Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Zizians: How Harry Potter Fanfic Inspired a Death Cult
Tue, 11 Mar 2025
Earlier this year a Border Patrol officer was killed in a shoot-out with people who have been described as members of a trans vegan AI death cult. But who are the Zizians, really? Robert sits down with David Gborie to trace their development, from part of the Bay Area Rationalist subculture to killers. (4 Part series) Sources: https://medium.com/@sefashapiro/a-community-warning-about-ziz-76c100180509 https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130318/https://sinceriously.fyi/rationalist-fleet/ https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/infohazard https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130316/https://sinceriously.fyi/net-negative/ Wayback Machine The Zizians Spectral Sight True Hero Contract Schelling Orders – Sinceriously Glossary – Sinceriously https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130330/https://sinceriously.fyi/my-journey-to-the-dark-side/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130302/https://sinceriously.fyi/glossary/#zentraidon https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130259/https://sinceriously.fyi/vampires-and-more-undeath/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130316/https://sinceriously.fyi/net-negative/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230201130318/https://sinceriously.fyi/rationalist-fleet/ https://x.com/orellanin?s=21&t=F-n6cTZFsKgvr1yQ7oHXRg https://zizians.info/ according to The Boston Globe Inside the ‘Zizians’: How a cultish crew of radical vegans became linked to killings across the United States | The Independent Silicon Valley ‘Rationalists’ Linked to 6 Deaths The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians | WIRED Good Group and Pasek’s Doom – Sinceriously Glossary – Sinceriously Mana – Sinceriously Effective Altruism’s Problems Go Beyond Sam Bankman-Fried - Bloomberg The Zizian Facts - Google Docs Several free CFAR summer programs on rationality and AI safety - LessWrong 2.0 viewer This guy thinks killing video game characters is immoral | Vox Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck Eliezer Yudkowsky comments on On Terminal Goals and Virtue Ethics - LessWrong 2.0 viewer Effective Altruism’s Problems Go Beyond Sam Bankman-Fried - Bloomberg SquirrelInHell: Happiness Is a Chore PLUM OF DISCORD — I Became a Full-time Internet Pest and May Not... Roko Harassment of PlumOfDiscord Composited – Sinceriously Intersex Brains And Conceptual Warfare – Sinceriously Infohazardous Glossary – Sinceriously SquirrelInHell-Decision-Theory-and-Suicide.pdf - Google Drive The Matrix is a System – Sinceriously A community alert about Ziz. Police investigations, violence, and… | by SefaShapiro | Medium Intersex Brains And Conceptual Warfare – Sinceriously A community alert about Ziz. Police investigations, violence, and… | by SefaShapiro | Medium PLUM OF DISCORD (Posts tagged cw-abuse) Timeline: Violence surrounding the Zizians leading to Border Patrol agent shooting See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What happened on January 21st involving a Border Patrol agent?
I got to say, it is impressive the amount of time you would have to mull all this over to come to these conclusions, right?
You really have to be talking with a bunch of very annoying people on the internet for a long period of time.
Yeah, it's incredible.
Yeah. And again, there's like people keep consistently take this stuff in even crazier directions. There are some very rich, powerful people. Mark Andreessen of Andreessen 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.
And anything you do to stop them is justified because so many lives are on the line. And again, I'm an effective altruist, right? The long-term good, the future lives are saved by hurting whoever we have to hurt now to get this thing off the ground, right?
The more you talk about this, it kind of feels like six people is a steal for how this could have gone.
I don't think this is the end of people in these communities killing people. Oh, yikes. So rationalists and EA types, a big thing in these cultures talking about future lives, right? In part because it lets them feel heroic, right? While also justifying a kind of sociopathic disregard for real living people today. And all of these different kinds of chains of thought, the most toxic,
Because not every EA person is saying this, not every rational, not every AI person is saying all this shit. But these are all things that chunks of these communities are saying, and all of the most toxic of those chains are going to lead to the Zizians, right? That's where they come from.
I was just about to say, based on the breakdown you gave earlier, how could this? This is the perfect breeding ground. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What is the connection between Harry Potter fanfic and the Zizians?
We got enough people with brain damage in the White House right now.
That's probably fair. And we don't need somebody who likes to fist fight that much.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're probably right there. I mean, if we could go back in time and make Joe Louis the president, I think he could solve some fucking problems in Congress.
He could get stuff done.
You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.
I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.
She had been shot twice in the head and in the back.
It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression.
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