The Killing Spree Tied to a Silicon Valley Intellectual Movement

0:04In January, near the Canadian border with Vermont, a border patrol agent pulled over a suspicious vehicle with two passengers inside. This Border Patrol agent in Vermont was stopping a car because there had been suspicions about these two people. They're wearing all black, they're armed to the teeth. That's our colleague Zusha Ellenson. It was a shooting and they got into a gunfight. Breaking news out of Vermont for you tonight. A U.S. Border Patrol agent, we have learned, has died along with another person. The Border Patrol agent was killed in the shootout, as was one of the suspicious passengers.

0:40Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, in California... There was a landlord in Vallejo, California, a little working-class city north of San Francisco, that was stabbed to death. New at 10, Vallejo police are investigating the city's first homicide of the year. Officers say they found one man who had been stabbed.

1:06The killing of the Border Patrol agent and the landlord occurred within three days of one another. On the face of these two murders, you'd think they'd have nothing in common. And then the authorities revealed the suspects. And they were both young. They were both computer scientists. They were both vegans. And they were both interested in artificial intelligence safety. Computer scientists. Vegans. Interested in AI safety. Those characteristics of the alleged suspects were familiar to an influential community of thinkers in California called the Rationalists. It's a very potent, brainy, brilliant community that's having a big influence in tech.

1:51And somehow, from this community emerged this group of violent, militant vegans.

2:01Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Monday, March 3rd.

2:14Coming up on the show, a Silicon Valley intellectual society kicked them out. Now, they're tied to a killing spree.

2:36The Rationalists are a loose group of intellectuals, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area. They get together in person and in online forums to ponder philosophical ideas, like how do we make better decisions? Or how do we know what's true? They like to talk about, debate big existential questions. They love reason, logic, and probability. A lot of people may have not heard about the rationalists, but they're very influential. Many rationalists today are devoted to developing artificial intelligence in a way that's safe for humanity. They talk a lot about this idea of the robot apocalypse, of an evil AI killing off humanity.

3:16And they spend a lot of their time trying to prevent that. When you think about a robot apocalypse, most Americans are like, oh, that's in a movie. But, you know, to them, this is very serious.

3:30The rationalist movement has drawn some influential people. Early on, venture capitalist Peter Thiel funded a rationalist research organization. And former open AI researcher Paul Cristiano now leads the federal government's AI Safety Institute. Has the rationalist movement had a real impact on AI safety? Absolutely. I feel like they've sort of spearheaded this whole movement to slow down AI, to make sure AI is done in a way that doesn't harm people. I mean, the development of AI has been so rapid, right? And often in Silicon Valley, you don't have a voice that's saying we need to slow down and do things in a different way.

4:13Much of the rationalist-heady conversations take place online. There's this famous online forum called Less Wrong where they debate everything, the rationalists. They love debating everything. This post is a collection of 11 different proposals for building safe, advanced AI. Less Wrong is filled with long-winded and complex posts. To give you a sense of what it's like on the Less Wrong forum, we asked the journal team to read some examples. The stereotyped image of AI catastrophe is a powerful, malicious AI system that takes its creators by surprise and quickly achieves a decisive advantage over the rest of humanity.

4:49I shall argue that the most critical aspects of today's and tomorrow's world-scale ethical problems have and will have to do with algorithms, not robots. It's a lot of very high IQ people, a lot of software engineers, very brainy people. When I entered college, they told me a Harvard education would empower me to do anything I want. The world would be my oyster. They attract a lot of people who don't feel comfortable in other areas of society, like transgender folks, autistic folks, contrarians like atheists. Throughout my life, I've often thought that other people had beliefs that were really repugnant and stupid.

5:30Below are all the cruxes I could identify from my conclusion that veganism has trade-offs. And the community really, for a long time, didn't care who joined. They welcomed anyone. They welcomed any idea. They were eager to embrace anyone and any idea, no matter how outlandish it seemed to the outside.

5:52This welcoming intellectual online forum caught the eye of a budding rationalist in Alaska, a promising computer programmer fresh out of college. I'm just going to refer to her by her last name, Lasota. Lasota was a brilliant young computer scientist from Alaska, graduated magna cum laude, came to the Bay Area, you know, about a decade ago, looking to work in tech and looking to get into this rationality movement. In the Bay Area, Lasota found community and an identity. She came out as transgender. She embraced veganism. She was interested in startups. And she started living on a tugboat in the waters south of San Francisco with a handful of other like-minded rationalists.

6:34So Lasota comes into this mix in about 2016 and loves it. But even in this community of oddballs, Lasota stood out. Over time, Lasota's persona evolved into something more conspicuous and extreme. And she started going by the name Ziz. Ziz, which is an alien villain from an online comic. Lasota started wearing black robes everywhere and started adhering to this philosophy of, they call it vegan Sith, is what they call it, after the people in Star Wars. The bad guys from Star Wars are the Sith. Yeah. The emperor was a Sith. Very bad. Yeah. Controlling everything. At one point, Ziz wrote a cryptic blog post about what she called her, quote, journey to the dark side.

7:28And people started to get creeped out. You know, just a very intense person, tall, blonde hair, long blonde hair, wearing dark robes, talking intensely about veganism, and talking about, allegedly on online forums, about punishing meat eaters, you know, very violent stuff, about having Nuremberg trials for meat eaters. The rationalists began distancing themselves from Ziz. They started calling her and her friends on the tugboat the Zizians.

7:59Have any of Ziz's followers said anything about why they were drawn to her? We have not been able to talk to people who were Zizians themselves. But we've talked to parents of people who were drawn into the Zizians. And what people said is that the followers were all somewhat insecure, people who didn't quite fit in, even in this community, and who were really drawn to that militance that Ziz had. Ziz was very charismatic for that community. The Zizians began developing their own theories. Ziz was interested in an idea that the left and right sides of the human brain could be separated into two different identities.

8:41To study this, she and other Zizians attempted to keep one half of their brain awake while sleeping. The Zizians wanted to present their research at rationalist organizations like the Center for Applied Rationality in Berkeley. The organizations were rather dismissive. They said, we don't think, you know, this is real research. And they turned down their offer to speak about it. And that's really when the transformation took a very dark turn. In 2019, Ziz and three other Zizians showed up at a Center for Applied Rationality alumni reunion event. They protested this reunion of rationalists wearing dark robes and Guy Fawkes masks.

9:21They blocked the entrance. This was very dramatic for the rationalist movement. And the police had to come and arrest them. And this really represented the beginning of the hostility and the split from the rationalists. As part of the split, the Zizians publicly blasted the rationalist movement. Said they were corrupt, said they were anti-trans, and believed that her group was, you know, the real, true, pure group. The rationalist organizations denied the Zizians' accusations. But soon, the growing rebellion didn't seem like it mattered. Because by the summer of 2022, the Zizians' run appeared to be over.

9:58And why is that? That's because the Coast Guard gets a call in August of 2022 saying that Lasota has gone overboard on a ship in the San Francisco Bay. The Coast Guard searched the waters of the Bay Area for Ziz's body, but nothing turned up. Ziz was presumed dead. They run an obituary in a newspaper in Alaska saying, quote, loving adventure, friends and family, music, blueberries, biking, computer games and animals, you are missed. Their leader was gone, but the Zizians lived on. That's after the break.

10:49About three months after Ziz's obituary was published, the Zizians ran into trouble. The group had moved off their tugboat and onto a plot of land in Vallejo, California. But they weren't making rent, and their landlord tried to kick the Zizians off his property. The landlord, who's 80 years old at the time, a guy named Curtis Lynn, is trying to evict these Zizians, and they attack him with knives and a sword. He loses an eye, but he has a gun. He shoots back. He loses an eye? Yeah. Yeah, he loses an eye. He shoots back during the violent confrontation. One of the Zizians is killed. Two of them are arrested.

11:28And who should be spotted at the crime scene? None other than the supposedly dead Lasota. Ziz. Ziz is alive. So she faked her own death? Ziz faked her own death. That's exactly right. A prosecutor's email to Ziz's attorney confirmed the sudden reappearance. Ziz was, quote, alive and well. She wasn't charged in the sword attack on the landlord, but two other Zizians were. They've both denied the charges. What happens next? Ziz shows up in an even more sinister spot across the country in Pennsylvania just a few weeks later. On New Year's Eve in 2022, an older couple in Pennsylvania was shot and killed in their home.

12:17When the police went to question the couple's daughter, they found her at a hotel with Ziz. But when they approached Ziz to talk to Ziz, Ziz just plays dead and lies there. Won't say anything. They arrested Ziz for alleged obstruction. Her attorney disputed the charges. Ziz made bail and then vanished again.

12:41After the murders in Pennsylvania, the rationalist community in Berkeley really starts to get freaked out. Someone puts what they call a community alert on this forum called Less Wrong where the rationalists like to debate things. And they say, you know, people are concerned that Ziz and her associates are violent and that there's a real threat here. That post went out in early 2023, putting the rationalists on high alert. But after that, the Zizians went quiet and no one really heard from them. Until this past January, when those two killings happened. A U.S. Border Patrol agent, we have learned, has died along with...

13:21The Border Patrol agent in Vermont and that landlord in California. Officers say they found one man who had been stabbed. The landlord in California was the same man who lost his eye in the sword attack a few years earlier. And he was said to testify against the Zizians in that case when he was killed. All told, six people have died in connection with the Zizians. There's the landlord, the Border Patrol agent, the couple in Pennsylvania, and two Zizians themselves, who were killed during the various confrontations. The motivation behind these killings is still unclear. In February, Ziz was arrested on trespassing, obstruction, and gun charges following a manhunt.

14:00A judge ordered that she be held without bail. She's denied any wrongdoing. How is the rationalist movement processing what's going on? Someone posted on the Rationalist Forum about why do so many rationalists turn crazy? A leader in the rationalist community, a person named Oliver Habrika, made a post on Less Wrong inviting the rationalists to do what they do best, debate and reflect. This time, the topic of the discussion was themselves. We asked one of our colleagues to read it out loud. I think there is a common thread between a lot of the people behaving in crazy or reckless ways, that it can be explained, and that understanding what is going on there might be of enormous importance in modeling the future impact of the extended less-wronged social network.

14:48These rationalists are asking questions like, were there dynamics in our group that sort of bred cult-like behavior that led to this sort of thing? I think a lot of this is just that we aren't very conventional, and so we tend to develop novel standards and social structures. Another thing they've been talking about a lot is how open the community was. They really just would allow anyone to come and go and they feel like that openness has really helped them and helped the movement do things that other folks couldn't do but also let in people who were not welcome elsewhere for a good reason. There are fewer norms that we share with more long-lived groups which might act as antibodies for the most destructive kinds of ideas.

15:30But at the center of it is sort of a soul-searching. It's like, did our movement go wrong in some way? And it's reminiscent of the soul-searching that took place after Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of, you know, one of the biggest frauds in history.

15:48Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, who was convicted of fraud, was a follower of a movement called Effective Altruism, which has a lot of overlap with rationalism and its approach and community. Since his conviction, the effective altruism movement has suffered reputational damage and increased scrutiny. And after that, people ask, well, you know, is there something wrong with this movement that this guy turned out so badly? And it's a very similar situation now. Do you think that this incident with the Zizians might damage the rationalist movement's reputation or the movement itself? Yeah, that's a really great question.

16:25How is it going to change this movement that's had so much influence in Silicon Valley? I think the one thing it might do is make people look at their movement a little more askance, you know, with a little more suspicion in their mind when they're talking about AI safety. You know, will people take them seriously in these really important debates when they have this group of militant vegans that came from their ranks?

16:59That's all for today. Monday, March 3rd. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.