Who are the Zizians?

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1:12Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

1:22Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know. So this is, I guess, a timely, topical, true crime edition, the three Ts. COA alert. Yeah. I feel I should sound the klaxon on this one. Yeah, we're issuing a COA on this one, a pretty robust one, because A, this is something we don't do a lot, which is tackle true crime in almost real time as far as the fact that none of this is settled. The alleged crimes, we're probably going to say alleged a lot, because there's not even been court dates a lot of times for some of these cases.

2:06We're talking about potentially six murders in three states by a group that may or may not have done it, that may or may not be a cult. So just a big COA there. This is one of the true crimes where neither one of us are going to be like, well, here's my theory on this because just who knows, this has got to play out first. And the other big COA is a lot of sort of a disproportionate amount of members of the Zizians who we're going to be talking about are members of the trans community. And it's just one of the sort of facts of the case. There's obviously no suggestion or judgment on our part of the trans community, but it seems to be a big sort of part of this group of people who got together.

2:49So just kind of keep all that in mind as we lay all this out there. Right. Nice work, Chuck. Thank you for that. So like you said, we're talking about the Zizians. How did you hear about this? This is your pick. You know what? I have no idea. I even went to look to see if somebody has suggested it and no one had. I think I might have just seen a news story and been like, wait a minute, This is something that hasn't been a 10-part Netflix series yet. So it must be super, super current, which it is. My theory is that the great Gazoo said, do one on the Zizians, dum-dum. And you were like, hmm, I should do one on the Zizians.

3:26Yeah. Thanks for bringing a joke into this thing. So the Zizians are called such because they center around Ziz, a trans woman who is often portrayed as the leader of this cult. And I mean, you can make a pretty fair case that at the very least she's the leader or the most influential member because the whole thing's named after her. Although we should say that this group of people do not call themselves the Zizians. That was a name that was given to them by somebody who's critical of them, an anonymous person who's critical of them. But Ziz herself, we know, was born in 1991 in Fairbanks, Alaska.

4:06And like the other people that she attracts into her orbit, she was brilliant. I mean, very precocious as far as like working on computers goes, as far as mathematics goes. I think by the time she was at the University of Fairbanks in Alaska, she had internships at both Oracle, the cloud computing company, and NASA. So, I mean, like she had a pretty great resume, I guess, is what you'd say if you're on LinkedIn. Yeah, for sure. And like you said, this is going to be sort of a common thing with everyone who got together with Ziz and the others. So in college, Ziz started learning about what's called the rationalist movement or the rationalist community, which were also very science-minded people.

4:51They kind of gathered around Silicon Valley. And one of the big things with rationalism is, and a lot of this stuff makes sense, like a lot of the stuff that they're laying down, like, hey, let's use logical tools to just always question ourselves. Let's not get set in our way of thinking about anything. Let's always revise what we're thinking about everything. And one of the key people here, one of the names you'll hear early and then later on is a guy named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is an AI researcher who is kind of doing something different than what a lot of AI researchers are doing in that he has devoted much of his career to basically saying, hey, warning, this could really go wrong.

5:33And I'm going to do everything I can to make sure it goes down in the right way. Yeah, he dedicated himself to solving the AI alignment problem, which is how do you create an artificial intelligence whose motivations are totally aligned with humans and we don't accidentally wipe ourselves out with the AI we create? Yeah. And like you said, it kind of flies in the face of especially what's going on these days, which is like, hurry up and build an AI or else China's going to do it first and we're going to lose out. And there's so much money to be made off of AI. And Eliezer Yukowski is a very, very interesting dude.

6:06He's a self-taught AI researcher. Incredibly brilliant. And just by happenstance, I got an email yesterday from somebody at a publishing house that mentioned that he has a new book coming out in September with Nate Soares, one of his collaborators. It's called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. And it's about AI. Right. Which doesn't have a whole lot to do with the Zizians, but that just sets up kind of who this guy is. In 2009, he founded a blog called Less Wrong, as in let's do less wrong. And I mean, I assume that's what it means. It means, so it's about overcoming your biases, like you want to be less wrong, kind of.

6:50It's all about thinking clearly and not letting your biases guide your thinking, I think. Yeah, so they started gathering as, I guess, a de facto sort of community of rationalists. A lot of this, again, is taking place in and around Silicon Valley in Northern California. And he founded a couple of Berkeley, California-based organizations that will come into play, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, or MIRI. And again, that's about, you know, minimizing the risks of AI. And then the Center for Applied Rationality, or CIFAR. And again, same deal. Clear, unbiased thinking is what they're after, never getting too set in your ways and always trying to revise how you think about things.

7:34Right. They're also very closely tied with effective altruism, which is essentially using rational thinking to donate your money to the greatest good. We did an episode on that, if I'm not mistaken. We did, my friend. All of this attracted Ziz to move from Alaska down to the Bay Area in San Francisco. And she got involved with CIFAR, got involved with Miri, and dedicated herself also to trying to figure out this AI alignment problem, too. And she, the thing about this rationalist community is they are as open as you can be. You can be a Nazi and show up and be like, I'm a Nazi. And here's what I think about everything.

8:19And they will engage you in debate because that's just what they do. They like no thought processes off the table. And that attracted a lot of interesting people who were the average normie would probably not necessarily feel comfortable sitting in a room with just because, you know, of awkwardness, but also because they probably wouldn't have much to converse about because the people we're talking about in this rationalist community are so brilliant that they probably would not be able to relate to the average person and vice versa. Yeah, or at the very least on some of the radical fringes of whatever movement that they're in.

8:58Ziz is one of those people and started writing on the Less Wrong site and her own blog and writing about, again, stuff that's on the more radical end of the spectrum. Like, hey, we got a, you know, sort of a 12 monkeys kind of stuff. Like, hey, we got to do whatever it takes. Some people might think, you know, something we're doing is evil, but if it's in the service of what we think has a good end, then that's what we should do. Sometimes she calls herself a Sith, as in, you know, Star Wars. And apparently the name Ziz comes from a speculative fiction story called Worm that a lot of rationalists love, in which Ziz in the story is a villainous entity that if they're listened to for too long, you will go crazy.

9:43And so Ziz is all of a sudden hanging around the Bay Area, going to these rationalist hangouts and meetings, wearing black robes and sort of dressed like a Sith. So all this is what, around 2016, 17, that this is all starting, that Ziz is showing up. And again, like I said, this community is very open. So even though Ziz would show up wearing black robes, declaring herself a Sith Lord and that that's her religion is Sith. But despite that community being open, she still stood out, not necessarily because she wore black robes and called herself a Sith, but more because she was more intensely devoted and dedicated than even the average rationalist, right?

10:24So she did stand out some. One of the other things that she was radically dedicated to was veganism and animal rights. And this would actually end up separating her from the rationalist community eventually. And that you can kind of make a case, it seems like, is the initial schism that caused this wedge that led to all the events that would follow. Yeah, like basically, hey, you're trying to protect human life. Like, what about the animals? Like, every sentient animal is a person. And these are Ziz's words. And, you know, so we got to kick up the intensity on the animal front as well. The problem with all of this is that this was around San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where it's really, really expensive to live.

11:11And if you're someone like Ziz, you're not, you know, going out and getting some big tech job where you're making tons of money to afford that condo downtown. So you got to live somewhere. And this is when Ziz meets up with somebody named Gwen Danielson, had a lot in common. another rationalist, another trans woman, another person who was very much into animal rights. And Gwen happened to live on a sailboat in Berkeley Marina and said, hey, this is a much cheaper rent here. Why don't you just come and live on this boat with me? I'm also into math. I'm also into science. And I'm also have some pretty radical ideas about stuff.

11:49Yeah. And so the point of this was if you and this is this is belief. If you could free yourself from things like paying rent, especially the high rent of San Francisco, and keep your cost down to as minimal as possible, you could devote that much more time to figuring out the AI alignment problem, figuring out how to push CIFAR and MIRI into protecting animal rights too, like just thinking and learning to think better. That was kind of the point. And so I think Ziz initially moved into the sailboat with Gwen Danielson, found that they were not quite exactly compatible roommate wives, but still friends.

12:26And so Ziz bought her own sailboat and docked it at the same marina in Berkeley. And they became what was called the rationalist fleet. They invited more and more people to come join them at the marina. And they actually went so far as to buy an old tugboat that by this time was in its 70s or 80s, maybe. Not a good age for a tugboat. And they They actually bought it from Alaska and tugged it down or sailed it down all the way to San Francisco. Yeah. The name of this boat was Caleb. So now it's in Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco. And Caleb was a problem, though. Cable, like you said, was an old boat, an old World War II-era tugboat.

13:10So it wasn't like, you know, even like a mid-'70s houseboat would have been a better option probably. This thing, they couldn't. They had a hard time anchoring it. It was too expensive to maintain. It would drift out of control and hit other boats. So it was not, you know, everything they thought it was going to be. So just, you know, sort of park that for now. I'm going to say that a lot. It threw me parking a lot of things as this jumps around. At this point, we have to introduce some new characters to the scene. Again, had a lot in common with Ziz and Gwen in that they were very, very smart, very much into math and science.

13:47Some were trans and some were non-binary. And the first player here is someone named Emma Baranian, a programmer, worked at Google, but left Google because they thought the company was corrupt. Yes. And we should say these people fell into Ziz's orbit because Ziz was a prolific blogger and blogged in a way that like a lot of the language and thoughts and ideas were impenetrable to all but a certain group of people. And these were the people that she ended up attracting through her blog. There's a really great Guardian article about all of this written by Oliver Conroy. And Conroy says that there was a glossary that somebody gave him that one of Zig's blog followers created of Zig's words.

14:39And that when he printed it out, it was 48 pages long. So like she had a certain thing going on that attracted a certain kind of person. And these were the people who were falling into their orbit at this time. And we should also say all of these people were in their early to mid 20s. I think Ziz was the oldest maybe at the time at 26. So they were all disaffected, brilliant, often trans, vegan 20-somethings who were living very close to homelessness in San Francisco in the late 2000 teens. Yeah. So the second person was Alex Lethem, occasionally known as Somni, a mathematician in this case, went to UCLA, studied at UC Berkeley as well.

15:27Then we have Michelle Zashko, a biometrics researcher, another smarty pants. And then someone named Alice Monday, who was Zashko's girlfriend and a bit of a mentor, apparently, according to Ziz, to Ziz. And they started sort of just getting together, talking about their ideas. They came up with a name for one of their theories, or sort of their overarching theory called vegan anarcho-transhumanism. And Gwen Danielson developed this idea that the hemispheres of the brain were basically separate, and they could operate independently from one another. You can be different genders at the same time.

16:06You can be good and evil, or good or evil at the same time. and they started these experiments called unihemispheric sleep where they were saying you can be asleep and awake at the same time. One can be asleep and then one can be active and awake. And we say this because there are people that have accused Ziz and others in the group of basically keeping you sleep-deprived through these experiments, potentially leading to a couple of suicides that we'll talk about. And again, I have no judgment on whether or not they are a cult or not at this point. But if you're making a case for cult, sleep deprivation is a very big hallmark of something that oftentimes happens.

16:47Yeah, that's like chapter two in the cult leader's playbook. Yeah. We should say also that unihemispheric sleep theoretically is possible. Humans don't do it, but dolphins do, whales do, migratory birds do. So it's not like it just doesn't exist. It's humans trying to figure out how to do it themselves so they could think longer, more hours in a day, essentially. Yeah. So this group is getting a little more upset and aggressive toward the official rationalist movement and community. They think, again, that Miri and CIFAR, you're not doing enough for the animals. You need to expand your, I guess, viewpoint on sentient beings and what that means.

17:28And you're also biased against trans people. Yeah, and there was another thing, too, that Ziz got really upset about. She came to believe that Miri paid off a blackmailer. Another way to put it is that somebody accused people at Miri of sexual assault or statutory rape, I think it was, and that they paid the person to go away. Some people would call it a settlement. To Ziz, it was blackmail, paying off a blackmailer, and that you just did not do that, that that violated some of the basic tenets of the rationalist community and the way of solving problems that they use. So that, with the ethical veganism combined, really separated her from this rationalist community.

18:10And with this growing group around her, they decided that they were going to show up, go to the CFAR seminar conference that was being held in 2019. and they were going to present their problems and their issues in a very rational way, just like CIFAR would want them to. And the people who organized CIFAR were like, you guys are way too aggressive for our tastes. You can't come to this CIFAR retreat. And one of them said, you've got a Nazi in there. So four of them, Ziz, Gwen Danielson, Emma, Baranian, and it gets a little confusing with all names. And Alex Lethem, they went anyway, and they had their Guy Fawkes masks on, and they had their black hooded robes on.

18:57They blocked the exits with their vehicles, and they were like, here, you're going to listen to us. Here's our flyers. Here's our problems and our issues. And the staff didn't know what was going on. They called in a report of a possible active shooter, and the cops came. They did not have arms on them or anything like that, but they were arrested on charges of false imprisonment and child endangerment because there were kids there. It was a campground where they met north of San Francisco. And the defendants, we should point out, the four of them did end up filing a suit against the police alleging mistreatment.

19:28Yeah. So the rationalist community is like, that's it. Not only can you not come to CFAR retreats, you can't even hang out on the Less Wrong blog. You can't come to our cocktail meetups that we have, which are a lot of fun. So you're probably going to be upset. They just got booted out. So now this wedge was a gulf. It was a break in communication between the group that would come to be known as Cisians and the rationalist community. And with that, that group became more and more isolated and their ideas got a little weirder and a little more far out and a little more aggressive because they were all similar people who were feeding off one another in this isolated situation.

20:15situation, there weren't people on the outside coming and be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's rethink what you're saying. It was like, yeah, that's a really good idea. And it just kept going from there. All right. I think that's a good, you can kind of park all that stuff for now because the story kind of jumps around the country a bit. And when we come back, we're going to pick up with part two, a little north of San Francisco in Vallejo, California.

20:50Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen.

21:25I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. The moments that shape us often begin with a simple question. What do I want my life to look like now? I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, and on Therapy for Black Girls, we create space for honest conversations about identity, relationships, mental health, and the choices that help us grow.

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23:53Stop. You know. Stop. Stop. You should know.

24:03So, Chuck, one of the outcomes of being pushed out of the rationalist community, somebody launched a website called Zizians.info. It's still around today. And they basically chronicled all the things that they accused the Zizians of being a cult, or that backs up their accusation of the Zizians being a cult. And two of the things are something you referenced earlier. there were two suicides by people who were said to have gone through this unihemispheric sleep, I guess, boot camp. And it resulted in their suicides, allegedly. So the Zizians just have a really bad name at this point. The marina thing is not working out.

24:48The rationalist fleet is kind of sinking, as it were. And they just happened to meet somebody at the marina named Curtis Lind, who was a 70-something guy who loved people, loved artists, and had a bunch of land down in Vallejo and said, hey, I want artists to come live down there. You guys seem kind of artsy and odd. Why don't you come live there for really cheap rent? And the Zizians were like, heck yeah. All right, so Curtis Lynn offers them the chance to go live. They paid rent, but I don't imagine it was very much. And in this, we're going to be introduced to some more players at this point.

25:25One of the members of the group that had joined up at this time, her name was Suri Dow, and she was fresh out of high school and a leftist blogger and just sort of put a pin in this. At one point in a Discord chat, she said that she had had very dramatic fantasies about becoming a knife murderer. And there's, you know, up to 20 people at this time on Curtis Lynn's property. The neighbors get a little freaked out. They're like, hey, they're walking around naked sometimes. They're wearing gas masks. Lind eventually was like, you guys aren't even paying rent anymore. And they said, yeah, well, there's a COVID eviction moratorium.