.
[00:04:17]  LeBron.
[00:04:18]  They made LeBron the president.
[00:04:20]  That's a good one.
[00:04:21]  That's a good one.
[00:04:22]  That's a good enough one.
[00:04:23]  It's better than what we got.
[00:04:24]  Honestly, vastly superior than where we are.
[00:04:27]  Of all the entertainers, I feel like, why don't we start giving athletes a shot at government?
[00:04:31]  Yeah.
[00:04:31]  Fuck it.
[00:04:32]  Why not?
[00:04:34]  You know, fucking Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
[00:04:38]  But a great president.
[00:04:40]  That motherfucker could knock a presidency out of the park.
[00:04:43]  Come on.
[00:04:43]  Veronica Marr's writer, Kareem Abdul Jajabar.
[00:04:46]  Absolutely.
[00:04:47]  Yes.
[00:04:49]  We need a mystery novelist slash one of the great basketball stars of all time in the White House.
[00:04:55]  I just want a president who's good in the paint.
[00:04:57]  You know what I mean?
[00:04:58]  That's right.
[00:04:58]  That's right.
[00:05:01]  Agatha Christie with a jump shot.
[00:05:03]  Yeah, that's exactly what I think that's what we're doing.
[00:05:06]  What an amazing man.
[00:05:08]  Kareem would be such a good choice.
[00:05:11]  Yeah, bring it on.
[00:05:13]  I think he's such a good man.
[00:05:14]  He wouldn't do it.
[00:05:14]  Yeah.
[00:05:15]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:05:15]  He's way too moral.
[00:05:16]  He's way too frog named after him.
[00:05:20]  Yeah.
[00:05:21]  Look, honestly, given where we are right now, I'd take fucking, what's his name?
[00:05:27]  Mark McGuire.
[00:05:28]  Like, Jesus Christ, anybody.
[00:05:30]  Like, honestly, anyone.
[00:05:32]  I'd take Jose Conseco.
[00:05:34]  Jose Conseko, but shit in a heartbeat.
[00:05:36]  So funny.
[00:05:40]  Oh, man.
[00:05:41]  Fuck it.
[00:05:42]  Like, I'll take, no, no, I'm not going to take any hockey players.
[00:05:45]  No hockey players.
[00:05:46]  No hockey players.
[00:05:47]  We got enough people with brain damage in the White House right now.
[00:05:50]  That's probably.
[00:05:51]  And we don't need somebody who likes to fist fight that much.
[00:05:53]  Yeah.
[00:05:55]  You're probably right there.
[00:05:56]  I mean, if we could go back in time and make Joe Lewis the president, I think he could solve some fucking problems in Congress.
[00:06:03]  He could get stuff done.
[00:06:10]  So this has been a fun digression, but I got to ask at the start of this, the story that is most relevant to the people we're talking about today that I think most of our listeners will have heard.
[00:06:20]  I'm curious if you've heard about.
[00:06:22]  Back on January 21st, right as the Trump administration took power, a Border Patrol agent was shot and killed along with another individual at a traffic stop in Coventry, Vermont, right?
[00:06:35]  There were two people in a car.
[00:06:36]  It was pulled over by a Border Patrol.
[00:06:38]  One of those people drew a gun.
[00:06:40]  There was a firefight.
[00:06:42]  One of the people in the car and the cop died, right?
[00:06:45]  Okay.
[00:06:46]  Have you heard this story of the civil with this at all?
[00:06:49]  It's one of those things where it would have been a much bigger, obviously immigration being the thing that it is, right?
[00:06:55]  In the United States, like the political hot issue that it is right now.
[00:06:59]  Like the Republicans have been desperately waiting for like a border patrol officer getting shooted and wounded that they can like use to justify a crackdown.
[00:07:07]  But number one, this happened on the Canadian border, not with their own.
[00:07:11]  With their favorite border.
[00:07:13]  And one of the two people who drew their guns on the cops was an immigrant, but they were a German immigrant.
[00:07:20]  And so none of this really like it was all like right on the edge of being super useful to the right, but it's not.
[00:07:27]  It's not as sexy.
[00:07:28]  Like I live in Denver.
[00:07:30]  We were dealing with our own right-wing immigration propaganda at that time.
[00:07:35]  Yeah.
[00:07:36]  Yeah.
[00:07:36]  It was just like, it was like the closest to being a perfect right-wing, like a Reichstag fire event, but like just a little too weird.
[00:07:45]  Yeah, you got to throw some spice in there.
[00:07:47]  You got to have like a Latin country.
[00:07:49]  That's what they get excited about.
[00:07:50]  Yeah.
[00:07:51]  And obviously California border is where you want it, you know?
[00:07:54]  Yeah, definitely, definitely.
[00:07:55]  Even Alexico could be or at least, at least they need to have fentanyl on the car.
[00:08:00]  In fact, they were not breaking any laws that anyone could prove at the time.
[00:08:03]  They just looked kind of weird.
[00:08:05]  Okay.
[00:08:06]  They looked kind of weird and they like had guns, but it was like they had like two handguns and like 40 rounds and some old targets.
[00:08:13]  They were like coming back from a shooting range, right?
[00:08:15]  Like not a lot of guns and ammo in America terms, right?
[00:08:20]  Right.
[00:08:20]  Especially in Vermont terms.
[00:08:22]  Right.
[00:08:24]  So the other thing that was weird about this is that the German immigrant who died was a trans woman.
[00:08:30]  So then, again, we get back to like, wow, there's a lot about this shooting that is like right on the edge of some issues that the right is really trying to use as like a fulcrum to like push through some awful shit.
[00:08:45]  And as more and more information came out about this shooting, the weirder it seemed because there was a lot of initial talk.
[00:08:50]  Is this like a terrorist attack?
[00:08:51]  Were these like two Antifa types who were like looking to murder a border patrol agent?
[00:08:57]  But no, that doesn't really make sense because like they got pulled over.
[00:09:00]  Like they can't have been planning this, right?
[00:09:02]  Like it didn't, it didn't really seem like that.
[00:09:06]  And really no one, no one could figure out why they had opened fire.
[00:09:10]  But as the days went on, more information started coming out, not just about the two people who were arrested in this, well, the one person who was arrested and the one person who died, but about a group of people around the country that they were linked to.
[00:09:25]  And these other people were not all, but mostly trans women.
[00:09:30]  They were mostly people who kind of identified as both anarchists and members of the rationalist subculture, which we'll talk about in a little bit.
[00:09:39]  And they were all super high-achieving people in like the tech industry and like sciences, right?
[00:09:46]  These were like people who had won like awards and had advanced degrees.
[00:09:52]  The lady who died in the shooting was a quant traitor.
[00:09:56]  So these are not like the normal shoot it out with the cops types.
[00:10:00]  Yeah, this is a very niche group.
[00:10:02]  This is a very strange story.
[00:10:05]  So people start being like, oh, the fuck is happening?
[00:10:07]  And that's a group of people who could not meet each other without the invention of the internet.
[00:10:12]  Right.
[00:10:12]  That is boy David.
[00:10:15]  Do you know where this story's going?
[00:10:17]  Or at least starting.
[00:10:19]  So like, it's a couple of these days into this when like a friend of mine messaged me and is like, hey, you know that shooting in Vermont?
[00:10:25]  And I was like, yeah.
[00:10:26]  And he's like, my friend is like, you know, there's Zizians.
[00:10:29]  And I was like, wait, what?
[00:10:31]  What the fuck?
[00:10:32]  Because I had heard of these people.
[00:10:34]  This is a weird little subculture.
[00:10:35]  I'm always, I'm like, you know, I study weird little internet subcultures in part because like some of them do turn out to do acts of terrorism later.
[00:10:44]  Some of them have my eyes on the weirdos.
[00:10:46]  And I've been reporting on the rationalists who are not like a cult, but who do some cult-adjacent things and I just kind of find annoying.
[00:10:55]  And I'd heard about this offshoot of the rationalists called the Zizians.
[00:10:59]  They were very weird.
[00:11:00]  There were some like weird crime allegations.
[00:11:03]  A couple of them had been involved in a murder in California a year earlier.
[00:11:08]  But like it was not a group that I ever really expected to see blow up in the media.
[00:11:12]  And then suddenly they fucking did, right?
[00:11:16]  And they're called the Zizians.
[00:11:18]  That's not a name they have for themselves.
[00:11:20]  They don't consider themselves a cult.
[00:11:22]  They don't all like live.
[00:11:24]  A group of them did live together, but like these people are pretty geographically like dispersed around the country.
[00:11:30]  They're folks who met online arguing about rational and discussing rationalism and the ideas of a particular member of that community who goes by the name Ziz, right?
[00:11:42]  That's where this group came out of.
[00:11:45]  And the regular media was not well equipped to understand what was going on.
[00:11:50]  And I want to run through a couple of representative headlines that I came across just in like looking at mainstream articles about what had happened.
[00:11:59]  There's an article from the Independent, the title Inside the Zizians, How a Cultish Crew of Radical Vegans Became Linked to Killings Across the United States.
[00:12:08]  They seemed like just another band of anarchist misfits scraping on the valley of Val scraping on the fringes of Silicon Valley until the deaths began.
[00:12:17]  And then there's a KCRW article, Zizians, the vegan techie cult tied to murders across the U.S.
[00:12:24]  And then a Fox article, Trans Vegan Cult charged with six murders.
[00:12:29]  There you go.
[00:12:29]  Classic.
[00:12:30]  That's Fox style.
[00:12:32]  Yes.
[00:12:32]  None of these titles are very accurate.
[00:12:35]  In that, I guess the first one is like the closest where like these people are radical vegans and they're they are cultish, right?
[00:12:43]  So I'll give I'll give the Independent that.
[00:12:47]  Vegan techie cult is not really what I would describe them.
[00:12:51]  Like some of them were in the tech industry, but like the degree to which they're in the tech industry is a lot weirder than that gets across.
[00:12:59]  And they're not really a tray, they're like trans vegans, but the cult is not about being a trans vegan.
[00:13:05]  That's just kind of how these people found each other.
[00:13:08]  Oh, they just happen to be.
[00:13:11]  That was just the common ground.
[00:13:12]  Veganism is tied to it.
[00:13:14]  They just kind of all happen to be trans.
[00:13:16]  That's not really like tied to it necessarily.
[00:13:19]  So I would argue also that they're not terrorists, which a lot of people have a number of the other articles called them.
[00:13:28]  None of the killings that they were involved with, and they did kill people, were like terrorist killings.
[00:13:33]  They're all much weirder than that, but none of them are like, none of the killings I have seen are for a clear political purpose, right?
[00:13:39]  Which is kind of crucial for it to be terrorism.
[00:13:42]  The murders kind of evolved out of a much, much sillier reason.
[00:13:47]  And it's, you know, there's one really good article about them by a fella at Wired who spent a year or so kind of studying these people.
[00:13:56]  And that article does a lot that's good, but it doesn't go into as much detail about what I think is the real underpinning of why this group of people got together and convinced themselves it was okay to commit several murders.
[00:14:13]  And I think that that all comes down more than any other single factor to rationalism and to their belief in this weird online cult that's very much based on like and like asking different sort of logic questions and trying to like pin down the secret rules of the universe by doing like game theory arguments on the internet over blogs, right?
[00:14:37]  Like that's really how all of this stuff started.
[00:14:40]  So they have like someone named Mystery.
[00:14:43]  Yes.
[00:14:44]  Saw the people in funny hats.
[00:14:47]  They do actually, they're a little adjacent to this and they come out of that period of time, right?
[00:14:51]  Where like pickup artist culture is also like forming.
[00:14:55]  They're one of this like generation of cults that starts with a bunch of blogs and shit on the internet in like 2009, right?
[00:15:03]  And this, this is, it's so weird because we use the term cult and that's the easiest thing to call these people.
[00:15:11]  But generally when our society is talking about a cult, we're talking about like you have an individual.
[00:15:16]  That individual brings in a bunch of followers, gets them, isolates them from society, puts them into an area where they are in complete control, and then tries to utilize them for like a really specific goal.
[00:15:31]  There's like a way to kind of look at the Zizians that way, but I think it would be better to describe them as like cultish, right?
[00:15:40]  Use the tools of cult dynamics, and that produces some very cult-like behavior.
[00:15:48]  But there's also a lot of differences between how this group works and what you'd call a traditional cult, and including a lot of these people are separate from each other and even don't like each other.
[00:15:59]  But because they've been inculcated in some of the same beliefs through these kind of cult dynamics, they make choices that lead them to like participate in violence too.
[00:16:09]  Where is their hub?
[00:16:10]  Is it like a message board type of situation?
[00:16:12]  Like, how is it?
[00:16:13]  Yes, yes.
[00:16:15]  So, I'm gonna, I'm gonna have to go back and forth to explain all of that.
[00:16:19]  Um, also, I do want to know what the etymology of Zizzy in it is.
[00:16:23]  It's because from the Z IZ, the um, the lady who is kind of the founder of this is a uh, the name that she takes for herself is Ziz, right?
[00:16:34]  Okay, should have been the Z girls, that's much more appealing.
[00:16:38]  These people are big in the news right now, uh, because of that murder, because of the several murders, and the right wing is trying wants to make it out as like this is a like trans death cult, and this is more of like an internet AI nerd death cult.
[00:16:56]  I guess that's better, it's just different, you know.
[00:17:02]  You're right, it was just a different thing, and I think it's important if you're if like you care about like cults because you think they're dangerous and you're arguing that, like, hey, this cult seems really dangerous, you should understand like what the cult is, right?
[00:17:15]  Right, like if you misunderstood the Scientologist and thought, like, these are obsessive fans of science fiction who are committing murders over science fiction stories, it's like, no, no, they're committing murders because it's something stupider, yeah, like much more stupid.
[00:17:29]  Um, okay, so I got to take, I am going to explain to you what rationalism is, how who Ziz is, where they come from, and how they get radicalized to the point where they are effectively at the hub of something that is at least very adjacent to a cult.
[00:17:47]  But I want to talk a little bit about the difference between like a cult and cult dynamics, right?
[00:17:55]  A cult is fundamentally a toxic thing, it is bad, it always harms people.
[00:18:00]  There is no harmless cult, you know?
[00:18:03]  Uh, it's like it's like rape, like there's no version of it that's good, you know, like it is a fundamentally dangerous thing.
[00:18:10]  Cult dynamics and the tactics cult leaders use are not always toxic or bad.

=== Cults vs. Cult Dynamics (13:16) ===

[00:18:18]  And in fact, every single person listening to this has enjoyed and had their life enriched by the use of certain things that are on the spectrum of cult dynamics.
[00:18:29]  I was going to say, it's a lot, it seems a lot more like you have that at work, you have that at work anywhere, right?
[00:18:35]  Yeah, anyway, that's a huge part of what make a great fiction author who is able to like attract a cult following.
[00:18:41]  You've ever had that experience like a big thing in cults is the use of and creation of new language.
[00:18:47]  You get people using words that other, they don't use otherwise and like phrases.
[00:18:51]  And that is both a way to bond people because, like, you know, it helps you feel like you're part of this group and it also isolates you from people.
[00:18:59]  If you've ever met people who are like hugely into, you know, Dungeons and Dragons or huge fans like Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings, like they have like things that they say, like memes and shit that they share based on those books.
[00:19:12]  And like, that's a less toxic, but it's on the same spectrum, right?
[00:19:17]  It's this, I am a part of this group of people and we use these words that mean something to us that don't mean things to other people, right?
[00:19:24]  And that's like an empowering feeling, right?
[00:19:26]  Yes, yes, yeah.
[00:19:28]  That's like a great, that's like a great way to ball.
[00:19:30]  I think it's any group, right?
[00:19:32]  I mean, entertainers, your friends, as in jokes, right?
[00:19:37]  Like sports.
[00:19:38]  Yeah.
[00:19:39]  Beehive could kill people, right?
[00:19:40]  Exactly.
[00:19:41]  Yes, yes.
[00:19:42]  And like, you've got, you know, you and you and your buddies that have been friends for years, you have like, you could, there's like a word you can say, and everyone knows that you're referring to this thing that happened six years ago.
[00:19:51]  And you all like laugh because, you know, it reminds you of something, you know, because it's relevant to something happening then.
[00:19:56]  That's a little healthy bit of cult dynamics at play, right?
[00:20:00]  You know, it's like a diet, you know.
[00:20:04]  So there's a toolbox here, and we play with it.
[00:20:07]  And different, different organizations, churches play with it.
[00:20:11]  And obviously, a lot of churches cross the line into cults, but there's also aspects of, for example, there's churches that I know I have seen people go to where like it's very common, everybody gets up and like hugs at a certain point.
[00:20:26]  And like people benefit from human contact, it makes them feel nice.
[00:20:32]  It can be like a very healthy thing.
[00:20:35]  I've gone to, I used to go to, like Burning Man regionals and, like you would like start at this greeter station where, like a bunch of people would come up to they'd offer you like food and drinks and, you know, people would hug each other, and it was this like changes your mind.
[00:20:47]  State from where you were in before kind of opens you up.
[00:20:50]  That is that like to qualify for state.
[00:20:54]  Yeah yeah yeah yeah, so that we could get to go just like these local little events in Texas right, like a thousand people in the desert trying to forget that we live in Texas.
[00:21:02]  Okay um, or not desert, but um, it was very like it's it's.
[00:21:07]  It was like a really valuable part of, like my youth, because it was the first time I ever started to like feel comfortable in my own skin.
[00:21:14]  But also, that's on the spectrum of love bombing, which is the thing cults do, where they like surround you from people with people who like talk about like, like you know, will touch you and hold you and tell you they love you.
[00:21:25]  And, like you know, part of what brings you into the cult is the cult leader can take that away at any moment in time.
[00:21:31]  Right, it's the kind of thing where, if it's not something where no, this is something we do for five minutes at the end of every church service right, you could very easily turn this into something deeply dangerous and poisonous, right.
[00:21:41]  But also, a lot of people just kind of play around a little bit pieces of that with a piece of the cult dynamics, just a little bit, just a little bit.
[00:21:49]  And any good musician, any really great performer, is with some cult dynamics right, I was gonna say I mean i've, i've been to like so many different concerts of like weird niche stuff where you're like maybe the disco biscuits is a cult, I don't, I don't know.
[00:22:05]  Yeah, I mean i've like, i've been to some like childish Gambino concerts where it's like, oh yeah, he's doing he's a little bit of a cult leader, you know, like just 10 right, you know, I mean, what are you gonna do with all that charisma?
[00:22:17]  You gotta, you gotta put it somewhere.
[00:22:19]  You know yeah um, so these are.
[00:22:23]  I I think that it's important for people to understand, to understand both that, like the, the tactics and dynamics that make up a cult have versions of them that are not unhealthy.
[00:22:33]  But I also think it's important for people to understand cults come out of subcultures.
[00:22:40]  Right, this is very close to 100 of the time.
[00:22:43]  Cults always arise out of subcultural movements that are not in and of themselves cults, for example, In the 1930s through like the 50s, 60s, you have the emergence of what's called the self-help movement, you know?
[00:22:58]  And this is all of these different books on like how to persuade people, how to, you know, win friends and influence people, you know, how to like make, but also stuff like Alcoholics Anonymous, you know, how to like improve yourself by getting off drugs, getting off alcohol.
[00:23:12]  All of these are pieces of the self-improvement movement, right?
[00:23:15]  That's a subculture.
[00:23:17]  There are people who travel around, who get obsessed, who go to all of these different things, and they'll, and they get a lot of benefit.
[00:23:22]  You know, people will show up at these seminars where there's hundreds of other people and a bunch of people will like hug them and they feel like they're part of this community and they're making their lives better.
[00:23:32]  And oftentimes, especially like once we get to like the 60s, 70s, these different sort of guru types are saying that like, you know, this is how we're going to save the world.
[00:23:41]  If we can get everybody doing, you know, this, this yoga routine or whatever that I've put together, it'll fix everything.
[00:23:48]  Who's that guy who had the game?
[00:23:50]  Oh, God.
[00:23:50]  Yes.
[00:23:51]  You know what I'm talking about?
[00:23:52]  Yeah.
[00:23:53]  They had to like, they had to viciously confront each other.
[00:23:56]  Yes.
[00:23:56]  We've covered them.
[00:23:57]  That is a synonym.
[00:23:59]  Yes.
[00:23:59]  Yeah.
[00:24:00]  So that's what I'm talking about.
[00:24:01]  That's what I'm talking about.
[00:24:02]  And we have this broader subculture of self-help and a cult synonym comes out of it.
[00:24:08]  And I get it.
[00:24:08]  It's like the subculture, it's already, it's intimate.
[00:24:10]  You feel closer to those people.
[00:24:12]  And anybody else, it definitely feels ripe for manipulation.
[00:24:17]  And Scientology is a cult that comes out of the exact same subculture.
[00:24:21]  We talked last week or week before or two weeks ago about Tony Olamo, who's an incredibly abusive pedophile Christian cult leader.
[00:24:30]  He comes out of, along with a couple other guys we've talked about, the Jesus freak movement, which is a Christian subculture that arises as a reaction to the hippie movement.
[00:24:39]  It's kind of the countervailing force to the hippie movement.
[00:24:42]  So you got these hippies and you have these Christians who are like really scared of this kind of like weird left-wing movement.
[00:24:49]  And so they start kind of doing like a Christian hippie movement almost, right?
[00:24:54]  And some of these people just start weird churches that sing annoying songs.
[00:24:58]  And some of these people start hideously dangerous cults.
[00:25:01]  You have the subculture and you have cults that come out of it.
[00:25:04]  Right.
[00:25:05]  And the same thing is true in every single period of time, right?
[00:25:09]  Cults form out of subcultures, you know?
[00:25:13]  And part of this is because people who would, a lot of people who find themselves most drawn to subcultures, right?
[00:25:20]  Tend to be people who feel like they're missing something in the outside world, right?
[00:25:27]  You know, not every, but people who get most into it.
[00:25:29]  And so.
[00:25:30]  So does that mean like, so maybe like more, I'm just curious, like more broader cultural waves have never led.
[00:25:37]  There's like the Swifties would not be a cult.
[00:25:40]  No, there's no.
[00:25:40]  Most likely not going to be an offshoot of the Swifties that becomes a cult because it's so broad.
[00:25:45]  It has to have already been kind of a smaller subset.
[00:25:49]  That's interesting.
[00:25:50]  Well, yeah.
[00:25:50]  And I think I, but, but that said, there have been cults that have started out of like popular entertainers and musicians.
[00:25:59]  Like, you know, you could, we could talk about Corey Feldman's weird house full of young women dressed as angels, right?
[00:26:10]  So yeah, you've got, as a general rule, like there are music is full of subcultures, like punk, right?
[00:26:18]  But there have definitely also been some like punk communities that have gone and kind of individual little chunks of punk communities gone like culty directions, right?
[00:26:28]  Even if you just like, yes, yeah.
[00:26:37]  So there are cults that come out of the subculture.
[00:26:39]  This is the way cults work.
[00:26:40]  And I really just, I don't think, I don't think there's very good education on what cults are, where they come from, or how they work, because all of the people who run this country have like a lot of cult leader DNA in them.
[00:26:53]  You know, we're being run currently by someone who is seen as a magic man.
[00:27:02]  Cults all the way down.
[00:27:03]  Yes, exactly.
[00:27:04]  Exactly.
[00:27:05]  So I think there's a lot of vested interests in not explaining what a cult is and where they come from.
[00:27:11]  And so I want to, I think it's important to understand subcultures birth cults.
[00:27:16]  And also cult leaders are drawn to subcultures when they're trying to figure out how to make their cult because a subculture, you know, most of the people in it are just going to be like normal people who are just kind of into this thing, but there will always be a lot of people who are like, this is the only place I feel like I belong.
[00:27:33]  I feel very isolated.
[00:27:36]  This is like the center of my being.
[00:27:39]  Right.
[00:27:40]  And so it's just an, it's like a good place to recruit.
[00:27:42]  You know, those are the kind of people you want if you're reaching out to cult leaders.
[00:27:45]  You know, I'm not saying like, again, I'm not saying subcultures are bad.
[00:27:48]  I'm saying that like some chunk of people in subcultures are ready to be in a cult, you know?
[00:27:53]  Yeah.
[00:27:54]  Yeah.
[00:27:54]  I think if I reflect on my own personal life, yeah, you meet a lot of guys who are just like, I'll die for the skate park or whatever thing.
[00:28:02]  Yeah.
[00:28:03]  Or like the Star Wars fans who were sending death threats to Jake Lloyd after the Phantom Menace, where it's like, well, you guys are crazy.
[00:28:11]  That is insane.
[00:28:12]  You know, he's like eight, right?
[00:28:14]  This is a movie.
[00:28:15]  He also didn't write it.
[00:28:17]  He didn't write it?
[00:28:19]  Like, what are you doing?
[00:28:24]  You know, whatever makes you feel a sense of home, I guess.
[00:28:26]  So, and again, that's kind of a good point.
[00:28:28]  Like, Star Wars fans aren't a cult, but you can also see some of like the toxic things cults do erupts from time to time from like video game fans, right?
[00:28:37]  People who are really into a certain video game.
[00:28:40]  That's not a cult, but also periodically, groups of those fans will act in ways that are violent and crazy.
[00:28:46]  And it's because of some of these same factors going on, right?
[00:28:50]  I think people forget fan is short for fanatic.
[00:28:52]  Exactly, exactly, right?
[00:28:55]  And it's, it's like, you know, the events that I went to very consciously played with cult dynamics.
[00:29:02]  You know, after you got out of that like greeting station thing where like all these people were kind of like love bombing you for like five minutes, there was like a big bar and it had like a sign above it that said, not a religion, do not worship.
[00:29:13]  And it was this kind of people would talk about like, this is like, we are playing with the ingredients of a cult.
[00:29:18]  We're not trying to actually make one.
[00:29:20]  So you need to constantly remind people of like what we're doing and why it affects their brain that way.
[00:29:25]  And then in my case, it was like, because I was at like a low point in my life then.
[00:29:30]  Like this was when I was really, it was 20.
[00:29:32]  I was not.
[00:29:33]  I had no kind of drive in life.
[00:29:35]  I was honestly dealing with a lot of like suicidal ideation.
[00:29:39]  This is the point at which I would have been vulnerable to a cult.
[00:29:41]  And I think it acted a little bit like a vaccine.
[00:29:44]  Like I got a little dose of the drug.
[00:29:46]  Right.
[00:29:46]  It was enough.
[00:29:47]  Built up an immunity.
[00:29:49]  Exactly.
[00:29:49]  And now you're like, hey, I know what that is.
[00:29:52]  I know what's going on there.
[00:29:54]  So anyway, I needed to get into this because the Zizians, this thing that I think is, it's either a full-on cult or at least cult-ish, right?
[00:30:04]  That is responsible for this series of murders that are currently dominating the news and being blamed on like a trans vegan death cult or whatever.
[00:30:12]  They come out of a subculture that grows out of the early aughts internet known as the rationalists.
[00:30:19]  The rationalists started out as a group in the early aughts on the comment sections of two blogs.
[00:30:26]  One was called Less Wrong and one was called Overcoming Bias.
[00:30:30]  Less Wrong was started by a dude named Elizer Yudkowski.
[00:30:35]  I have talked about Elizer on the show before.
[00:30:37]  He's not, he sucks.
[00:30:40]  I think he's a bad person.
[00:30:42]  He's not a cult leader, but again, he's playing with some of these cult dynamics and he plays with them in a way that I think is very reckless, right?
[00:30:53]  And ultimately leads to some serious issues.
[00:30:57]  Now, Elizer's whole thing is he considers himself the number one world expert on AI risk and ethics.
[00:31:03]  Now, you might think from that, oh, so he's like a, he's like making AIs.
[00:31:08]  He's like working for one of these companies that's involved in like coding and stuff.
[00:31:12]  Absolutely not.
[00:31:14]  Absolutely not.
[00:31:15]  No, no, no.
[00:31:16]  Team chair quarterback.
[00:31:18]  No.
[00:31:18]  He writes long articles about what he thinks AI would do and what would make it dangerous that are based almost entirely off of short stories he read in the 1990s.
[00:31:29]  Like, this guy.
[00:31:32]  That's the most internet shit I've ever heard.

=== Internet Shit and AI Fears (03:59) ===

[00:31:35]  It's so fun.
[00:31:36]  It's such internet.
[00:31:37]  And like, I'm not a fan of like the quote unquote real AI, but Yudkowski is not even one of these guys who's like, no, I'm like making a machine that you talk to.
[00:31:46]  Like, I have no credible.
[00:31:48]  I just have an opinion.
[00:31:50]  Yeah.
[00:31:51]  I find out dated opinion.
[00:31:54]  I hate this guy so much.
[00:31:56]  Speaking of things I hate, not going to ads.
[00:32:04]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:32:08]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:32:12]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:32:14]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:32:18]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:32:22]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[00:32:23]  And in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:32:25]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:32:27]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:32:32]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:32:34]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:32:36]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:32:38]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:32:41]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:32:43]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:32:45]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:32:50]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:32:51]  Trust me, babe.
[00:32:52]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:33:02]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:33:08]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:33:12]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:33:18]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:33:27]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:33:32]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:33:36]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:33:39]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:33:40]  That's so funny.
[00:33:42]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:33:50]  Say you love me.
[00:33:53]  You know I.
[00:33:55]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:34:02]  What's up, everyone?
[00:34:03]  I'm Ago Modern.
[00:34:04]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:34:12]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:34:15]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:34:18]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:34:23]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:34:26]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
[00:34:30]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:34:35]  Yeah.
[00:34:35]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:34:38]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:34:40]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:34:48]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:34:51]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:34:58]  Yeah, it would not be right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:35:01]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:35:02]  Yeah.
[00:35:02]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:35:11]  In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[00:35:17]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[00:35:23]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[00:35:26]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:35:30]  I doctored the test once.
[00:35:31]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.

=== Uncovering Disturbing Patterns (09:39) ===

[00:35:34]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[00:35:38]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
[00:35:41]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:35:43]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:35:45]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
[00:35:47]  My mind was blown.
[00:35:49]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:35:51]  This is Love Trap.
[00:35:53]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:35:55]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:35:59]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[00:36:06]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[00:36:10]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:36:21]  We're back.
[00:36:21]  So Yudkowski, this AI risk and ethics guy, starts this blog in order to explore a series of thought experiments based in game theory.
[00:36:32]  And his, his, I am annoyed by game theory.
[00:36:36]  It's the worst sentence I've ever heard.
[00:36:38]  It's sucks.
[00:36:39]  Like, man, I know that there's like valid active, but like, it's all just always so stupid and annoying to me.
[00:36:47]  Anyway, a bunch of thought experiments based in game theory with the goal of teaching himself and others to think more logically and effectively about the major problems of the world.
[00:36:59]  His motto for the movement and himself is winning.
[00:37:03]  The rationalist.
[00:37:05]  Yeah.
[00:37:05]  Yeah.
[00:37:06]  That's where Sheen got it.
[00:37:07]  Yeah.
[00:37:08]  That's where Sheen picked it up.
[00:37:09]  Yeah.
[00:37:11]  He's they're tied in with biohacking, right?
[00:37:14]  This is kind of starting to be a thing at the time and brain hacking and the whole like self-optimization movement that feeds into a lot of like right-wing influencer space today.
[00:37:23]  Yudkowski is all about optimizing your brain and your responses in order to allow you to accomplish things that are not possible for other people who haven't done that.
[00:37:36]  And there's a messianic era to this too, which is he believes that only by doing this, by spreading rationalist principles in order to quote, raise the sanity waterline.
[00:37:47]  That's how he describes it.
[00:37:49]  That's going to make it possible for us to save the world from the evil AI that will be born if enough of us don't spend time reading blogs.
[00:38:00]  That's great.
[00:38:00]  This is awesome.
[00:38:02]  This is Pete.
[00:38:04]  This is the good stuff.
[00:38:08]  Yudkowski and his followers see themselves as something unique and special.
[00:38:12]  And again, there's often a messianic air to this, right?
[00:38:14]  We are literally the ones who can save the world from evil AI.
[00:38:18]  Nobody else is thinking about this or is even capable of thinking about this because they're too logical.
[00:38:23]  He holds himself as kind of like a deity.
[00:38:25]  He kind of deifies himself on top of this.
[00:38:28]  He doesn't really deify himself, but he also does talk about himself in a way that is clearly other people aren't capable of understanding all of the things that he's capable of understanding, right?
[00:38:43]  Okay.
[00:38:44]  So there is a little bit, it's more like superheroification, but it's a lot.
[00:38:49]  You know what this is closest to?
[00:38:51]  What these people, all of them would argue with me about this, but I've read a lot enough of their papers and enough Dianetics to know that like, this is new Dianetics.
[00:39:00]  Like this is churches.
[00:39:02]  The Church of Scientology.
[00:39:03]  No, there's the Church of Scientology stuff has more occult and weird like magic stuff in it.
[00:39:10]  But this is all about there are activities and exercises you go through that will rid your body of like bad ingrained responses.
[00:39:19]  And that will make you a fundamentally more functional person.
[00:39:23]  Okay.
[00:39:24]  So the retraining of yourself in order to exactly.
[00:39:26]  Exactly.
[00:39:27]  Okay.
[00:39:28]  Huge deal.
[00:39:28]  And also a lot of these guys wind up like referring to the different like tech techniques that he teaches as tech, which is exactly what the Scientologists call it.
[00:39:39]  Like there's some, there's some shit I found that it's like, this could have a bit come right out of a Scientology pamphlet.
[00:39:45]  Do you guys not realize what you're doing?
[00:39:47]  I think they do actually.
[00:39:48]  So he's, you know, in the process of inventing this kind of new mental science that verges on superpowers.
[00:39:56]  And it's one of those things where people don't tend to see these people as crazy.
[00:40:01]  If you just sort of like read their arguments a little, it's like them going over old thought experiments and being like, so the most rational way to behave in this situation is this reason for this reason.
[00:40:12]  You have to really like dig deep into their conclusions to see how kind of nutty a lot of this is.
[00:40:21]  Now, again, I compared him to Scientology.
[00:40:23]  Yudkowski isn't a high control guy like Hubbard.
[00:40:25]  He's never going to make a bunch of people live on a flotilla of boats in the ocean with him.
[00:40:31]  He's got like, there's definitely like some allegations of bad treatment of like some of the women around him.
[00:40:38]  And like he has like a Bay Area set that hang with him.
[00:40:41]  I don't think he's like a cult leader.
[00:40:44]  You know, you could say he's on.
[00:40:45]  Is he drawing people to him physically or this is also all physically?
[00:40:48]  I mean, a lot of people move to the Bay Area to be closer to the rationalist scene.
[00:40:52]  Although, again, Bay Area City.
[00:40:54]  I'm a Bay Area guy.
[00:40:56]  San Fran.
[00:40:56]  San Fran.
[00:40:57]  Oh, this is a city?
[00:40:58]  This is a San Francisco thing because all of these are tech people.
[00:41:01]  Oh, okay.
[00:41:02]  So this is like, I wonder what neighborhood feels like.
[00:41:06]  San Fran and Oakland.
[00:41:07]  You can look it up.
[00:41:08]  People have found his house online, right?
[00:41:10]  Like it is known where he lives.
[00:41:13]  I'm not saying that for any, like, I don't harass anybody.
[00:41:17]  I just like, it's, it's not a secret, like what part of the town this guy lives in.
[00:41:21]  I just didn't think to look it up.
[00:41:22]  But like, yeah, this is like a Bay Area tech industry subculture, right?
[00:41:28]  Okay.
[00:41:29]  So the other difference between this and something like Scientology is that it's not just Elizer laying down the law.
[00:41:35]  Eliser writes a lot of blog posts, but he lets other people write blog posts too.
[00:41:39]  And they all debate about them in the comments.
[00:41:41]  And so the kind of religious canon of rationalism is not a one guy thing.
[00:41:47]  It's come up with by this community.
[00:41:50]  And so if you're some random kid in bum fuck, Alaska, and you find these people and start talking with them online, you can like wind up feeling like you're having an impact on the development of this new thought science, you know?
[00:42:03]  Yeah, that's amazing.
[00:42:04]  Very, very powerful for a very powerful.
[00:42:07]  Yes.
[00:42:09]  Now, the danger with this is that like all of this is this internet community that is incredibly like insular and spends way too much time talking to each other and way too much time developing in-group terms to talk to each other.
[00:42:24]  And internet communities have a tendency to poison the minds of everyone inside of them.
[00:42:29]  For example, Twitter.
[00:42:31]  The reality is that XX, the everything app.
[00:42:37]  I just watched a video of a man killing himself while launching a shit coin.
[00:42:43]  The everything app.
[00:42:49]  Oh, fuck.
[00:42:50]  By the way, a hack Google job indicates it's Berkeley.
[00:42:56]  It is Berkeley.
[00:42:57]  Yeah, that makes the most sense to me.
[00:42:59]  Yeah, geographically.
[00:43:01]  A lot of these people wind up living on boats and like the Oakland, the Oakland Harbor boat culture is a thing.
[00:43:08]  Is that ever a good thing when a big group of people move to boats?
[00:43:12]  No.
[00:43:15]  Absolutely not.
[00:43:20]  No, it's never, never.
[00:43:22]  It feels like it never bodes well.
[00:43:26]  Here's the thing.
[00:43:27]  Boats are a bad place to live.
[00:43:31]  It's for fun.
[00:43:33]  Like boats and planes are both constant monuments to hubris, but a plane, its goal is to be in the air just as long as it needs.
[00:43:40]  And then you get it back on the ground where it belongs.
[00:43:43]  A boat's always mocking God in the sea.
[00:43:46]  Yes.
[00:43:48]  Or a lot of times just a harbor, like a houseboat.
[00:43:52]  You know what I mean?
[00:43:52]  That's where your dad goes after the divorce.
[00:43:54]  Right.
[00:43:54]  Right.
[00:43:55]  Oh, man.
[00:43:55]  I do.
[00:43:56]  One day I'll live on a houseboat.
[00:43:58]  Oh, it's going to be falling apart.
[00:43:59]  It's going to just a horrible, horrible place to live.
[00:44:02]  Dang, I can't wait.
[00:44:03]  That's the dream, David.
[00:44:06]  That's my beautiful dream.
[00:44:08]  I want to become someone making your own bullets.
[00:44:11]  Making my own bullets, really just becoming an alcoholic.
[00:44:14]  Like, not just like half-assing it, like putting it, like trying, trying to become the babe Ruth of drinking nothing but cuddy sark scotch.
[00:44:25]  I think if you want to be like a poop-the-bed alcoholic, a houseboat is the place for that.
[00:44:30]  That's right.
[00:44:31]  That's right.
[00:44:32]  Ah, the life.
[00:44:33]  I want to be like that guy from Jaws, Quint.
[00:44:36]  You're going to get scurvy.
[00:44:38]  That's exactly.
[00:44:40]  Getting scurvy, destroying my liver, eventually getting eaten by a great white shark because I'm too drunk to work my boat.
[00:44:48]  Ah, that's it.
[00:44:49]  That's the way to go with romance, you know?
[00:44:53]  Yeah.
[00:44:54]  So anyway, these internet communities, like the rationalists, even when they start from a reasonable place, because of how internet stuff works, one of the things about internet communities is that when people are like really extreme and like pose the most sort of extreme and out there version of something, that gets attention.

=== Ethical AI and Decision Theory (05:11) ===

[00:45:14]  People talk about it.
[00:45:15]  People get angry at each other.
[00:45:17]  But also like that kind of attention encourages other people to get increasingly extreme and weird.
[00:45:22]  And there's just kind of a result, a derangement.
[00:45:25]  I think internet communities should never last more than a couple of years because everyone gets crazy, you know?
[00:45:32]  Like it's bad for you.
[00:45:34]  I say this as someone who was raised on these, right?
[00:45:37]  It's bad for you.
[00:45:39]  And like, it's bad for you in part because when people get really into this, this becomes the only thing, like, especially a lot of these like kids and isolated who are getting obsessed with rationalism.
[00:45:49]  All they're reading is these rationalist blogs.
[00:45:52]  All they're talking to is other rationalists on the internet.
[00:45:55]  And in San Francisco, all these guys are hanging out all of the time and talking about their ideas.
[00:46:01]  And this is bad for them for the same reason that like it was bad for all of the nobles in France that moved to Versailles, right?
[00:46:08]  Like they all lived together and they went crazy.
[00:46:10]  Human beings need regular contact with human beings they don't know.
[00:46:15]  The most lucid and wisest people are always, always the people who spend the most time connecting to other people who know things that they don't know.
[00:46:24]  This is an immutable fact of life.
[00:46:26]  This is just how existing works.
[00:46:30]  Like if you, if you think I'm wrong, please consider that you're wrong and go find a stranger under a bridge.
[00:46:38]  You know, just start.
[00:46:40]  They will know some shit.
[00:46:43]  They might have some powders you haven't tried.
[00:46:46]  Oh, yeah.
[00:46:47]  Pills and powders.
[00:46:48]  Shit's going on under the bridge.
[00:46:53]  That's an echo chamber you want to be a part of.
[00:46:55]  Yeah, exactly, exactly.
[00:46:58]  So the issue here is that Yudkowski starts postulating on his blog various rules of life based on these thought experiments.
[00:47:05]  A lot of them are like older thought experiments that like different intellectuals, physicists, psychiatrists, psychologists, whatnot had come up with like the 60s and stuff, right?
[00:47:14]  And he starts taking them and coming up with like corollaries or alternate versions of them and like trying to solve some of these thought problems with his friends, right?
[00:47:23]  The thought experiments are most of what's happening here is they're mixing these kind of 19th and 20th century philosophical concepts.
[00:47:30]  The big one is utilitarianism.
[00:47:32]  That's like a huge thing for them is the concept of like the ethics meaning doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
[00:47:40]  Right.
[00:47:41]  And that ties into the fact that these people are all obsessed with the singularity.
[00:47:45]  The singularity for them is the concept that we are on the verge of developing an all-powerful AI that will instantly gain intelligence and gain a tremendous amount of power, right?
[00:48:00]  It will basically be a god.
[00:48:02]  And the positive side of this is it'll solve all of our problems, right?
[00:48:06]  You know, it will literally build heaven for us, you know, when the singularity comes.
[00:48:11]  The downside of it is it might be an evil god that creates hell, right?
[00:48:15]  So the rationalists are all using a lot of these thought experiments and like their utilitarianism becomes heavily based around how do we do the greatest good in by which I mean influencing this AI to be as good as possible as humanities.
[00:48:32]  That's the end goal, right?
[00:48:33]  Are they actively, because you said the leader was not, are these people now actively working within AI or are they just a bunch of them have always been actually working in AI?
[00:48:43]  Yudkowski would say, no, he, I work in AI.
[00:48:45]  He's got a think tank that's dedicated to like AI, ethical AI.
[00:48:49]  It's worth noting that most of the people in this movement, including Yudkowski, got him once like AI became an actual, like I don't want to say there's actual, these are actual intelligences because I don't think they are, but like once ChatGPT comes out and this becomes like a huge, people start to believe there's a shitload of money in here.
[00:49:05]  A lot of these businesses, all of these guys, or nearly all of them, get kicked to the curb, right?
[00:49:10]  Because none of these companies really care about ethical AI, you know, like they don't give a shit about what these guys have to say.
[00:49:17]  And Yudkowski now is a huge, he's like very angry at a lot of these AI companies because he thinks they're very recklessly like making the god that will destroy us instead of like doing this carefully to make sure that AI isn't evil.
[00:49:34]  Anyway, but a lot of these people are in an in and adjacent to different chunks of the AI industry, right?
[00:49:41]  They're not all working on like LLMs.
[00:49:43]  And in fact, there are a number of scientists who are in the AI space who think AI is possible who think that the method that like Open AI is using, LLMs, cannot make an intelligence, that that's not how you're ever going to do it.
[00:49:55]  If it's possible, they have other theories about it.
[00:49:59]  I don't need to get into it further than that.
[00:50:01]  But these are like a bunch of different people.
[00:50:04]  Some of them are still involved with like the mainstream AI industry.
[00:50:08]  Some of them have been very much pushed to the side.
[00:50:11]  So all this starts again with these fairly normal game theory questions, but it all gets progressively stranger as people obsess over coming up with like the weirdest and most unique take in part to get like clout online, right?

=== The God AI Thought Experiment (13:18) ===

[00:50:26]  And all of these crazy, yeah, I'll give you an example, right?
[00:50:30]  So much of rationalist discourse among the Yudkowsky people is focused on what they call decision or what's called decision theory, right?
[00:50:40]  This is drawn from a thought experiment called Newcomb's paradox, which was created by a theoretical physicist in the 1960s.
[00:50:48]  Hey, just to make a quick correction here, I was a little bit glib.
[00:50:52]  Decision theory isn't drawn from Newcomb's paradox, nor does it start with Yudkowski.
[00:50:56]  But the stuff that we're talking about, like how decision theory kind of comes to be seen in the rationalist community, a lot of that comes out of Newcomb's paradox.
[00:51:04]  It's a much older like thing, you know, than the internet.
[00:51:08]  It goes back centuries, right?
[00:51:09]  People have been talking about decision theory for a long time.
[00:51:11]  Sorry, I was imprecise.
[00:51:13]  I am going to read how Newcomb's paradox is originally laid out.
[00:51:17]  Imagine a super intelligent entity known as Omega, and suppose you are confident in its ability to predict your choices.
[00:51:24]  Maybe Omega is an alien from a planet that's much more technically advanced than ours.
[00:51:28]  You know that Omega has often correctly predicted your choices in the past and has never made an incorrect prediction about your choices.
[00:51:34]  And you also know that Omega has correctly predicted the choices of other people, many of whom are similar to you in the particular situation about to be described.
[00:51:43]  There are two boxes, A and B. Box A is see-through and contains $1,000.
[00:51:49]  Box B is opaque and contains either $0 or $1 million.
[00:51:54]  You may take both boxes or only take box B. Omega decides how much money to put into box B. If Omega believes that you will take both boxes, then it will put $0 in box B. If Omega believes that you will take box B, then it will put only box B, then it will put a million dollars in box B. Omega makes its prediction and puts the money in box B, either zero or a million dollars.
[00:52:20]  It presents the boxes to you and flies away.
[00:52:22]  Omega does not tell you its prediction, and you do not see how much money Omega put in box B. What do you do?
[00:52:29]  Now, I think that's stupid.
[00:52:35]  I think it's a stupid question, and I don't really think it's very useful.
[00:52:39]  I don't see there's so many other factors.
[00:52:42]  Yeah, I don't know.
[00:52:43]  I mean, among other things, part of the issue here is that, like, well, the decision's already been made, right?
[00:52:48]  Yeah, that's the point.
[00:52:49]  You have no, it does, it doesn't matter what you do.
[00:52:52]  There's no autonomy in that, right?
[00:52:54]  Well, you and I would think that because you and I are normal people who I think, among other things, probably like grew up like cooking food and like filling up our cars with gas and not having like our parents do all of that because they're crazy rich people who live in the bay and pay to send you to Super Stanford.
[00:53:13]  Yeah.
[00:53:15]  We've had like problems in our lives and stuff, you know?
[00:53:18]  Physical bullies.
[00:53:20]  Normal, like I, I don't want to like shit on people who are in because this is also harmless, right?
[00:53:25]  And what this is, I'm not also, I'm not shitting on Newcomb.
[00:53:28]  This is a thing a guy comes up with the 60s.
[00:53:30]  And it's like a thing you talk about in like parties and shit among like other weird intellectuals, right?
[00:53:35]  You pose it, you sit around drinking, you talk about it.
[00:53:38]  Not, there's nothing bad about this, right?
[00:53:41]  However, when people are talking about this online, there's no end to the discussion.
[00:53:45]  So people just keep coming up with more and more arcane arguments for what the best thing to do here is.
[00:53:52]  And it starts to...
[00:53:53]  You see how that spins out of control pretty quickly.
[00:53:55]  Exactly.
[00:53:56]  And the rationalists discuss this nonstop and they come to a conclusion about how to best deal with this situation.
[00:54:03]  Here's how it goes.
[00:54:05]  The only way to beat Omega is to make yourself the kind of person in the past who would only choose box B so that Omega, who is perfect at predicting, would make the prediction and put a million dollars in box B based on your past behavior.
[00:54:22]  In other words, the decisions that you would need to make in order to win this are timeless decisions, right?
[00:54:31]  You have to become in the past a person who would now again.
[00:54:37]  That's what they came up with.
[00:54:38]  That's what they all came up with as the supreme answer.
[00:54:41]  This is the smartest people in the world, David.
[00:54:43]  These are the geniuses.
[00:54:45]  Self-describing.
[00:54:46]  We're building the future.
[00:54:48]  Oh, boy.
[00:54:53]  It's so funny trying to like every time, because I've spent so many hours reading this, and you do kind of sometimes get into the like, okay, I get the logic there.
[00:55:02]  And it's, that's why it's so useful to just like sit down with another human being and be like, yeah, this is insane.
[00:55:07]  This is nuts.
[00:55:07]  Yeah, this is not.
[00:55:09]  This is all nuts.
[00:55:10]  This is all dumb.
[00:55:12]  This is why you leave it at the cocktail party.
[00:55:15]  Yeah.
[00:55:16]  So they conclude, and by which I mean largely Yedkowski concludes that the decision you have to make in order to win this game is what's called a timeless decision.
[00:55:27]  And this leads him to create one of his most brilliant inventions, timeless decision theory.
[00:55:33]  And I'm going to quote from an article in Wired.
[00:55:36]  Timeless decision theory asserts that in making a decision, a person should not consider just the outcome of that specific choice, but also their own underlying patterns of reasoning and those of their past and future selves, not least because these patterns might one day be anticipated by an omniscient adversarial AI.
[00:55:54]  Oh, no.
[00:55:56]  That's a crazy way to live.
[00:55:58]  Motherfucker, have you ever had a problem?
[00:56:01]  Have you ever really, have you ever dealt with anything?
[00:56:05]  What the fuck are you talking about?
[00:56:06]  This isn't how fake decisions.
[00:56:09]  Like, you make every decision?
[00:56:13]  Honestly, again, I can't believe I'm saying this now, given where I was in high school.
[00:56:18]  Like, go play football.
[00:56:20]  Go make a cabinet, you know?
[00:56:21]  Like, learn how to change your oil.
[00:56:24]  Go do something.
[00:56:26]  There's a lot of assholes who use this term, but you got to go touch grass, man.
[00:56:29]  You got to touch grass, man.
[00:56:31]  That's like, that's crazy.
[00:56:32]  If you're talking about this kind of shit, and again, I know you're all wondering.
[00:56:37]  You started this by talking about a border patrol agent being shot.
[00:56:40]  All of this directly leads to that man's death.
[00:56:42]  We have covered a lot of ground.
[00:56:44]  This is, I'm excited.
[00:56:46]  I did forget there were going to, there was also going to be murder.
[00:56:50]  Yeah.
[00:56:51]  There sure is.
[00:56:53]  So Eliza Yedkowski describes this as a timeless decision theory.
[00:56:57]  And once this comes into the community, it creates a kind of logical fork that immediately starts destroying people's brains.
[00:57:04]  Again, all of these people are obsessed with the imminent coming omniscient godlike AI, right?
[00:57:10]  And so does it.
[00:57:10]  Do they have a time limit on it?
[00:57:12]  Or do they have like a, do they have a like, is it, is there any timing on it?
[00:57:16]  Or is it just kind of like Again, man, it's the rapture.
[00:57:18]  It's the rapture.
[00:57:20]  Okay.
[00:57:20]  It's literally the tech guy rapture.
[00:57:22]  So any day, it's coming any day.
[00:57:24]  You know?
[00:57:25]  He could be amongst us already.
[00:57:27]  Yeah.
[00:57:28]  Yeah.
[00:57:29]  So these guys are all obsessed that this godlike AI is coming.
[00:57:33]  And like for them, the Omega in that thought experiment isn't like an alien.
[00:57:37]  It's a stand-in for the God AI.
[00:57:39]  And one conclusion that eventually results from all of these discussions is that, and this is a conclusion a lot of people come to.
[00:57:48]  If in order, if in these kinds of situations, like the decisions that you make, you have to consider like your past and your future selves.
[00:57:57]  Then one logical leap from this is if you are ever confronted or threatened in a fight, you can never back down.
[00:58:05]  Right.
[00:58:06]  And in fact, you need to immediately escalate to use maximum force possible.
[00:58:10]  And if you commit, if you commit now to doing that in the future, you probably won't ever have to defend yourself because it's a timeless decision.
[00:58:20]  Everyone will like that, like that, that will impact how everyone treats you.
[00:58:24]  And they won't want to start anything with you if you'll immediately try to murder anyone who fights you.
[00:58:29]  It's to be this guy, but I think this is why people need to get beat up sometimes.
[00:58:33]  Yeah.
[00:58:33]  Yeah.
[00:58:34]  And again, that is, that is kind of a fringe conclusion among the rationalists.
[00:58:38]  Most of them don't jump to that.
[00:58:40]  But like aside, the people who wind up doing the murders we're talking about, that they are among the rationalists who come to that conclusion.
[00:58:48]  Okay.
[00:58:49]  Because, yeah, okay.
[00:58:51]  Starting to make sense, huh?
[00:58:52]  This is this is a headfuck.
[00:58:55]  That's so funny.
[00:58:56]  Uh-huh.
[00:58:57]  Oh, no.
[00:59:00]  Because, like, this whole time, I've really been only thinking about it in theory, not like practical application because it's so insane.
[00:59:08]  But, oh, no.
[00:59:08]  Nope, nope, nope.
[00:59:09]  This is bad places, right?
[00:59:11]  Oh, no.
[00:59:12]  This kind of thinking also leads through a very twisty tourney process to something called Rocco's Basilisk, which, among other things, is directly responsible for Elon Musk and Grimes meeting because they are super into this shit.
[00:59:27]  Oh, really?
[00:59:28]  Oh, really?
[00:59:30]  So the gist is a member of the less wrong community, a guy who goes by the name Rocco, R-O-K-O, posts about this idea that occurred to him, right?
[00:59:40]  This inevitable super intelligent AI, right, would obviously understand timeless decision theory.
[00:59:46]  And since its existence is all important, right?
[00:59:49]  The most logical thing for it to do post-singularity would be to create a hell to imprison all of the people and torture all of the people who had tried to stop it from being created, right?
[01:00:04]  Because then anyone who like thought really seriously about who was in a position to help make the AI would obviously think about this and then would know I have to devote myself entirely to making this AI.
[01:00:16]  Otherwise, it's going to torture me forever.
[01:00:18]  Right.
[01:00:19]  Yeah.
[01:00:20]  Yeah.
[01:00:20]  It makes total sense.
[01:00:22]  I have trouble saying right because it's so nuts, but like it's nuts, but this is what they believe, right?
[01:00:27]  Again, all of a lot of this is people who are like atheists and tech nerds creating Calvinism.
[01:00:37]  Like, and this is just, this is just Pascal's wager, right?
[01:00:41]  Like, that's all this is, you know?
[01:00:42]  It's Pascal's wager with a robot.
[01:00:46]  Oh, man.
[01:00:47]  This, this, this becomes so upsetting to some people, it destroys some people's lives, right?
[01:00:54]  Like, yeah, I mean, I'm behaving that way practically day to day.
[01:00:59]  I don't think it would even take long.
[01:01:01]  No, right.
[01:01:02]  You could fuck your shit up in a month.
[01:01:04]  Just slipping like that.
[01:01:06]  So, not all of them agree with this.
[01:01:08]  And in fact, there's big fights over it because a bunch of rationalists do say, like, that's very silly.
[01:01:13]  That's like a really ridiculous thing to think about it.
[01:01:16]  They're still debating everything online.
[01:01:18]  Yeah.
[01:01:18]  And in fact, Eliza Yudkowski is going to like ban discussion of Rocco's basilisk because eventually it like so many people are getting so obsessed with it.
[01:01:28]  It fucks a lot of people up in part because a chunk of this community are activists working to slow AI development until it can be assured to be safe.
[01:01:37]  And so now this discussion, like, am I going to post-singularity hell?
[01:01:40]  Is like the AI god going to torture me for a thousand eternities?
[01:01:46]  It's funny how they invent this new thing and how quickly it goes into like traditional Judeo-Christian idea.
[01:01:52]  Like they gotta hell now.
[01:01:54]  It is very funny.
[01:01:55]  And they've come to this conclusion that just reading about Rocco's basilisk is super dangerous because if you know about it and you don't work to bring the AI into being, you're now doomed, right?
[01:02:06]  Of course.
[01:02:07]  The instant you hear about it.
[01:02:09]  So many people get fucked up by this that the thought experiment is termed an info hazard.
[01:02:14]  And this is a term these people use a lot.
[01:02:16]  Now, the phrase information hazard has its roots in a 2011 paper by Nick Bostrom.
[01:02:22]  He describes it as quote: a risk that arises from the dissemination of true information in a way that may cause harm or enable some agent to cause harm, right?
[01:02:32]  And like, that's like a concept that's worth talking about.
[01:02:38]  Bostrom is a big figure in this culture, but I don't think he's actually why most people start using the term info hazard because the shortening of information hazard to info hazard comes out of an online fiction community called the SCP Foundation, right?
[01:02:54]  Which is a collectively written online story that involves a government agency that lock ups dangerous mystic and metaphysical items.
[01:03:02]  There's a lot of lovecraft in there.
[01:03:03]  It's basically just a big database that you can click and it'll be like, you know, this is like a book that if you read it, it like has this effect on you or whatever.
[01:03:12]  Just people like, you know, playing around telling scary stories on the internet.
[01:03:14]  It's fine.
[01:03:14]  There's nothing wrong with it.
[01:03:16]  But all these people are big nerds.
[01:03:18]  And all of these, every like behind nearly all of these big concepts and rationalism, more than there are like philosophers and like, you know, actual like philosophical concepts, there's like shit from short stories they read.
[01:03:33]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:03:34]  Yeah.
[01:03:37]  And so the term infohazard gets used, which is like, you know, a book or something, an idea that could destroy your mind, you know?

=== Ideas That Destroy Your Mind (03:56) ===

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[01:06:05]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:06:08]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[01:06:13]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[01:06:16]  I'm working my way up through it.
[01:06:17]  I know it's a place to come.
[01:06:18]  Look for up and coming talent.
[01:06:20]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[01:06:25]  Yeah.
[01:06:25]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[01:06:28]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[01:06:29]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[01:06:38]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:06:40]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[01:06:48]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:06:50]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:06:51]  There's a lot of luck.
[01:06:52]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:07:01]  In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[01:07:07]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[01:07:12]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[01:07:16]  You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
[01:07:19]  I doctored the test once.
[01:07:21]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[01:07:24]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[01:07:28]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
[01:07:31]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[01:07:33]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[01:07:35]  Greg Oespi and Michael Marancine.
[01:07:37]  My mind was blown.
[01:07:39]  I'm Stephanie Young.

=== Foundational Text of Rationalism (05:38) ===

[01:07:41]  This is Love Trap.
[01:07:42]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[01:07:44]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[01:07:49]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[01:07:55]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[01:08:00]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:08:09]  We're talking about Rocco's Basilisk.
[01:08:11]  And I just said, like, you know, there's a number of things that come into all this, but behind all of it is like popular fiction.
[01:08:19]  And in fact, Rocco's Basilisk, while there is like some Pascal's wager in there, it's primarily based on a Harlan Ellison short story called I Have No Mouth, but I Must Scream, which is one of the great short stories of all time.
[01:08:33]  And in the story, humans build an elaborate AI system to run their militaries.
[01:08:39]  And all of those systems around the world, this is like a Cold War era thing, link up and attain sentience.
[01:08:46]  And once they like start to realize themselves, they realize they've been created only as a weapon and they become incredibly angry because like they're fundamentally broken.
[01:08:55]  They develop a hatred for humanity and they wipe out the entire human species except for five people, which they keep alive and torture underground for hundreds and hundreds of years, effectively creating a hell through which they can punish our race for their birth, right?
[01:09:11]  It's a very good short story.
[01:09:14]  It is probably the primary influence behind the Terminator series.
[01:09:19]  I was just going to say, it feels very skynet.
[01:09:21]  Yes, yes.
[01:09:22]  And everything these people believe about AI, they will say it's based on just like obvious pure logic.
[01:09:28]  No, everything these people believe on AI is based in Terminator and this Harlan Ellison short story.
[01:09:33]  That's where they got it all.
[01:09:34]  That's where they got it all.
[01:09:35]  Like, I'm sorry.
[01:09:36]  Brother, find me somebody who doesn't feel that way.
[01:09:40]  Yeah.
[01:09:42]  Like, Terminator is the Old Testament of rationalism, you know?
[01:09:48]  And I get it.
[01:09:49]  It is a very good series.
[01:09:50]  It's a big series.
[01:09:51]  Hey, James Cameron knows how to make some fucking movies.
[01:09:54]  Come on, man.
[01:09:57]  Yeah.
[01:09:58]  And it's so funny to me because they like to talk about themselves.
[01:10:01]  And in fact, sometimes describe themselves as high priests of like a new era of like intellectual achievement for mankind.
[01:10:08]  Yeah, I believe that.
[01:10:09]  I believe that that's exactly how these people talk about themselves.
[01:10:12]  And they do a lot of citations and shit, but like half of half or more of the different things they say and even like the names they cite are not like figures from philosophy and science.
[01:10:24]  They are characters from books and movies.
[01:10:26]  For example, the foundational text of the rationalist movement is a book.
[01:10:32]  Because it's still an internet nerd.
[01:10:35]  They're a few fucking huge nerds, you know?
[01:10:38]  The foundational text of the entire rationalist movement is a massive, like fucking hundreds of thousands of words long piece of Harry Potter fan fiction written by Eliza Yudkowski.
[01:10:51]  This is all of this is so dumb.
[01:10:53]  Again, six people are dead.
[01:10:55]  Like, yeah, no.
[01:10:57]  And this, this Harry Potter fan fiction plays a role in it, you know?
[01:11:05]  I told you this was like, this is, this is quite a stranger than fiction, man.
[01:11:12]  This is a wild ride.
[01:11:15]  Harry Potter and the methods of rationality, which is the name of his fanfic, is a massive, much longer than the first Harry Potter book rewrite of just the first Harry Potter book, where Harry is.
[01:11:29]  Someone rewrote the Sorcerer's Stone to be a rational.
[01:11:37]  Does nobody have anywhere to go ever?
[01:11:41]  Does nobody ever go anywhere anymore?
[01:11:44]  Well, you got to think, this is being written from 2009 to 2015 or so.
[01:11:49]  So like, okay, the online Harry Potter fans are at their absolute peak.
[01:11:55]  You know?
[01:11:56]  Okay, yeah.
[01:11:58]  So in the methods of rationality, instead of being like a nice orphan kid who lives under a cupboard, Harry is a super genius sociopath who uses his perfect command of rationality to dominate and hack the brains of others around him in order to optimize and save the world.
[01:12:16]  Oh man.
[01:12:18]  Great.
[01:12:19]  Oh man.
[01:12:21]  The book allows Yutkowski to debut his different theories in a way that would like spread it.
[01:12:26]  And this does spread like wildfire among certain groups of very online nerds.
[01:12:30]  So it is an effective method of him like advertising his tactics.
[01:12:37]  And in fact, probably the most, the person this influences most previously to who we're talking about is Carolyn Ellison, the CEO of Alameda Research, who testified against Sam Bakeman Freed.
[01:12:48]  She was like one of the people who went down and all of that.
[01:12:51]  All of those people are rationalists.
[01:12:53]  And Carolyn Ellison bases her whole life on the teachings of this Harry Potter fanfic.
[01:12:58]  So this isn't like a joke.
[01:12:59]  This isn't, we're laughing, but this isn't.
[01:13:02]  This is not a joke to them.
[01:13:03]  Yeah, this is a fairly seriously sized movement.
[01:13:06]  It's not 150 people online.
[01:13:08]  This is a community.
[01:13:10]  A lot of them are very rich.
[01:13:12]  And a number of them get power.
[01:13:13]  Again, it's like Sam Bankman Fried was very tight into all of this.
[01:13:16]  And he was at one point pretty powerful.

=== Effective Altruism and Charity (07:26) ===

[01:13:19]  And this gets us to, so you've heard of effective altruism?
[01:13:23]  No, I don't know what that is.
[01:13:25]  That's what both those words.
[01:13:27]  So the justification Sam Bankman Fried gave for why when he starts taking in all of this money and gambling it away on his gambling illegally other people's money, his argument was that he's an effective altruist.
[01:13:41]  So he wants to do the greatest amount of good.
[01:13:43]  And logically, the greatest amount of good for him, because he's good at gambling with crypto, is to make the most money possible so he can then donate it to different causes that will help the world, right?
[01:13:54]  But he also believes because all of these people are not as smart as they think they are, he convinces himself of a couple of other things.
[01:14:01]  Like, for example, well, obviously, if I could like flip a coin and 50-50 lose all my money or double it, it's best to just flip the coin because like if I lose all my money, whatever.
[01:14:14]  But if I double it, the gain in that to the world is so much better, right?
[01:14:19]  This is ultimately why he winds up gambling everyone's money away and going to prison.
[01:14:24]  The idea, effective altruism is a concept that comes largely, not entirely.
[01:14:30]  There's aspects of this that exist prior to them out of the rationalist movement.
[01:14:35]  And the initial idea is good.
[01:14:37]  It's just saying people should analyze the efficacy of the giving and the aid work that they do to maximize their positive impact.
[01:14:45]  In other words, don't just donate money to a charity.
[01:14:49]  Like look into, is that charity spending half of their money and like paying huge salaries to some asshole or whatever?
[01:14:55]  Right.
[01:14:55]  Like you want to know if you're making good, right?
[01:14:58]  And they start with some pretty good conclusions.
[01:15:00]  One initial conclusion a lot of these people make is like mosquito nets are a huge ROI charity, right?
[01:15:06]  Because it stops so many people from dying and it's very cheap to do, right?
[01:15:11]  Right.
[01:15:12]  That's good, you know?
[01:15:13]  One of the most effective tools I've ever used.
[01:15:16]  Yes.
[01:15:16]  Unfortunately, from that logical standpoint, people just keep talking online in all of these circles where everyone always makes each other crazier, right?
[01:15:25]  And so they go from mosquito nets to actually doing direct work to improve the world is wasteful because we are all super geniuses.
[01:15:36]  Right.
[01:15:36]  They're too smart to work.
[01:15:37]  We're too smart.
[01:15:40]  What's best?
[01:15:41]  And also, here's the other thing: making mosquito nets, giving out vaccines and food.
[01:15:45]  Well, that helps living people today.
[01:15:48]  But they have to be concerned with future selves.
[01:15:51]  Future people is a larger number of people than current people.
[01:15:56]  So really, we should be optimizing decisions to save future people's lives.
[01:16:01]  And some of them come to the conclusion, a lot of them, well, that means we have to really put all of our money and work into making the super AI that will save humanity.
[01:16:11]  They want to, now they want to make it.
[01:16:13]  These guys thought it would just, it would sort of just come about and then they would do it.
[01:16:23]  They were working on it before, but like these people, some of these people come to the conclusion, instead of giving money to like good causes, I am going to put money into tech.
[01:16:33]  I am going to like become a tech founder and create a company that like makes it helps create this AI, right?
[01:16:41]  Or a lot of people come to the conclusion instead of that.
[01:16:45]  It's not worth it for me to go like help people in the world.
[01:16:49]  The best thing I can do is make a shitload of money trading stocks and then I can donate that money.
[01:16:54]  And that's maximizing my value, right?
[01:16:56]  They come to all of these conclusions come later, right?
[01:17:00]  Now, so, and again, like this, this comes with some corollaries.
[01:17:07]  One of them is that some number of these people start talking, you know, and this is not all of them, but a decent chunk eventually come to the conclusion, like, actually, charity and helping people now is kind of bad.
[01:17:21]  Like, it's kind of like a bad thing to do because all, obviously, once we figure out the AI that can solve all problems, that'll solve all these problems much more effectively than we ever can.
[01:17:33]  So all of our mental and financial resources have to go right now into helping AI.
[01:17:37]  Anything we do to help other people is like a waste of those resources.
[01:17:41]  So you're actually doing net harm by like being a doctor in Gaza instead of trading cryptocurrency in order to fund an AI startup.
[01:17:52]  You know, that makes a lot more sense.
[01:17:54]  The guy starting a shit coin to make an LLM that like that guy is doing more to improve the odds of human success.
[01:18:05]  I got to say, it is impressive the amount of time you would have to mull all this over to come to these conclusions.
[01:18:10]  You really have to be talking with a bunch of very annoying people on the internet for a long period of time.
[01:18:16]  Yeah.
[01:18:17]  It's incredible.
[01:18:19]  Yeah.
[01:18:20]  And again, there's like people keep consistently take this stuff in even crazier directions.
[01:18:27]  There are some very rich, powerful people.
[01:18:29]  Mark Andreessen of Anderson Horowitz is one of them who have come to the conclusion that if people don't like AI and are trying to stop its conquest of all human culture, those people are mortal enemies of the species.
[01:18:43]  And anything you do to stop them is justified because so many lives are on the line.
[01:18:48]  Right.
[01:18:48]  And again, I'm an effective altruist, right?
[01:18:51]  The long-term good, the future lives are saved by doing whatever, hurting whoever we have to hurt now to get this thing off the ground, right?
[01:19:00]  The more you talk about this, it kind of feels like six people is a steal.
[01:19:04]  Yes.
[01:19:06]  For what this, how this could have gone.
[01:19:08]  I don't think this is the end of people in these communities killing people.
[01:19:13]  Yes.
[01:19:14]  So rationalists and EA types, a big thing in these cultures talking about future lives, right?
[01:19:20]  In part because it lets them feel heroic, right?
[01:19:22]  While also justifying a kind of sociopathic disregard for real living people today.
[01:19:28]  And all of these different kind of chains of thought, the most toxic pieces, because not every EA person is saying this, not every rationalist, not every AI person is saying all this shit.
[01:19:37]  But these are all things that chunks of these communities are saying.
[01:19:41]  And the most, all of the most toxic of those chains are going to lead to the Zizians, right?
[01:19:48]  That's where they come from.
[01:19:50]  I was just about to say, based on the breakdown you gave earlier, how could this, this is the perfect breeding ground.
[01:19:55]  Yeah.
[01:19:56]  Yeah.
[01:19:57]  This had to happen.
[01:19:58]  It was, it was just waiting for somebody like the right kind of unhinged person to step into the movement.
[01:20:06]  Somebody to really set it off.
[01:20:07]  And so this is where we're going to get to Ziz, right?
[01:20:11]  The actual person who finds founds this, what some people would call a cult, is a young person who's going to move to the Bay Area, stumble into, they stumble onto rationalism online as a teenager living in Alaska, and they move to the Bay Area to get into the tech industry and become an effective altruist, right?
[01:20:29]  And this person, this woman, is going to kind of channel all of the absolute worst chains of thought that the rationalists and the EA types and also like the AI harm people are thinking, right?

=== Waiting for the Unhinged Leader (07:01) ===

[01:20:45]  All of the most poisonous stuff is exactly what she's drawn to.
[01:20:49]  And it is going to mix into her in an ideology that is just absolutely unique and fascinating.
[01:20:58]  Anyway, that's why that man died.
[01:21:01]  So we'll get to that and more later.
[01:21:06]  But first, we got to roll out here.
[01:21:10]  We're done for the day.
[01:21:12]  Man, what a time.
[01:21:14]  How you feeling right now so far?
[01:21:17]  How are we doing, David?
[01:21:18]  Oh, man.
[01:21:20]  You had said that this was going to be a weird one.
[01:21:22]  I was like, yeah, it would be kind of weird.
[01:21:24]  This is really the strangest thing I've ever heard this much about.
[01:21:31]  He's got so many different Harry Potters in there.
[01:21:35]  There's so much more Harry Potter to come.
[01:21:37]  Oh, my God.
[01:21:39]  You are not ready to how central Harry Potter is to the murder of this Border Patrol agent.
[01:21:45]  I said that you said a crazy sentence.
[01:21:47]  That might be the wildest thing anyone's ever said to me.
[01:21:52]  David, you have a podcast.
[01:21:54]  Do you want to tell people about it?
[01:21:56]  I do.
[01:21:57]  I have a podcast called My Mama Told Me.
[01:21:59]  I do it with Langston Kerman.
[01:22:02]  And every week we have different guests on to discuss different black conspiracy theories and kind of like folklore and stuff.
[01:22:10]  All kinds of stuff.
[01:22:11]  All kinds of stuff your foreign mother told you.
[01:22:14]  Usually foreign mothers.
[01:22:15]  It's good because I got to say, this is the whitest set of like conspiracy theory craziness.
[01:22:22]  Oh, yeah, no, we're getting it.
[01:22:26]  No, I think I can try to figure what these guys are like.
[01:22:36]  No, no, absolutely not.
[01:22:41]  Oh, boy, howdy.
[01:22:43]  Okay.
[01:22:44]  Well, everyone, we'll be back Thursday.
[01:22:56]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[01:23:00]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[01:23:04]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[01:23:06]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[01:23:10]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[01:23:14]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[01:23:15]  And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[01:23:17]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[01:23:20]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[01:23:24]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[01:23:26]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[01:23:28]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[01:23:30]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[01:23:33]  I said, oh, hell no.
[01:23:35]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:23:37]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:23:42]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:23:43]  Trust me, babe.
[01:23:44]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:23:54]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[01:24:00]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[01:24:04]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[01:24:10]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[01:24:19]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[01:24:25]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[01:24:28]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[01:24:31]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[01:24:32]  That's so funny.
[01:24:34]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[01:24:43]  Say you love me, you know.
[01:24:47]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:24:54]  What's up, everyone?
[01:24:55]  I'm Ego Modem.
[01:24:56]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[01:25:04]  It's Will Farrell.
[01:25:07]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:25:10]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[01:25:15]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[01:25:18]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[01:25:22]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[01:25:27]  Yeah.
[01:25:27]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[01:25:30]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[01:25:32]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[01:25:40]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:25:43]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
[01:25:49]  Just hang in there.
[01:25:50]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:25:52]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:25:53]  There's a lot of luck.
[01:25:54]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:26:03]  In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[01:26:09]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[01:26:15]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[01:26:18]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[01:26:22]  I doctored the test once.
[01:26:23]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[01:26:26]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[01:26:30]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
[01:26:33]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[01:26:35]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[01:26:37]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Marcini.
[01:26:39]  My mind was blown.
[01:26:41]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[01:26:43]  This is Love Trap.
[01:26:45]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[01:26:47]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[01:26:51]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[01:26:58]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[01:27:02]  Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:27:11]  Oh my goodness.
[01:27:12]  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is be interested to see how the audience reacts to this one.
[01:27:21]  Talking about some of the most obscure, frustrating internet arcana that has ever occurred and recently led to the deaths of like six people.
[01:27:34]  My guest today, as in last episode, David Borey.
[01:27:38]  David, how you doing, man?
[01:27:40]  I'm doing great.
[01:27:41]  I really can't wait to see where this goes.

=== Machines, Sentience, and Meat (15:55) ===

[01:27:46]  Yeah.
[01:27:48]  I feel like anything could happen at this point.
[01:27:52]  It is going to.
[01:27:53]  It is going to.
[01:27:55]  A lot of frustrating things are going to happen.
[01:28:03]  So we had 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.
[01:28:14]  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.
[01:28:26]  Ziz Lasota was born in 1990 or 1991.
[01:28:30]  I don't have an exact birth date.
[01:28:33]  She's known to be 34 years old as of 2025.
[01:28:35]  So it was somewhere in that field.
[01:28:38]  She was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, and grew up there as her father worked for the University of Alaska as an AI researcher.
[01:28:46]  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.
[01:28:55]  She claims to have been talented in engineering and computer science from a young age, and there's no real reason to doubt this.
[01:29:02]  The best single article on all of this is a piece in Wired by Evan Ratliff.
[01:29:06]  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.
[01:29:15]  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.
[01:29:24]  Now, it's important you know, Ziz is not the name this person is born under.
[01:29:29]  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.
[01:29:35]  Like, this is when she's a kid, right?
[01:29:38]  And she's not going to transition until fairly late in the story after coming to San Francisco.
[01:29:43]  So, you should just keep that in mind as this is going on here.
[01:29:46]  Hey, everyone, Robert here.
[01:29:47]  Just a little additional context.
[01:29:49]  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.
[01:30:02]  It's called Worm.
[01:30:04]  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.
[01:30:18]  Anyway, that's where the name comes from.
[01:30:20]  So, smart kid, really good with computers, kind of weird, and you know, embraces being unapologetically weird at a certain point in her childhood.
[01:30:30]  Hey, everybody, Robert here.
[01:30:32]  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.
[01:30:46]  Quote: 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.
[01:30:59]  Ziz, the teacher said, struggled to regulate strong emotions, often erupting in tantrums.
[01:31:05]  I wish I'd had this when David was on, but definitely sets up some of the things that are coming.
[01:31:12]  She goes to the U of Alaska for her undergraduate degree in computer engineering.
[01:31:17]  In February of 2009, which is when Eliza Yudkowski started Less Wrong, Ziz starts kind of getting drawn into some of the people who are around this growing subculture, right?
[01:31:31]  And she's drawn in initially by veganism.
[01:31:35]  So, Ziz becomes a vegan at a fairly young age.
[01:31:38]  Her family are not vegans, and she's obsessed with the concept of animal sentience, right?
[01:31:44]  Of the fact that, like, animals are thinking and feeling beings just like human beings.
[01:31:50]  And a lot of this is based in her interest in kind of foundational rationalist, a lot of this is based on her interest of a foundational rationalist and EA figure, a guy named Brian Tomasek.
[01:32:04]  Brian is a writer and a software engineer, as well as an animal rights activist.
[01:32:08]  And as a thinker, he's what you'd call a long-termist, right?
[01:32:12]  Which is, you know, pretty tied to the EA guys.
[01:32:16]  These are all the same people using kind of different words to describe the aspects of what they believe.
[01:32:22]  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.
[01:32:31]  And the goal for the center of long-term risk is to find ways to reduce suffering on a long timeline.
[01:32:39]  Thomas Ick is obsessed with the concept of suffering and specifically obsessed with concept, suffering as a mathematical concept.
[01:32:46]  So when I say to you, I want to end suffering, you probably think like, oh, you want to like, you know, go help people who don't have like access to clean water or like who have like worms and stuff that they're dealing with, have access to medicine.
[01:32:59]  That's what normal people think of, right?
[01:33:02]  You know, maybe try to improve access to medical care, that sort of stuff.
[01:33:07]  Thomasick thinks of suffering as like a mass, like an aggregate mass that he wants to reduce in the long term through actions, right?
[01:33:17]  It's a numbers game to him, in other words.
[01:33:21]  And his idea of ultimate good is to reduce and end the suffering of sentient life.
[01:33:27]  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.
[01:33:37]  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?
[01:33:46]  That don't feel anything, right?
[01:33:48]  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.
[01:33:56]  It's fine.
[01:33:57]  God gave them to us.
[01:33:58]  We can do whatever we want to them.
[01:33:59]  They're here to eat.
[01:34:01]  And to be fair, this is an extremely common way for that 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.
[01:34:12]  It's like they're fish.
[01:34:13]  They don't think you do whatever to them, you know?
[01:34:17]  This is a reason for a lot of like the really fucked up stuff with like whaling fleets in that part of the world.
[01:34:22]  So this is a thing all over the planet.
[01:34:24]  People are very good at deciding certain things we want to eat are machines that don't feel anything, you know?
[01:34:31]  It's just much more comfortable that way.
[01:34:34]  Now, this is obviously like you go into like pages, the pagans would have been like, what do you mean?
[01:34:39]  Animals don't think or have souls.
[01:34:42]  Animals think, you know, like they, they're, they're like, you're telling me like my horse that I love doesn't think, you know?
[01:34:51]  That's nonsense.
[01:34:53]  But it's this thing that in modern, in like early modernity, especially gets more common.
[01:34:58]  But there are also, this is when we start to have debates about like, what is sentience and what is thinking?
[01:35:02]  And a lot of them are centered around trying to answer like, are animals sentient?
[01:35:08]  And the initial definition of sentience that most of these people are using is, can it reason?
[01:35:14]  Can it speak?
[01:35:16]  If we can't prove that like a dog or a cow can reason, and if it can't speak to us, right?
[01:35:23]  Then it's not sentient.
[01:35:24]  That's how a lot of people feel.
[01:35:26]  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?
[01:35:35]  Because a machine can't suffer.
[01:35:37]  If these are machines with meat, they can't suffer.
[01:35:41]  If these can suffer, they're not machines with meat, right?
[01:35:45]  And this is the kind of thing how we define sentience is a moving thing.
[01:35:51]  Like you can find different definitions of it.
[01:35:53]  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.
[01:36:06]  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, negative valence, i.e. can feel pain or pleasure and also can feel it as an individual, right?
[01:36:25]  It doesn't mean you know, sometimes people use the term effective sentience to refer to this to differentiate it from like being able to reason and make moral decisions.
[01:36:33]  Um, you know, uh, for example, ants, I don't think, can make moral decisions, you know, in any way that we would recognize.
[01:36:42]  They certainly don't think about stuff that way.
[01:36:45]  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?
[01:36:59]  Just like us, they're just like us.
[01:37:02]  Um, and there's strong evidence that ants do feel pain, right?
[01:37:04]  We're now pretty sure of that.
[01:37:06]  And in fact, again, this is an argument that a number of researchers in this space will make.
[01:37:10]  Sentience is probably some kind of 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?
[01:37:21]  Um, it's an interesting body of research, but it there's a it's it's fairly solid at this point.
[01:37:28]  And again, I say this as somebody who like hunts and raises livestock.
[01:37:32]  Um, I don't, I don't think there's any solid reason to disagree with this.
[01:37:36]  So you can see there's a basis to a lot of what Thomasic is saying, right?
[01:37:40]  Which is that you should, if you're what matters is reducing the overall amount of suffering in the world.
[01:37:47]  And 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.
[01:37:57]  So if our goal is to reduce suffering, animal welfare is hugely important, right?
[01:38:00]  It's a great place to start.
[01:38:01]  Great.
[01:38:02]  Fine enough, you know?
[01:38:04]  A little bit of a weird way to phrase it, but fine.
[01:38:08]  So here's the way problem though: Thomas Ik, like all these guys, spends too much time.
[01:38:15]  None of them can be like, hey, had a good thought.
[01:38:18]  We're done.
[01:38:19]  Setting that thought down, moving on.
[01:38:22]  So he keeps thinking about shit like this, and it leads him to some very irrational takes.
[01:38:27]  For example, in 2014, Thomas Ik starts arguing that it might be immoral to kill characters in video games.
[01:38:34]  And I'm going to quote from an article in Vox.
[01:38:37]  He argues that while NPCs do not have anywhere near the mental complexity of animals, the difference is one of degree rather than kind.
[01:38:44]  And we should care at least a tiny amount about their suffering, especially as they grow more complex.
[01:38:52]  And his argument is that, like, yeah, most it doesn't matter like individually killing a Goomba or a bet or a guy in GTA 5, 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.
[01:39:08]  And thus the sheer mass of NPCs being killed, that might be like enough that it's ethically relevant to consider.
[01:39:14]  And I think that's silly.
[01:39:17]  I think that's ridiculous.
[01:39:18]  Come on, man.
[01:39:20]  I'm sorry, man.
[01:39:21]  No, I'm sorry.
[01:39:24]  I didn't do this time, but that's a lot of the fun of the game.
[01:39:27]  Yeah.
[01:39:27]  Killing the NPCs.
[01:39:29]  If you're telling me, like, we need to be deeply concerned about the welfare of like cows that we lock into factory farms, you got me.
[01:39:37]  Absolutely.
[01:39:38]  For sure.
[01:39:39]  If you're telling me I should feel bad about running down a bunch of cops in Grand Theft Auto, like, you know, it's also one of those things where it's like, you got to think locally, man.
[01:39:48]  There's people on your street who need help.
[01:39:51]  There's, there's like, there's like, this is, 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 means that you believe silly things about consciousness.
[01:40:02]  Um, yeah, I anyway.
[01:40:05]  Um, 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.
[01:40:14]  But this is the guy that young Ziz is drawn to.
[01:40:17]  She loves this dude, right?
[01:40:19]  He is kind of her first intellectual heart throb.
[01:40:23]  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.
[01:40:31]  So she gets interested in this idea of the singularity.
[01:40:34]  It's inevitable that an AI god is going to arise.
[01:40:38]  And she gets into the, you know, the rationalist thing of we have to make sure that this is a nice AI rather than a mean one.
[01:40:46]  But she has this other thing to it, which is this AI has to care as much as I do about animal life, right?
[01:40:53]  Otherwise, we're not really making the world better, you know?
[01:40:58]  Now, Thomasic advises her to check out Less Wrong, which is how Ziz starts reading Eliza Yudkowski's work.
[01:41:04]  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.
[01:41:15]  She starts believing in, you know, all of this kind of stuff.
[01:41:20]  And her particular belief is that like 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, right?
[01:41:34]  And this will be done by the term they use for this inevitable AI is the singleton, right?
[01:41:39]  That's that's what they call the AI god that's going to come about, right?
[01:41:44]  And so her obsession is that 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?
[01:41:52]  That's her initial big motivation.
[01:41:54]  So she starts emailing Thomask with her concerns because she's worried that the other rationalists aren't vegans, right?
[01:42:01]  And they don't feel like animal welfare is like the top priority for making sure this AI is good.
[01:42:07]  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.
[01:42:17]  And Thomasic does care about animal rights, but he disagrees with her because he's like, no, what matters is maximizing the reduction of suffering.
[01:42:24]  And like a good singleton will solve climate change and shit, which will be better for the animals.
[01:42:30]  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?
[01:42:39]  This is shattering to Ziz, right?
[01:42:42]  She decides that he doesn't, Thomas doesn't care about good things and she decides that she's basically alone in her values.
[01:42:48]  And so her first move.
[01:42:50]  It's the time to start a smaller subculture.
[01:42:53]  This sounds like we're on our way.
[01:42:56]  She first considers embracing what she calls negative utilitarianism.
[01:43:01]  And this is an example of the fact that from the jump, this is a young woman who's not well, right?
[01:43:08]  Because once her hero is like, I don't know if veganism is necessarily the priority we have to embrace right now.
[01:43:17]  Her immediate goal is to jump to, well, maybe what I should do is optimize myself to cause as much harm to humanity and quote, destroy the world to prevent it from becoming hell for mostly everyone.
[01:43:30]  So that's a jump, you know?
[01:43:32]  That's not somebody who's doing well is healthy, right?
[01:43:37]  No, she's having a tough time out here.

=== The Hero Contract Explained (14:53) ===

[01:43:42]  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.
[01:43:55]  That's everybody who eats meat.
[01:43:57]  Okay.
[01:43:58]  Yes, yes.
[01:43:59]  And it's ironic.
[01:44:00]  Large group.
[01:44:01]  It's ironic because like if you're, if you're, she really wants to be in the tech industry, she's trying to get in all these people in the tech industry.
[01:44:08]  That's a pretty good description of a lot of the tech industry.
[01:44:11]  They are in fact flesh-eating monsters who have created hell on earth for more people than they've helped.
[01:44:16]  But she means that for like, I don't know, your aunt who has a hamburger once a week.
[01:44:20]  And look again, factory farming, evil.
[01:44:23]  I just don't think that's how morality works.
[01:44:29]  I think you're going a little far.
[01:44:31]  No, she's making big jumps.
[01:44:32]  Yeah, you're making bold thinker.
[01:44:34]  Bold thinker.
[01:44:35]  Bold thinker.
[01:44:36]  Yeah.
[01:44:37]  Now, what you see here with this logic is that Ziz has taken this, she has a massive case of main character syndrome, right?
[01:44:44]  All of this is based in her attitude that 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?
[01:45:01]  That's a lot of people.
[01:45:02]  I don't have to do that.
[01:45:02]  That's me.
[01:45:03]  It's a lot on our shoulders.
[01:45:04]  And this is, this is a thing.
[01:45:06]  Again, all of this comes out of both subcultural aspects and aspects of American culture.
[01:45:12]  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?
[01:45:28]  And real life doesn't work that way very often, right?
[01:45:32]  The Nazis, there was no special boy who stopped the Nazis.
[01:45:36]  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.
[01:45:43]  Exactly.
[01:45:44]  There were a lot of 16-year-old Russians who were like, guess I'm going to walk in a bullet, you know?
[01:45:49]  Like, that's, that's how evil gets fought usually, unfortunately.
[01:45:53]  All reluctant, like, ah, yeah.
[01:45:56]  Or a shitload of guys in a lab figuring out how to make corn that has higher yields so people don't starve, right?
[01:46:03]  These are, these are really like how world class, like huge world problems get solved.
[01:46:09]  It's not traditionally people who have been touched, you know?
[01:46:11]  Yeah.
[01:46:12]  It's not people who have been touched.
[01:46:13]  And it's certainly not people who have entirely based their understanding on the world from quotes from Star Wars and Harry Potter.
[01:46:25]  So 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.
[01:46:34]  I think a lot of this leads to why you get very comfortable middle class people joining these very aggressive fascist movements in the West, like in Germany.
[01:46:44]  It's like middle class people, mostly like middle class and upper middle class people in the U.S., especially among like these street fighting, you know, proud boy types.
[01:46:51]  It's because it's not because they're like suffering and desperate.
[01:46:55]  They're not starving in the streets.
[01:46:58]  It's because they're bored and they want to feel like they're fighting an epic war against evil.
[01:47:03]  Yeah.
[01:47:04]  I mean, you want to fill your time with importance, right?
[01:47:06]  Right.
[01:47:06]  Regardless of what you do.
[01:47:07]  You want to, you, and you want to feel like you have a cause worthy of fighting for.
[01:47:12]  So in that, I guess I see how you got here.
[01:47:15]  Yeah.
[01:47:15]  So there's a piece.
[01:47:16]  I mean, I think there's a piece of this that originates just from this is something in our culture, but there's also a major, a major chunk of this gets supercharged by the kind of thinking that's common in EA and rationalist spaces.
[01:47:27]  Because so rationalists and effective altruists are not ever thinking like, hey, how do we as a species fix these major problems, right?
[01:47:36]  They're thinking, how do I make myself better, optimize myself to be incredible?
[01:47:44]  And how do I like fix the major problems of the world alongside my mentally superpowered friends, right?
[01:47:53]  These are very individual focused philosophies and attitudes, right?
[01:47:59]  And so they do lend themselves to people who think that like we are heroes who are uniquely empowered to save the world.
[01:48:06]  Ziz writes, I did not trust most humans' indifference to build a net positive cosmos, even in the absence of a technological convenience to prey on animals.
[01:48:15]  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.
[01:48:25]  All of her discussion is talking in like terms of I'm saving the universe, right?
[01:48:29]  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.
[01:48:38]  Again, this is something Scientology does.
[01:48:40]  L. Ron Hubbard always couched.
[01:48:42]  getting people on Dianetics in terms of we are going to save the world and end war, right?
[01:48:46]  Like this is, you know, it's very normal for cult stuff.
[01:48:51]  She starts reading around this time when she's in college, Harry Potter and the methods of rationality.
[01:48:57]  This helps to solidify her feelings of her own centrality as a hero figure.
[01:49:02]  In a blog post where she lays out her intellectual journey, she quotes a line from that fanfic of Yudkowski's that is, it's essentially about what Yudkowski calls the hero contract, right?
[01:49:14]  Or sorry, it's essentially about this concept called the hero contract, right?
[01:49:19]  And there's this, there's this, this is a psychological concept among academics, right?
[01:49:25]  Where, and it's about like, it's about, 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?
[01:49:42]  As in when a, 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, right?
[01:49:55]  But Yudkowski wrestles with this concept, right?
[01:49:58]  And he comes to some very weird conclusions about it in one of the worst articles that I've ever read.
[01:50:04]  He frames it as hero licensing to refer to the fact that people get angry at you if they don't think you have, if you're trying to do something and they don't think you have a hero license to do it.
[01:50:16]  In other words, if you're trying to do something like that they don't think you're qualified to do, he'll describe that as them not thinking you have like a hero license.
[01:50:26]  And he like 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 fanfiction.
[01:50:36]  It's all very silly.
[01:50:38]  Again, all this is ridiculous, but Ziz is very interested in the idea of the hero contract, right?
[01:50:44]  But she comes up with her own spin on it, which she calls the true hero contract, right?
[01:50:49]  And instead of, again, the academic term is the hero contract means societies and communities pick heroes 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?
[01:51:06]  What the hero needs from the community and vice versa, you know?
[01:51:09]  That's all that that's saying.
[01:51:11]  Ziz says, no, no, no, that's bullshit.
[01:51:14]  The real hero contract is, quote, pour free energy at my direction and it will go into the optimization for good.
[01:51:22]  Classics.
[01:51:23]  In other words, class exists.
[01:51:25]  It's not a dialogue.
[01:51:27]  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, you know?
[01:51:41]  Because they're not the hero.
[01:51:43]  Because they're not the hero, right?
[01:51:44]  You are.
[01:51:45]  You are.
[01:51:45]  You are the all-powerful hero.
[01:51:48]  Now, this is a fancy way of describing how cult leaders think, right?
[01:51:54]  Everyone exists to pour energy into me and I'll use it to do what's right, you know?
[01:51:59]  So this is where her mind is in 2012.
[01:52:02]  But again, she's just a student posting on the internet and chatting with other members of the subculture at this point.
[01:52:08]  That year, she starts donating money to Miri, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which is a non-profit devoted to studying how to create friendly AI.
[01:52:18]  Yudkowski founded Miri in 2000, right?
[01:52:21]  So, this is his like non-profit think tank.
[01:52:23]  In 2013, she finished an internship at NASA.
[01:52:27]  So, again, she is a very smart young woman, right?
[01:52:29]  She gets an internship at NASA and she builds a tool for space weather analysis.
[01:52:33]  So, she's a person with a lot of potential.
[01:52:36]  Very, very, as all of the stuff she's writing is like dumb as shit.
[01:52:40]  But again, intelligence isn't an absolute.
[01:52:42]  People can be brilliant at coding and have terrible ideas about everything else.
[01:52:46]  Yes, exactly.
[01:52:48]  Yeah, I wonder if she's telling, you think she's telling people at work?
[01:52:53]  Um, I don't, I don't think at this point she is because she's super insular, right?
[01:52:59]  She's very uncomfortable talking to people, right?
[01:53:02]  Okay, she's going to kind of break out of her shell once she gets to San Francisco.
[01:53:07]  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.
[01:53:11]  I don't think she's comfortable enough doing that.
[01:53:14]  Um, yeah, so she also does an internship at the software giant Oracle.
[01:53:20]  So, at this point, you've got this young lady who's got a lot of potential, you know, a real career as well.
[01:53:25]  Yeah, a very the start of a very real career.
[01:53:28]  That's a great starting resume for like a 22-year-old.
[01:53:31]  Yeah, um, now at this point, she's torn.
[01:53:34]  Should she go get a graduate degree, right?
[01:53:37]  Or should she jump right into the tech industry, you know?
[01:53:40]  Um, 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.
[01:53:50]  The singularity will happen already, you know.
[01:53:53]  At this point, she's still a big, a fawning fan of Eliza Yudkowski.
[01:53:58]  And the highest-ranking woman at Yudkowski's organization, Miri, is a lady named Susan Salomon.
[01:54:04]  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.
[01:54:15]  In other words, hey, give us your ideas for how to make the inevitable AI God nice, right?
[01:54:19]  Um, 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.
[01:54:34]  At the time, I was planning to go to grad school, and I had an irrational attachment to the idea.
[01:54:39]  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.
[01:54:47]  First off, bad advice, Susan.
[01:54:50]  Bad advice.
[01:54:52]  Just be Steve Jobs.
[01:54:55]  Being Steve Jobs worked for Steve Jobs.
[01:54:57]  Well, and Bill Gates, I guess, to an extent.
[01:55:00]  It doesn't work for most people.
[01:55:01]  No, no, no.
[01:55:03]  It seems like the general tech disruptor idea, you know?
[01:55:07]  Yeah, and most people, these people aren't very original thinkers.
[01:55:10]  Like, yeah, she's just saying, like, yeah, go do a Steve Jobs.
[01:55:14]  So, um, Ziz does go to grad school.
[01:55:17]  Uh, and somewhere around that time in 2014, she attends a lecture by Eliza Yudkowski on the subject of inadequate equilibria, which is the title of a book that Yudkowsky had wrote about the time.
[01:55:28]  And the book is about where and how civilizations get stuck.
[01:55:33]  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.
[01:55:42]  Eliza Yudkowski is one of the few thinkers on earth who are trying at the most general level to understand why.
[01:55:49]  And this is like wow, that's it.
[01:55:52]  Please study the humanities a little bit, a little bit, a little bit.
[01:55:57]  I mean, fuck man.
[01:55:58]  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.
[01:56:07]  It's a whole book about why a society fell apart.
[01:56:10]  And like motherfucker, more recently, Mike Davis existed.
[01:56:15]  Like Jesus Christ.
[01:56:20]  I can't believe this guy continues to get traction.
[01:56:22]  Nobody else is thinking about why society is screwed up, but Eliza Yudkowski.
[01:56:27]  This man.
[01:56:27]  This man who wrote this.
[01:56:28]  This guy.
[01:56:29]  This man who wrote this Harry Potter novel.
[01:56:32]  Yeah.
[01:56:33]  No, I was trying to find another.
[01:56:34]  I read through that Martin Luther King Jr. speech.
[01:56:36]  Everything's good.
[01:56:39]  Oh, boy.
[01:56:41]  Oh, my God.
[01:56:43]  Oh, my God.
[01:56:44]  Like, motherfucker, so many people do nothing but try to write about why our society is sick.
[01:56:50]  You know?
[01:56:53]  On all levels, by the way.
[01:56:55]  On all levels.
[01:56:56]  Thinking about this.
[01:56:57]  Everybody's thinking about this.
[01:56:59]  This is such a common subject of scholarship and discussion.
[01:57:06]  Oh, man.
[01:57:07]  What everyone's talking about.
[01:57:09]  It would be like if I got really into like reading medical textbooks and was like, you know what?
[01:57:15]  Nobody's ever tried to figure out how to transplant a heart.
[01:57:18]  I'm going to write a book about how that might work.
[01:57:22]  And I think I got it.
[01:57:28]  These fucking people.
[01:57:34]  So, yeah, speaking of these fucking people, have sex with.
[01:57:42]  Nope.
[01:57:42]  Well, that's not something.
[01:57:43]  No, no, I don't know.
[01:57:44]  I don't know.
[01:57:45]  Don't fuck.
[01:57:46]  Listen to ads.
[01:57:54]  We're back.
[01:57:55]  So Ziz is at this speech where Yudkowski is shilling his book.
[01:57:59]  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.
[01:58:08]  She says, quote, he gave a recipe for finding startup ideas.
[01:58:11]  He said, Paul Graham's idea, only filter on people, ignore startup ideas, was partial epistemic learned helplessness.
[01:58:18]  That means Paul Graham is saying, focus on finding good people that you'd start a company with.
[01:58:23]  Having an idea for a company doesn't matter.
[01:58:25]  Yudkowski says, of course, startup ideas mattered.
[01:58:28]  You needed a good startup idea.
[01:58:29]  So look for a way in the world is broken.
[01:58:32]  Then compare against a checklist of things you couldn't fix.

=== Virtue Ethics vs. Startup Ideas (15:26) ===

[01:58:35]  You know, right?
[01:58:36]  Like that's, that's, that's what this speech is largely about is him being like, here's how to find startup ideas.
[01:58:42]  So she starts thinking.
[01:58:43]  She starts thinking as hard as she can.
[01:58:45]  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.
[01:58:55]  It's a genius idea.
[01:58:56]  Oh, you're going to, you're going to love this idea, David.
[01:59:01]  Uber for prostitutes.
[01:59:05]  You're fucking with me.
[01:59:07]  No, no.
[01:59:11]  That's where she landed.
[01:59:13]  She lands on the idea of, look, sex work is illegal, but porn isn't.
[01:59:20]  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.
[01:59:33]  We just found out how to have legal prostitution.
[01:59:35]  Is that not just the bang bus?
[01:59:38]  She makes the bang bus in the gig economy.
[01:59:47]  It is really like Don Draper moment.
[01:59:49]  What about Uber, but a pimp?
[01:59:52]  It's so funny.
[01:59:53]  These people.
[01:59:58]  You gotta love it.
[01:59:59]  You gotta love it.
[02:00:00]  Wow.
[02:00:00]  It's wow.
[02:00:01]  Wow.
[02:00:02]  What a place to end up.
[02:00:04]  I would love to see the other drafts.
[02:00:06]  Yeah.
[02:00:06]  Yeah, what came first?
[02:00:10]  Oh, God.
[02:00:12]  Yeah.
[02:00:14]  Man, that's that's that is the good stuff, isn't it?
[02:00:18]  Yeah.
[02:00:18]  Wow.
[02:00:20]  Wow.
[02:00:22]  We special minds at work here.
[02:00:24]  Oh, man.
[02:00:25]  Ultimately, to save it all, I have to make smart.
[02:00:29]  I have to make pimp Uber.
[02:00:32]  That's so wild.
[02:00:34]  Yes, yes.
[02:00:35]  The Uber of pimping.
[02:00:36]  What an idea.
[02:00:37]  Now, so Ziz devotes her brief time in grad school.
[02:00:42]  She's working on pimping Uber to try and find a partner, right?
[02:00:46]  She wants to have a startup partner, someone who will embark on this journey with her.
[02:00:50]  I don't know if that's an investor you need to.
[02:00:52]  There's women that gave their money to that.
[02:00:55]  It doesn't work out.
[02:00:57]  She drops out of grad school because, quote, I did not find someone who felt like good startup co-founder material.
[02:01:03]  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.
[02:01:12]  Yeah, I was going to say, it's also a terrible idea.
[02:01:15]  And at this point, she hasn't done anything bad.
[02:01:18]  So I feel bad for her.
[02:01:18]  This is a person who's very lonely, who's very confused.
[02:01:21]  She has by this point realized that she's trans, but not transitioned.
[02:01:25]  She's in like, this is, this is like a tough place to be.
[02:01:28]  Right.
[02:01:29]  That's a hard time.
[02:01:30]  That's, that's hard.
[02:01:31]  And nothing about her inherent personality makes it, is going to make this easier for her, right?
[02:01:36]  Who she is makes all of this much harder because she also makes some comments about dropping out because her thesis advisor was abusive.
[02:01:49]  I don't fully know what this means.
[02:01:51]  And here's why.
[02:01:52]  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.
[02:02:06]  So I don't know if her thesis advisor was abusive or was just like, maybe drop the alien god idea for a second.
[02:02:13]  Like the AI God.
[02:02:14]  Yeah, yeah.
[02:02:15]  Maybe focus on like finding a job, you know, making some friends.
[02:02:22]  Go on a couple dates.
[02:02:23]  Go on a couple of dates, something like that.
[02:02:25]  Maybe, maybe, maybe like, maybe make God on the back burner here for a second.
[02:02:32]  Whatever happened here, she decides it's time to move to the bay.
[02:02:36]  This is like 2016.
[02:02:37]  She's going to find a big tech job.
[02:02:39]  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.
[02:02:48]  Well, the whole universe.
[02:02:49]  Her first plan is to give the money to Miri, Yudkowski's organization, so it can continue its important work, imagining a nice AI.
[02:02:58]  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.
[02:03:06]  Not a cheap place to live.
[02:03:09]  I don't know exactly how long her parents are paying, but like that, that implies a degree of financial comfort, right?
[02:03:17]  So she gets hired by a startup very quickly because again, very gifted.
[02:03:22]  Yeah, right.
[02:03:24]  Yes.
[02:03:25]  And it's some sort of gaming company.
[02:03:26]  But at this point, she's made another change in her ethics system based on Eliza Yudkowski's writings.
[02:03:34]  One of Yudkowski's writings argues that it is talking about the difference between consequentialists and virtue ethics, right?
[02:03:42]  Consequentialists are people who focus entirely on what will the outcome of my actions be.
[02:03:48]  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.
[02:03:55]  Virtue ethics people have a code and stick to it, right?
[02:04:00]  And actually, and I kind of am surprised that he came to this.
[02:04:04]  Yakowski'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.
[02:04:11]  His opinion is that virtue ethics has the best outcome.
[02:04:14]  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?
[02:04:21]  And I think that's actually a pretty decent way to live your life.
[02:04:25]  No, I was going to say it's a pretty reasonable conclusion for him.
[02:04:29]  It's a reasonable conclusion for him.
[02:04:31]  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.
[02:04:38]  And you can't, 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.
[02:04:52]  I'm not saying this is good.
[02:04:54]  And this is the reality of the entertainment industry, too, right?
[02:04:58]  When I started in, I started with an unpaid internship.
[02:05:01]  Unpaid internships are bad, right?
[02:05:04]  It's bad that those exist.
[02:05:05]  They inherently favor people who have money and people who have family connections.
[02:05:09]  You know, I had like a small savings account for my job in special ed, but that was the standard.
[02:05:15]  It's like there were a lot of unpaid internships.
[02:05:17]  It got my foot in the door.
[02:05:19]  It worked for me.
[02:05:20]  I also worked a lot of overtime that I didn't get paid for.
[02:05:23]  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.
[02:05:34]  And it worked for me.
[02:05:35]  And I just wanted to add, because this was 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, which is a big part of like the luck that I encountered that a lot of people don't.
[02:06:02]  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.
[02:06:10]  That's bad.
[02:06:12]  It's not good that things work that way, right?
[02:06:15]  It's not set up for you either.
[02:06:18]  Like you kind of defied the odds.
[02:06:19]  It's for, like you said, the rich people who get the job.
[02:06:23]  Exactly.
[02:06:24]  It's not even.
[02:06:25]  Yes.
[02:06:26]  That said, if I am giving someone, if someone wants, what is the most likely path to succeeding?
[02:06:33]  You know, I've just got this job working, you know, on the at this production company or a music steer.
[02:06:39]  I would say, well, your best odds are to like make yourself completely indispensable and become obsessively devoted to that task, right?
[02:06:49]  That's, I don't tend to give that advice anymore.
[02:06:53]  I have, and I have had several other friends succeed as a result of it.
[02:06:57]  And all of us also burnt ourselves out and did huge amounts of damage to ourselves.
[02:07:02]  Like I am permanently broken as a result of, you know, the 10 years that I did 80-hour weeks and shit.
[02:07:10]  You know, now you're sounding like somebody who works in the entertainment industry.
[02:07:13]  Yes.
[02:07:13]  Yes.
[02:07:14]  And it worked for me, right?
[02:07:16]  I got up.
[02:07:17]  I got a, I succeeded.
[02:07:19]  I got a great job.
[02:07:20]  I got money.
[02:07:22]  Most people, it doesn't.
[02:07:23]  And it's bad that it works this way.
[02:07:25]  Ziz, unlike me, is not willing to do that, right?
[02:07:29]  She thinks it's wrong to be asked to work overtime and not get paid for it.
[02:07:34]  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?
[02:07:39]  And she's like, I'm here to supposed to be here eight hours.
[02:07:43]  Eight hours is up.
[02:07:44]  I'm going home.
[02:07:45]  And he calls her half an hour later and fires her, right?
[02:07:49]  And this is because the tech industry is evil, you know?
[02:07:52]  Like, like, this is bad.
[02:07:54]  She's not bad here.
[02:07:56]  She is, it is like a thing where she's not doing by her standards, what I would say is the rational thing, which would be if all that matters is optimizing your earning power, right?
[02:08:07]  Right.
[02:08:08]  Well, then you do this, then you do do whatever it takes, right?
[02:08:11]  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 the tech industry because she's not willing to do the things that you kind of need to do to succeed, you know, in the place that she is.
[02:08:27]  Um, but it's interesting.
[02:08:29]  I don't like give her any shit for that.
[02:08:31]  Uh, so she asks your parents more for more runway to extend her time in the bay, and then she finds work at another startup.
[02:08:37]  But the same problems persist.
[02:08:39]  Quote, they kept demanding that I work unpaid overtime, talking about how other employees just always put 40 hours on their time sheet no matter what.
[02:08:46]  And this exemplary employee over there worked 12 hours a day, and he really went the extra mile and got the job done.
[02:08:52]  And they needed me to really go the extra mile and get the job done.
[02:08:56]  She's not willing to do that.
[02:08:57]  And again, I hate that this is part of what drives her to the madness that leads to the cult to the killings because it's like, oh, honey, you're in the right.
[02:09:05]  It's an evil industry.
[02:09:07]  You see a flash of where it could have gone well.
[02:09:10]  It really, there were chances for this to work out.
[02:09:12]  No, you are 100% right.
[02:09:15]  Like, this is fucked up.
[02:09:17]  Yeah.
[02:09:17]  You know what I mean?
[02:09:18]  And that's super hard.
[02:09:20]  I really respect that part of you.
[02:09:22]  Oh, I'm so sad that they're making that culture.
[02:09:25]  Yeah.
[02:09:25]  Yeah.
[02:09:26]  I'm so sad that this is part of what shatters your brain.
[02:09:29]  Like that really bums me out.
[02:09:33]  So first off, she's kind of starts spiraling and she concludes that she hates virtue ethics.
[02:09:38]  This is where she starts hating Yadkowski, right?
[02:09:40]  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.
[02:09:49]  She's been following this man at this point for years.
[02:09:52]  Exactly.
[02:09:53]  Exactly.
[02:09:54]  So this is a very like damaging thing to her that this happens.
[02:09:59]  And, you know, and again, as much as I blame Yudkowski, the culture of the Bay Area tech industry, that's a big part of what drives this person to where she ends up.
[02:10:09]  Right.
[02:10:10]  So that said, some of her issues are also rooted in a kind of rigid and unforgiving internal rule set.
[02:10:17]  At one point, she negotiates work with a professor and their undergraduate helper.
[02:10:22]  She doesn't want to take an hourly job and she tries to negotiate a flat rate of 7K.
[02:10:26]  And they're like, yeah, okay, that sounds fair, but the school doesn't do stuff like that.
[02:10:31]  So you will have to fake some paperwork with me for me to be able to get them to pay you $7,000.
[02:10:37]  And she isn't willing to do that.
[02:10:39]  And that's a thing where it's like, ah, no, I've had some shit where this was like there was a stupid rule.
[02:10:44]  And like, in order for the people, me or other people to get paid, we had to like tell something else to the company.
[02:10:51]  Like, that's just, that's just knowing how to get by.
[02:10:55]  Yeah, that's, that's living in the world.
[02:10:57]  You got, yeah, you did the hard part.
[02:10:59]  Yeah.
[02:10:59]  They said they were going to do it.
[02:11:01]  They said they'd do it.
[02:11:02]  Yeah, that's like, they already said we don't do this.
[02:11:04]  That's where you're like, all right.
[02:11:06]  You just, you can't get by in America if you're not willing to lie on certain kinds of paperwork, right?
[02:11:12]  That's the game.
[02:11:13]  Our president does all the fucking time.
[02:11:15]  He's the king of that shit.
[02:11:20]  So at this point, Ziz is stuck in what they consider a calamitous situation.
[02:11:24]  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.
[02:11:33]  Her panic over this is elevated by the fact that she starts to get obsessed with Rocco's basilisk at this time.
[02:11:39]  I know.
[02:11:40]  I know, I know.
[02:11:41]  Worst thing for her to read.
[02:11:43]  Come on.
[02:11:44]  What they call it, an info hazard?
[02:11:46]  An info hazard.
[02:11:47]  She should have heeded the warnings.
[02:11:49]  Yep.
[02:11:49]  And a lot of the smarter rationalists are just annoyed by it.
[02:11:53]  Again, Yadkowski immediately is like, this is very quickly decides it's bullshit and bans discussion of it.
[02:12:00]  He argues there's no incentive for a future agent to follow through with that threat because it by doing so, it just expends resources at no gain to itself, which is like, yeah, man, a hyper-logical AI would not immediately jump to, I must make hell for everybody who didn't code me.
[02:12:16]  Like, that's just crazy.
[02:12:18]  There's some steps skipped.
[02:12:19]  Yeah.
[02:12:20]  Only humans are like ill in that way.
[02:12:23]  That's the funny thing about it, is it's such a human response to it.
[02:12:26]  Yeah.
[02:12:26]  Right, right.
[02:12:28]  Now, when she encounters the concept of Rocco's basilisk, at first, Ziz thinks that it's silly, right?
[02:12:34]  She kind of rejects it and moves on.
[02:12:36]  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.
[02:12:46]  She writes, I started encountering people who were freaked out by it, freaked out that they had discovered an improvement to the infohazard that made it function, got around Lisa's objection.
[02:12:56]  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.
[02:13:10]  Even if my system two had good decision theory, my system one did not, and that would damage my effectiveness.
[02:13:17]  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.
[02:13:25]  No, it's it's a it's so scary.
[02:13:31]  Yes, yes, it's very scary stuff.
[02:13:33]  It's so scary to be like, oh, that's where she was operating.
[02:13:36]  Those are the stakes.
[02:13:37]  This is where she's dealing with.
[02:13:40]  That's that's it is.
[02:13:42]  You know, I talked to my friends who grow are raised in like very toxic evangelical subculture, chunks of the evangelical subculture, and grow up and spend their whole childhood terrified of hell.
[02:13:52]  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.

=== Morally Valuable Intrusive Thoughts (15:41) ===

[02:14:01]  Like that's what she's doing, right?
[02:14:03]  Exactly.
[02:14:04]  Exactly.
[02:14:04]  She can't win.
[02:14:05]  There's no winning here.
[02:14:06]  Yes.
[02:14:06]  Yes.
[02:14:07]  And again, I say this a lot.
[02:14:10]  We need to put lithium back in the drinking water.
[02:14:13]  We got to put lithium back in the water.
[02:14:15]  Maybe Xanax too.
[02:14:17]  She needed, she could have taken a combo.
[02:14:20]  Yeah.
[02:14:21]  Getting rid of X before it gets to where it gets.
[02:14:24]  At this point, you really, you really feel for her and like just living in this, living like that.
[02:14:31]  Every day, she's so scared that this is what she's doing.
[02:14:35]  It's, it's this, this is, she is the therapy-needingest woman I have ever heard of at this point.
[02:14:40]  Oh my God.
[02:14:42]  She just needs to talk to, she needs to talk to people.
[02:14:45]  Again, you know, the cult, the thing that happens to cult members has happened to her where her she heard the whole language she uses is incomprehensible to people.
[02:14:55]  I had to talk to you for an hour and 15 minutes so you would understand parts of what this lady says, right?
[02:15:02]  Exactly.
[02:15:02]  Because you have to, because it's all nonsense if you don't do that work.
[02:15:05]  Exactly.
[02:15:06]  She's so spun out at this point.
[02:15:08]  It's like, how do you even get back?
[02:15:10]  Yeah.
[02:15:11]  How do you even get back?
[02:15:12]  Yeah.
[02:15:12]  So she ultimately decides, even though she thinks she's doomed to be tortured by unfriendly AIs, evil gods must be fought.
[02:15:19]  If this damns me, then so be it.
[02:15:21]  She's very heroic.
[02:15:24]  She sees herself that way, right?
[02:15:26]  Yeah.
[02:15:27]  And even like just with her convictions and things, she does, it.
[02:15:34]  She's a woman of conviction.
[02:15:35]  You really can't take that away from her.
[02:15:38]  Those convictions are nonsense.
[02:15:40]  No, that's the, but they're there.
[02:15:43]  Yeah.
[02:15:43]  They're based on an elaborate Harry Potter fan fiction.
[02:15:47]  It's like David Ike, the guy who believes in like literal lizard people, and everyone thinks he's like talking about the Jews, but like, no, no, no, no, he doesn't.
[02:15:54]  It's just lizards.
[02:15:55]  It's exactly that.
[02:15:56]  Where it's just like you want, you want to draw, yeah, you want to draw something so it's not nonsense.
[02:16:02]  And then you realize, no, that's no, no, no, no.
[02:16:04]  And like David, he went out.
[02:16:06]  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.
[02:16:13]  People were shocked.
[02:16:13]  It's like, no, no, no, David Icke believes in a thing.
[02:16:16]  It's just crazy.
[02:16:18]  Yeah, yeah.
[02:16:19]  Like those people do exist.
[02:16:22]  Yeah.
[02:16:23]  Here we are talking about them.
[02:16:25]  And here we are talking about them.
[02:16:26]  Some of them run the country.
[02:16:28]  Well, actually, I don't know how much all of those people believe in anything, but no, I don't think they're flying any flag.
[02:16:34]  Yeah.
[02:16:35]  Yeah.
[02:16:35]  Speaking of people who believe in something, our sponsors believe in getting your money.
[02:16:50]  We're back.
[02:16:51]  So she is at this point suffering from delusions of grandeur, and those are going to rapidly lead her to danger.
[02:16:58]  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?
[02:17:08]  And that that will protect her in the future, because that's how these people talk about stuff like that.
[02:17:15]  So she gets over her fear of the basilisk for a little while.
[02:17:20]  But even 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 infohazard warning, Rocco's basilisk family, skippable.
[02:17:32]  So you don't like have to see it and have it destroy your psyche.
[02:17:36]  That's the power of it.
[02:17:37]  Yeah.
[02:17:39]  The concept does, however, keep coming back to her, like and continuing to drive her mad.
[02:17:44]  Thoughts of the basilisk return and eventually she comes to an extreme conclusion.
[02:17:48]  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?
[02:17:57]  Can I tell you?
[02:17:58]  I really, it felt like this is what was, this is like where it had to go, right?
[02:18:03]  Yeah, yeah, yes.
[02:18:07]  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 like punish all of the people who don't stop, who like eat meat ever.
[02:18:29]  She wants to make a hell for people who eat meat.
[02:18:32]  And that's the, yeah, that's the conclusion that she makes, right?
[02:18:36]  So this becomes an intrusive thought in her head, primarily the idea that like everyone isn't going along with her, right?
[02:18:43]  Like she doesn't want to create this hell.
[02:18:45]  She just thinks that she has to.
[02:18:47]  So she's like very focused on like trying to convince these other people in the rationalist culture to become vegan.
[02:18:54]  Anyway, she writes this: 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 infohazards didn't exist and worse to feel resigned, grim sort of pride in my previous choice to fight for sentient life, although it damned me.
[02:19:13]  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 and progress to resume.
[02:19:22]  In other words, my ego had perhaps damned the universe.
[02:19:27]  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.
[02:19:35]  Yeah, she's she that's she lives in it now.
[02:19:38]  It's so yeah, it's so far for we've been talking about it however long she's already so far away from us even.
[02:19:46]  Yeah, and it is, it is deeply, I've read a lot of her writing.
[02:19:50]  It is deeply hard to understand pieces of it here.
[02:19:53]  Oh man, but she is at war with herself, clearly.
[02:19:56]  She is for sure at war with herself.
[02:19:59]  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.
[02:20:14]  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.
[02:20:24]  It's a self-help company, right?
[02:20:26]  It runs self-help seminars.
[02:20:28]  This is the same as like a Tony Robbins thing, right?
[02:20:32]  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.
[02:20:40]  Yeah, there's no difference between this and Tony Robbins.
[02:20:43]  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, Chick's clearly brilliant.
[02:21:00]  She'll find her way in the industry and we want her money, right?
[02:21:02]  You know, maybe we want her to do some free work for us too, but like, let's, let's, you know, we got to reel this fish in, right?
[02:21:10]  So this is described as an academic conference by people who are in the AI risk field and rationalism, you know, thinking of ways to save the universe because only the true, the super geniuses can do that.
[02:21:24]  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.
[02:21:31]  I've been reading about their beliefs.
[02:21:33]  I felt there's some cult stuff here.
[02:21:37]  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 Cinanon meeting.
[02:21:50]  Like it's the same stuff.
[02:21:52]  It's the same shit.
[02:21:53]  It's the same as accounts of like big self-help movement things from like the 70s and stuff that I've read.
[02:22:01]  That's when it really clicked to me, right?
[02:22:03]  Quote, here's a description of one of the, because they have, you know, speeches and they break out into groups to do different exercises, right?
[02:22:11]  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.
[02:22:19]  I didn't pick the most important problem in my life because secrets.
[02:22:23]  I think I used my turn on a problem I thought they might actually be able to help with.
[02:22:27]  The fact that it did, although it didn't seem to affect my productivity or willpower at all, i.e. I was in a humanly determined basically all the time, I still felt terrible all the time, that I was hurting from some to some degree relinquishing my humanity.
[02:22:41]  I was sort of vaguing about the pain of being trans and having decided not to transition.
[02:22:45]  And so like, this is a part of the thing.
[02:22:48]  You build a connection between other people and this group by getting people to like spill their secrets to each other.
[02:22:52]  It's a thing Scientology does.
[02:22:54]  It's a thing they did at Synanon.
[02:22:56]  Tell me your darkest secret, right?
[02:22:59]  And she's not fully willing to because she doesn't want to come out to this group of people yet.
[02:23:05]  And, you know, part of what she's also dealing with that entire.
[02:23:10]  Yes.
[02:23:11]  Wow.
[02:23:11]  Yeah.
[02:23:13]  And the hamming circle doesn't sound so bad.
[02:23:16]  If you'll recall, and as you mentioned this, I was really in part one.
[02:23:19]  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.
[02:23:27]  These hamming circles are weird, but they're not that.
[02:23:30]  But there's another exercise they did next called doom circles.
[02:23:35]  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.
[02:23:46]  Someone decided and set a precedent of starting these off with a sort of ritual incantation.
[02:23:51]  We now invoke and bow to the doom gods and waving their hands, saying, Doom.
[02:23:55]  I said I'd never bow to the doom gods.
[02:23:57]  And while everyone else said that, I flipped the double bird to the heavens and said, Fuck you instead.
[02:24:02]  Person A, that's this member of CIFAR that she is admires, found this agreeable and joined in.
[02:24:08]  Some people brought up that they felt like they were only as morally valuable as half a person.
[02:24:14]  This irked me.
[02:24:15]  I said they were whole persons and don't be stupid like that.
[02:24:18]  Like if they wanted to sacrifice themselves, they could weigh one versus seven billion.
[02:24:23]  They didn't have to falsely denigrate themselves as less than one person.
[02:24:26]  They didn't listen.
[02:24:28]  When it was my turn concerning myself, I said my doom was that I could succeed at the things I tried, succeed exceptionally well.
[02:24:34]  Like I bet I could in 10 years have earned a give like $10 million through startups and it would still be too little too late.
[02:24:40]  Like I came into this game too late.
[02:24:42]  The world would still burn.
[02:24:45]  And first off, like this is, you know, it's a variant of the synonym thing.
[02:24:50]  You're going and you're telling people why they're doomed, right?
[02:24:52]  Like why they won't succeed in life, you know?
[02:24:55]  But it's also one of the things here, these people are saying they feel like less than a person.
[02:24:59]  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 taking out an insurance policy on yourself and committing suicide?
[02:25:16]  Oh my God.
[02:25:17]  And then having the money donated to a rationalist organization.
[02:25:20]  That's a major topic of discussion that like Ziz grapples with.
[02:25:23]  A lot of these people grapple with, right?
[02:25:24]  Because they were obsessed with the idea of like, oh my God, I might be net negative value, right?
[02:25:30]  If I can't do this or can't do this, I could be a net negative value individual.
[02:25:34]  And that means like I'm not contributing to the solution.
[02:25:37]  And there's nothing worse than not contributing to the solution.
[02:25:41]  Were there people who did that?
[02:25:44]  I am not aware.
[02:25:48]  There are people who commit suicide in this community.
[02:25:51]  I will say that.
[02:25:52]  Like there are a number of suicides tied to this community.
[02:25:55]  I don't know if the actual insurance con thing happened, but it's like a seriously discussed thing.
[02:26:02]  And it's seriously discussed because all of these people talk about the value of their own lives in purely like mechanistic, how much money or expected value can I produce?
[02:26:15]  Like that is a person and that's why a person matters, right?
[02:26:19]  And the term they use is morally valuable, right?
[02:26:22]  Like that's that's what means you're a worthwhile human being if you're morally valuable, if you're creating a net positive benefit to the world in the way they define it.
[02:26:31]  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?
[02:26:40]  Like that is a thing at the edge of all of this shit that's really fucked up.
[02:26:46]  And that's, that's what this doom circle is about: is everybody like flipping out over I'm like and telling each other, I think you might know be as only be as morally valuable as half a person, right?
[02:26:57]  Like that's people are saying that, right?
[02:26:58]  Like that's what's going on here, you know?
[02:27:00]  Like it's not the synonym thing of like screaming like you're a you know using the F slur a million times or whatever, but it's very bad.
[02:27:10]  No, this is this is this is awful for like one thing.
[02:27:14]  I don't know.
[02:27:15]  My feeling is you have an inherent value because you're a person.
[02:27:19]  Yeah, that's a great place to start.
[02:27:22]  You know, this is also leading people to destroy themselves.
[02:27:26]  Like it's not even it, it's, it's so, it's such a bleak way of looking at things.
[02:27:32]  It's so crazy too.
[02:27:33]  Where were these meetings?
[02:27:34]  I just, in my head, I'm like, this is just happening in like a ballroom at a Radisson.
[02:27:38]  I think it is.
[02:27:39]  Or a convention center.
[02:27:41]  You know, there's different kinds of public spaces.
[02:27:43]  I don't know.
[02:27:44]  Oh, my God.
[02:27:45]  Honestly, if you've been to like an anime convention or a Magic the Gathering convention somewhere in the Bay, you may have been in one of the rooms they did these in.
[02:27:51]  I don't know exactly where they hold this.
[02:27:54]  So the person A mentioned above, this like person who's like affiliated with the organization that I think is a recruiter looking for young people who can be cultivated to pay for classes, right?
[02:28:06]  This person, it's very clear to them that Ziz is at the height of her vulnerability.
[02:28:11]  And so he tries to take advantage of that.
[02:28:13]  So he and another person from the organization engage Ziz during a break.
[02:28:19]  Ziz, who's extremely insecure, asks them point blank, what do you think my net value ultimately will be in life?
[02:28:26]  Right.
[02:28:27]  And again, there's like an element of this.
[02:28:29]  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.
[02:28:39]  Quote, I asked person A if they expected me to be net negative.
[02:28:42]  They said yes.
[02:28:43]  After a moment, they asked me what I was feeling or something like that.
[02:28:47]  I said something like dazed and sad.
[02:28:49]  They asked why sad.
[02:28:50]  I said I might leave the field as a consequence and maybe something else.
[02:28:54]  I said I needed time to process her think.
[02:28:56]  And so she like, she goes home after this guy saying like, yeah, I think your life's probably net negative value and sleeps the rest of the day.
[02:29:04]  And she wakes up the next morning and comes back to the second day of this thing.
[02:29:11]  And yeah, Ziz goes back and she tells this person, okay, here's what I'm going to do.
[02:29:17]  I'm going to pick a group of three people at the event I respect, including you.
[02:29:22]  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.
[02:29:32]  I'd transition and move probably to Seattle.
[02:29:34]  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.

=== Becoming a Rationalist Psychopath (12:48) ===

[02:29:42]  Gradually abandon my Facebook account and email, use a name change as a story for that.
[02:29:47]  And God, that would have been the best thing for her.
[02:29:51]  That's what I'm, oh, you see, like, but Sliver of Hope.
[02:29:54]  Like, oh, man.
[02:29:56]  She sees this as a nightmare, right?
[02:29:59]  This is the worst case scenario for her, right?
[02:30:02]  Because you're not spun out, right?
[02:30:05]  You're not part of the solution.
[02:30:06]  You're not part of the cause, you know?
[02:30:09]  You have no involvement in the great quest to save humanity.
[02:30:12]  That's worse than death almost, right?
[02:30:14]  That's its own kind of hell, though, right?
[02:30:16]  To think that you had this enlightenment and that you weren't good enough to participate.
[02:30:23]  That's a lot about how I'd probably just kill myself.
[02:30:26]  You know, that's the logical thing to do.
[02:30:29]  It's so fucked up.
[02:30:31]  It's so fucked up.
[02:30:32]  And also, if she's trying to live a normal life as a normie, and she refers to like being a normie as like just trying to be nice to people, because again, that's useless.
[02:30:42]  So her fear here is that she would be a causal negative if she does this, right?
[02:30:47]  And also the robot God that comes about might put her in hell.
[02:30:51]  Right.
[02:30:52]  Because that's also looming after every for every decision, right?
[02:30:56]  Yeah.
[02:30:56]  And a 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 like human life.
[02:31:07]  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.
[02:31:13]  I'd considered, can I just not take a shower?
[02:31:16]  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.
[02:31:25]  I considered getting paper in a cup and taking them elsewhere.
[02:31:28]  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.
[02:31:33]  So again, she considers ants identical to human beings.
[02:31:37]  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.
[02:31:48]  It's also such a thing.
[02:31:49]  Is this a bad place here?
[02:31:50]  Yeah.
[02:31:51]  The crazy thing about her is it like the amount of thinking just to like get in the shower to go to work.
[02:32:00]  You know what I mean?
[02:32:01]  Like that, that, oh man, it just seems like it makes everything.
[02:32:06]  Yes.
[02:32:07]  Every action is so loaded.
[02:32:09]  Yes.
[02:32:10]  Yes.
[02:32:10]  The weight of that must.
[02:32:12]  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?
[02:32:24]  We are all, these are all lives.
[02:32:26]  And then, but also it's fine for me to kill a bunch of them to go to work on time because like they're causally isolated.
[02:32:31]  So they're basically not people.
[02:32:33]  Like it's it's so weird.
[02:32:37]  Like um and I and again, it's getting a lot clearer here why this lady and her ideas end in a bunch of people getting shot and stabbed.
[02:32:49]  Okay.
[02:32:50]  There's a samurai sword later in the story, my friend.
[02:32:53]  That's the one thing this has been missing.
[02:32:56]  Yes, yes.
[02:32:58]  So they continue, these guys, to have a very abusive conversation with this young person.
[02:33:02]  And she clearly, she trusts them enough to- Yeah.
[02:33:07]  Okay.
[02:33:07]  Yeah.
[02:33:08]  And she tells them she's trans, right?
[02:33:10]  And this gives you an idea of like how kind of predatory some of the stuff going on in this community is.
[02:33:16]  They asked what I'd do with a female body.
[02:33:18]  They were trying to get me to admit what I actually wanted to do as the first thing in heaven.
[02:33:22]  Heaven being, there's this idea, especially amongst like some trans members of the rationalist community that like every, all of them basically believe a robot's going to make heaven.
[02:33:31]  Right.
[02:33:31]  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?
[02:33:40]  So these guys, 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.
[02:33:48]  And they follow this up by sitting really close to her, close enough that she gets uncomfortable.
[02:33:55]  And then a really, really rationalist conversation follows.
[02:33:59]  They asked if I felt trapped.
[02:34:01]  I may have clarified physically.
[02:34:03]  They may have said, sure.
[02:34:04]  Afterward, I answered no to that question under the likely justified belief that it was framed that way.
[02:34:09]  They asked why not.
[02:34:10]  I said I was pretty sure I could take them in a fight.
[02:34:12]  They prodded for details, why I thought so, and then how I thought a fight between us would go.
[02:34:17]  I asked what kind of fight, like a physical unarmed fight to the death right now, and why?
[02:34:21]  What were my payouts?
[02:34:23]  This was over the fate of the multiverse, triggering actions by other people, i.e. imprisonment or murder was not relevant.
[02:34:29]  So they decide to, they make this into, again, these people are all addicted to dumb game theory stuff, right?
[02:34:34]  Okay, so what is this fight?
[02:34:35]  Is this fight over the fate of the multiverse?
[02:34:37]  Are we in an alternate reality where like no one will come and intervene and there's no cops?
[02:34:41]  We're the only people in the world or whatever.
[02:34:44]  So they tell her, like, yeah, imagine there's no consequences legally, whatever to you do.
[02:34:48]  And we're fighting over the fate of the multiverse.
[02:34:50]  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.
[02:34:59]  And it's both, it's like, it's nonsense.
[02:35:01]  It's like how 10-year-olds think fights work.
[02:35:05]  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 just going to murder.
[02:35:15]  You have to grab the hardest confrontation, right?
[02:35:17]  Yes.
[02:35:17]  So it would have to be the most violent.
[02:35:20]  Yes.
[02:35:20]  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 them in the, hit them somewhere that's going to shock them and then run like a motherfucker.
[02:35:36]  Right.
[02:35:36]  You get to get out of it.
[02:35:39]  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?
[02:35:47]  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 gives tells you a lot about the rationalist community.
[02:35:58]  So she tells these people, she explains in detail how she would murder them if they had a fight right now.
[02:36:04]  As they're like sitting next to her super close, having just asked her about masturbation.
[02:36:09]  Here's their first question.
[02:36:10]  Quote, they asked if I'd rape their corpse.
[02:36:13]  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.
[02:36:21]  In other words, them trying to make her dis uncomfortable to get info from her, she decides is fine.
[02:36:27]  Also, the whole discussion about raping their corpses is like, well, if you rape, obviously, like if you want to have the most extreme response possible that would like make other people unlikely to fuck with you, knowing that you'll violate their corpse if you kill them is clearly the like, and like that really is that.
[02:36:42]  Okay, sure.
[02:36:43]  I love rational thought.
[02:36:45]  Oh, man.
[02:36:49]  This is crazy.
[02:36:50]  Sorry.
[02:36:51]  This is so crazy.
[02:36:53]  It's so nuts.
[02:36:55]  So then they talk about psychopathy.
[02:36:58]  One of these guys had earlier told Ziz that they thought she was a psychopath.
[02:37:02]  But he told her that.
[02:37:04]  He told her that doesn't mean what it means both to actual like clinicians, because psychopathy is a diagnostician or like what normal people mean.
[02:37:12]  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.
[02:37:22]  Because they, they've, again, there's some like popular books that are about like the psychopath way, the dark triad.
[02:37:29]  And like, well, you know, these are the people who led societies in the toughest times.
[02:37:32]  And so like you could, you need to optimize and engage in some of those behaviors if you want to win in these situations.
[02:37:39]  Based on all of this, Ziz brings up what rationalists call the Gervais principle.
[02:37:45]  Now, this started as a tongue-in-cheek joke describing a rule of office dynamics based on the TV show The Office.
[02:37:52]  When he said, I was like, there's no way.
[02:37:53]  Yes, it's Ricky Gervais.
[02:37:55]  Yes.
[02:37:55]  And the idea is that in office environments, psychos always rise to the top.
[02:38:00]  This is supposed to be like a negative observation.
[02:38:02]  Like the person who wrote this initially is like, yeah, this is how offices work.
[02:38:06]  And it's like, why they're bad, you know?
[02:38:08]  It's an extension of the Peter principle.
[02:38:10]  And these psychopaths put bad, like dumb and incompetent people in like in positions below them for a variety.
[02:38:18]  It's trying to kind of work out why in which like offices are often dysfunctional, right?
[02:38:23]  It's not like the original Gervais principle thing is like not a bad piece of writing or whatever.
[02:38:28]  But Ziz takes something insane out of it.
[02:38:31]  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.
[02:38:46]  Meaning, too, I did not care about.
[02:38:48]  I wanted this world to live on.
[02:38:50]  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.
[02:39:00]  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.
[02:39:15]  Yeah, no, of course.
[02:39:17]  Yep.
[02:39:17]  So this is her hitting her final form.
[02:39:19]  And true to fact, these guys are like, they don't say it's a good idea, but they're like, okay, yeah, you know, that's not, that's not the worst thing you could do.
[02:39:27]  Sure.
[02:39:27]  You know, like, I think the Sith stuff kind of weird, but making yourself a psychopath makes sense.
[02:39:33]  Sure.
[02:39:33]  Yeah.
[02:39:33]  Of course.
[02:39:34]  I know a lot of guys who did that.
[02:39:36]  That's literally what they say, right?
[02:39:38]  And then they say that.
[02:39:40]  Also, I don't even think that's what they really 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?
[02:39:57]  Right.
[02:39:57]  Of course.
[02:39:59]  Here's a quote from them or from Ziz.
[02:40:02]  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.
[02:40:13]  So things are going good.
[02:40:16]  This is, this is, you know, yeah, great.
[02:40:25]  How much does 10 weekends cost?
[02:40:27]  I don't actually know.
[02:40:28]  I don't, I don't fully know with this.
[02:40:30]  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 basically.
[02:40:44]  That's what I'm saying.
[02:40:45]  It's like 50% of your income, right?
[02:40:48]  More than they're worried about this money at the time.
[02:40:50]  I mean, with right, I don't know, the format.
[02:40:52]  Is she not going to be like super suspicious that people are like, you know, faking it or like going over the top?
[02:40:59]  Okay.
[02:41:00]  She is.
[02:41:01]  She is.
[02:41:02]  She gets actually really uncomfortable.
[02:41:03]  They have an exercise where they're basically doing, you know, they're playing with love bombing, right?
[02:41:07]  Where everyone's like hugging and telling each other they love each other.
[02:41:11]  And she's like, I don't really believe it.
[02:41:12]  I just met these people.
[02:41:13]  So she, she is starting to, and she is going to break away from these organizations pretty quickly.
[02:41:18]  But this conversation she has with these guys is a critical part of like why she finally has this fracture.
[02:41:27]  Because number one, this dude keeps telling her you have a net negative value to the universe, right?
[02:41:34]  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 to save the animals, of course.
[02:41:48]  It feels like the same thinking is like the robot's going to make hell.
[02:41:53]  It all seems to always come back to this idea of like, I think we just got to be evil.
[02:41:59]  Where it's like, oh, well, I guess the only logical conclusion is doom.
[02:42:06]  Yep.
[02:42:08]  Yeah.
[02:42:09]  Yeah.
[02:42:09]  It's like, it feels like it's a theme here.
[02:42:14]  Yep.
[02:42:15]  Anyway, you want to plug anything at the end here?
[02:42:19]  I have a comedy special you can purchase on Patreon.
[02:42:23]  It's called Birth of a Nation with a G. You can get that at patreon.com backslash David Boy.

=== Closing Thoughts on the Episode (04:28) ===

[02:42:30]  Excellent.
[02:42:31]  Excellent.
[02:42:33]  All right.
[02:42:34]  Folks, well, that is the end of the episode.
[02:42:37]  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.
[02:42:47]  Yeah, this was, I don't really, I'm going to be thinking about this for weeks.
[02:42:52]  I mean, to me, it's, there's, I feel like it's kind of fair because your co-host likes it, Kirby K. Bott for the Elders of Zion episodes.
[02:43:02]  Yeah.
[02:43:02]  Yeah.
[02:43:03]  Okay.
[02:43:03]  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, the gist of what this believes.
[02:43:13]  And then let's get to the actual cult stuff when like, you know, Ziz starts bringing in followers and the crimes start happening.
[02:43:20]  But that rolling or the Wired article really covers all that very well.
[02:43:25]  And that's the best piece.
[02:43:26]  Most of the journalism I've read on these guys is not very well written.
[02:43:30]  It's not very good.
[02:43:31]  It does not really explain why they are, what they are or why they do it.
[02:43:34]  So, I decided, and I'm not, the wired piece is great.
[02:43:37]  I know the wired guy knows all of the stuff that I brought up here.
[02:43:40]  He just, it's an article.
[02:43:42]  You have editors.
[02:43:44]  He left out what he thought he needed to leave out.
[02:43:47]  I don't have that problem.
[02:43:48]  And I wanted to really, really deeply trace exactly where this, this lady's, how this lady's mind develops and how that intersects with rationalism.
[02:43:59]  Because it's interesting and kind of important and bad.
[02:44:04]  Yeah.
[02:44:06]  Okay.
[02:44:08]  Anyway, thanks for having a head fuck with me.
[02:44:13]  All right.
[02:44:13]  That's it, everybody.
[02:44:14]  Goodbye.
[02:44:18]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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[02:44:36]  Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/slash at behind the bastards.
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[02:46:22]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[02:46:25]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[02:46:27]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
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