Robert tells David Gborie about the early life of Ziz LaSota, a bright young girl from Alaska who came to the Bay Area with dreams of saving the cosmos or destroying it, all based on her obsession with Rationalist blogs and fanfic.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What led to the birth of Ziz LaSota?
Oh my goodness, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is... I'll be interested to see how the audience reacts to this one. Talking about some of the most obscure, frustrating internet arcana that has ever occurred and recently led to the deaths of like six people. Um... My guest today, as in last episode, David Boree. David, how you doing, man?
I'm doing great. I really can't wait to see where this goes. Yeah. I feel like anything could happen at this point.
It is going to. It is going to. A lot of frustrating things are going to happen. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, listeners. I'm Melissa Jeltsin, host of What Happened to Talena Zarr. It's the story of a woman who disappears in the early days of COVID lockdowns and the group of online sleuths who try to find her.
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Chapter 2: How did Ziz's childhood shape her beliefs?
Ziz Lasoda was born in 1990 or 1991. I don't have an exact birth date. She's known to be 34 years old as of 2025, so it was somewhere in that field. She was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, and grew up there as her father worked for the University of Alaska as an AI researcher.
We know very little of the specifics of her childhood or upbringing, but in more than 100,000 words of blog posts, she did make some references to her early years. She claims to have been talented in engineering and computer science from a young age, and there's no real reason to doubt this. The best single article on all of this is a piece in Wired by Evan Ratliff.
He found a 2014 blog post by Ziz where she wrote, My friends and family, even if they think I'm weird, don't really seem to be bothered by the fact that I'm weird. But one thing I can tell you is that I used to de-emphasize my weirdness around them, and then I stopped and found that being unapologetically weird is a lot more fun."
Now, it's important you know, Ziz is not the name this person is born under. 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. Like this is when she's a kid, right? And she's not going to transition until fairly late in the story after coming to San Francisco. So you just keep that in mind as this is going on here.
Hey everyone, Robert here. Just a little additional context. 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. It's called Worm.
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. Anyway, that's where the name comes from. So smart kid, really good with computers, kind of weird and, you know, embraces being unapologetically weird at a certain point in her childhood. Hey, everybody. Robert here.
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 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. Ziz, the teacher said, struggled to regulate strong emotions, often erupting in tantrums.
I wish I'd had this when David was on, but definitely sets up some of the things that are coming. She goes to the U of Alaska for her undergraduate degree in computer engineering. In February of 2009, which is when Alicia Yudkowsky started Less Wrong, Ziz starts kind of getting drawn into some of the people who are around this growing subculture, right? And she's drawn in initially by veganism.
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Chapter 3: What role does Rationalism play in Ziz's life?
They're just like us. And there's strong evidence that ants do feel pain, right? We're now pretty sure of that. And in fact, again, this is an argument that a number of researchers in this space will make. Sentience is probably – 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? Yeah.
It's an interesting body of research, but it's fairly solid at this point. Again, I say this as somebody who hunts and raises livestock. I don't think there's any solid reason to disagree with this. You can see there's a basis to a lot of what Thomas is saying, which is that what matters is reducing the overall amount of suffering in the world.
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. So if our goal is to reduce suffering, animal welfare is hugely important, right? It's a great place to start. Great. Fine enough. You know, a little bit of a weird way to phrase it, but fine. Hmm. So here's the way.
Problem, though. Thomas, like all these guys. spends too much time, none of them can be like, hey, had a good thought. We're done. Setting that thought down. Moving on. So he keeps thinking about shit like this, and it leads him to some very irrational takes. For example, in 2014, Tomasek starts arguing that it might be immoral to kill characters in video games.
And I'm going to quote from an article in Vox. He argues that while NPCs do not have anywhere near the mental complexity of animals, the difference is one of degree rather than kind, and we should care at least a tiny amount about their suffering, especially as they grow more complex. Man.
And his argument is that, like, yeah, it doesn't matter, like, individually killing a Goomba or a guy in GTA V, 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. And thus, the sheer mass of NPCs being killed, that might be, like, enough that it's ethically relevant to consider.
That's...
I'm sorry, man. No, I'm sorry.
I hate to be this guy, but that's a lot of the fun of the game is killing the NPCs.
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Chapter 4: How did Ziz's views on AI evolve?
Please study the humanities a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. I mean, 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. It's a whole book about why a society fell apart. And like, motherfucker, more recently, Mike Davis existed. Like, like Jesus Christ.
I can't believe this guy continues to get traction.
Nobody else is thinking about why society is screwed up, but Eliezer Yudkowsky.
This man. This guy. This man who wrote this Harry Potter novel. Yeah. No, I was trying to find another. I read through that Martin Luther King Jr.
speech. Everything's good. Yeah. Oh, boy. Oh my God. Oh my God. Motherfucker. So many people do nothing but try to write about why our society is sick.
On all levels, by the way. Everybody's thinking about it.
Everybody's thinking about this.
This is such a common subject of scholarship and discussion.
From the bar room to the board room. It's what everyone's talking about, always.
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Chapter 5: What was Ziz's first startup idea?
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.
No, it's it's a. It's so scary. Yes, yes. It's very scary stuff. It's so scary to be like, oh, that's where she was operating.
Those are the stakes. This is where your head is. She feels like she's dealing with... That's... It is... I talk to my friends who are raised in very toxic evangelical...
subculture chunks of the evangelical subculture and grow up and spend their whole childhood terrified of hell 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 mother like that's what she's doing right exactly exactly she can't win there's no winning yes yes and again i say this a lot we need to put lithium back in the drinking water
We got to put lithium back in the water. Maybe Xanax too. She could have taken a combo.
Getting rid of Xanax. Before it gets to where it gets, at this point, you really feel for her. Just living like that. Every day, she's so scared that this is what she's doing.
She is the therapy-needingest woman I have ever heard of at this point. Oh, my God. She just needs to talk to a lot of people. Again, the thing that happens to cult members has happened to her, where the whole language she uses is incomprehensible to people. I had to talk to you for an hour and 15 minutes so you would understand parts of what this lady says, right? Exactly.
Because you have to, because it's all nonsense if you don't do that work.
Exactly. She's so spun out at this point. It's like, how do you even get back How do you even get back?
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Chapter 6: How did Ziz navigate the tech industry?
we got to reel this fish in, right? So this is described as an academic conference by people who are in the AI risk field and rationalism, thinking of ways to save the universe because only the true, the super geniuses can do that. 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. I've been reading about their beliefs.
I felt there's some cult stuff here 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 Synanon meeting. It's the same stuff. It's the same shit. It's the same as accounts of big self-help movement things from the 70s and stuff that I've read. That's when it really clicked to me, right?
Quote, here's a description of one of the... Because they have speeches and they break out into groups to do different exercises, right? 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. I didn't pick the most important problem in my life because secrets.
I think I used my turn on a problem I thought they might actually be able to help with. The fact that it did, although it didn't seem to affect my productivity or willpower at all, i.e. I was inhumanly determined basically all the time, I still felt terrible all the time. That I was hurting to some degree, relinquishing my humanity.
I was sort of vaguing about the pain of being trans and having decided not to transition. And so this is a part of the thing. You build a connection between other people in this group by getting people to spill their secrets to each other. It's a thing Scientology does. It's a thing they did at Synanon. Tell me your darkest secret, right? Exactly, yeah.
She's not fully willing to because she doesn't want to come out to this group of people yet.
I forget that she's also dealing with that entire- Yes.
Wow. Yeah. The hamming circle doesn't sound so bad. If you'll recall, and as you mentioned this, it was really good that you did it in part one, 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. Yeah. These hamming circles are weird, but they're not that.
But there's another exercise they did next called doom circles. 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. Someone decided and set a precedent of starting these off with a sort of ritual incantation.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of virtue ethics in Ziz's journey?
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. Gradually abandon my Facebook account and email. Use a name change as a story for that. And... God, that would have been the best thing for her.
Oh, you see like the sliver of hope.
Oh man. She sees this as a nightmare, right? This is the worst case scenario for her, right? Because you're not part of the cause. You know, you have no involvement in the great quest to save humanity. That's worse than death almost, right?
That's its own kind of hell though, right? To think that you have this enlightenment and that you weren't good enough to participate. And she talks a lot about how I'd probably just kill myself.
You know, that's the logical thing to do. Yeah. It's so fucked up. It's so fucked up. And also if she's trying to live a normal life as a normie and she, she refers to like being a normie as like, just trying to be nice to people. Cause again, that's useless. So her fear here is that she would be a causal negative if she does this. Right.
And also the robot God that comes about might put her in hell.
Right. Because that's also looming.
Yeah. After every, for every decision. Right. Yeah, and the 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 human life. 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. I'd considered, can I just not take a shower?
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." I considered getting paper and a cup and taking them elsewhere. 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.
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