Journalist Max Read explains how a bunch of Silicon Valley computer scientists spun into a cult accused of killings. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn with help from Travis Larchuk, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members A mugshot of Jack 'Ziz' Lasota, leader of the Zizians, after her arrest in connection with the killing of a Border Patrol Officer in Vermont in January. Image courtesy of the Allegany, MD County Sheriff's Office. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What happened to the Vermont Border Patrol agent?
In late January, Vermont Border Patrol agent David Mayland pulled over a car near the Canadian border. While trading fire, Mayland was killed, as was one of the car's occupants. The other was injured. As the days passed, authorities realized that the people in that car had links to what's been described as a cult called the Zizians. Most of the Zizians are now dead or in jail.
But do their ideas still have purchase?
This isn't like the Manson family driving around every night looking for people to murder. But I do think, you know, it's possible that there are people out there who are influenced by Ziz or who were in fact fellow travelers, so to speak, who are, you know, still waiting for the final confrontation that they're going to have.
That's coming up on Today Explained.
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It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. The Zizians emerged out of a movement called the Rationalists. Max Reed has been following this story. He's the owner-operator of the Read Max newsletter on Substack. And so I asked Max to start by telling us what the Rationalists are.
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Chapter 2: What is the Rationalist movement?
But I think it's fair to say the sort of main idea is that human beings can and in fact should develop their reasoning skills to better approach the world, to better pursue good political outcomes, economic outcomes, philanthropic outcomes, personal outcomes.
So in practice, this means having very long, very prolix conversations with other rationalists, usually online, like on forums, following chains of logic sort of deep as far as they possibly go.
And even if they come to absurd conclusions, taking those conclusions seriously so long as the logic seems sound, experimenting with sort of cognitive hacks or what they sometimes call debugging tricks to sort of eliminate bias and think more rationally in their lives.
Do you yearn to defend your own beliefs? Or do you yearn to see the world as clearly as you possibly can?
Rationalism has been very influential in the AI research community, in part because a sort of original set of concerns among maybe the most prominent rationalist, a man named Eliezer Yudkowsky, is about the inevitability or likelihood of a coming superintelligence and possibility the need to ensure that this superintelligence is aligned with human values and morality.
My prediction is that this ends up with us facing down something smarter than us that does not want what we want, that does not want anything we recognize as valuable or meaningful.
Just to give a sort of flavor of what rationalists thought, often the kind of crazy thought experiment that ends up being taken as, if not gospel, at least something to take seriously, is a famous thought experiment called Rocco's Basilisk.
The idea of which is, if there is a far future super intelligence that is going to come, it is likely to punish anybody who prevented it from coming into existence. And it will have the power to copy your brain onto its hardware in some kind of simulation and torture you for eternity.
So if you spend any time at all thinking about this coming superintelligence but not helping it come into existence, then you may be damning yourself or like a copy of you, which would be functionally equivalent to you, to an endless simulated hell, basically.
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Chapter 3: Who is Ziz and what are her beliefs?
Like, oh, yeah, it's a fun. It's a very fun sci fi. Like, you know, if you read that in a sci fi story, you'd get a little.
Yeah.
And you'd be like, that's exactly.
Exactly. But like, I don't I wouldn't make life choices based on it. But but the. The folks that we're about to discuss did appear to make some life choices based on things that, you know, were more thought experiment than real. So let's bring this into the real world. Who is Ziz and how does Ziz become involved with the rationalists?
So Ziz is a computer programmer originally from Alaska, I believe, who moved to the Bay Area in 2016, a few years after graduating college. Ziz is a trans woman who, based on what I can tell from the record, transitioned during or after college. She was very interested in the rationalist community. So there's two sort of big nonprofit institutions associated with rationalism.
One is called the Machine Society. Intelligence Research Institute, or MIRI, and the other is called CIFAR, the Center for Applied Rationality. And these are places where you can attend workshops and lectures about AI alignment, about AI safety, which are sort of the broad terms for talking about making sure that AI doesn't kill all of us. So she's really interested in this stuff.
She is attending these workshops. She's meeting a bunch of rationalists. She is hard to find housing, affordable housing in the Bay, and she moves onto a houseboat in the marina and becomes sort of well-known in the community for proposing a rationalist flotilla where a bunch of rationalists can all come live on houseboats in the marina for relatively cheap.
Our aim, whether or not we thought success probable, was to make something much larger than the vote that we got, to appeal to the entire rationality community.
People refer to the Zizians as a cult. Cults believe things. Cult leaders often have a big idea or two that they're very good at getting other people to believe. What is Ziz's big idea?
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Chapter 4: What events led to Ziz's disillusionment with the Rationalist community?
Destroy the Sith.
We must. For the purposes of like the basic understanding of Zizianism, there's sort of three important pillars to what Ziz believes. The first is that animal lives are worth the same as human lives. And because of that, factory farming, carnivorism, these are crimes on the order of genocide that millions of animals, hundreds of millions of animals are being hurt or killed or enslaved every year.
And moreover, you know, once you've sort of entered this thought experiment, you now have a kind of moral, the same moral obligation you would have to prevent a genocide, you now also have to prevent the killing and the death of animals. So, so far, so good.
This is kind of, this is not that far from what somebody who belongs to PETA might believe, but because of Ziz's and the sort of rationalist general commitment to their principles, no matter how kind of out of the mainstream those principles might take you, it suggests that violence, often extreme violence, is a necessary or allowable response to what you see as this enormous crime.
The second and sort of related part, Ziz seems to believe that you can kind of indefinitely just say no, that you can avoid compulsion and arrest and surrender simply by resisting at all times. And then the third part is that Ziz has a... What I suppose you would call a bicameral theory of mind, that she believes that every brain has two hemispheres.
I mean, every brain, in fact, does have two hemispheres. She's not wrong about that. But that each hemisphere contains a different person or a different personality that has been sort of melded together. in most people, but that through techniques like sleep deprivation, judicious application of hallucinogenic drugs, you can separate out these two halves of your brain, these two personalities.
She believes that each brain has a sort of independent moral quality and that, again, I can't believe how many times I have to say this is a blanket non-endorsement of all of Ziz's beliefs. But I do want to establish that, you know, as I describe this, it's not necessarily that we should take it at face value.
But she basically believes that something like one in 20 people, one part of the brain, one half of their brain has an intuitive understanding of animal lives as being worth the same as human lives. So that person is called single good. One of the two halves of their brain has this goodness, this understanding.
In one in 400 people, both parts of their brain have this intuitive moral understanding. Those people are called double good. So I bring up this schema both to, like, establish that Ziz is encouraging her followers to sort of pursue the sleep deprivation, the hallucinogenic drugs in pursuit of, like – you know, a genuinely pretty out there and strange vision of like human consciousness.
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Chapter 5: What conflict did the Zizians face with the law?
So you can kind of, you know, you can begin to see a sort of social dynamic emerge that allows her to take control of a group of people to establish herself as the leader, to establish herself as the sort of moral exemplar.
OK, so the Zizians have some strange ideas. They have a charismatic leader. That doesn't necessarily mean trouble has to happen. When do the Zizians first have trouble with the law?
Ziz starts to become disillusioned with the rationalist community around 2019. And around the same time, a set of accusations becomes public against some of the higher-ups at MIRI. That's, remember, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, one of the prominent nonprofits involved in AI safety and rationalism. These accusations, which are made on an anonymous website, are...
essentially that some of the higher ups at this at Mary have sexually assaulted minors. And, you know, these are these accusations have never been sort of specifically elaborated in court. You know, these are accusations about not just sexual assault, but also cover ups.
But there has been some really important and significant and really well documented reporting about sexual harassment, sexual assault, if not with minors, with adult members of the community. So, you know, to be fair to Ziz, it's not like she's inventing these charges. She is, I think, maybe picking up on some real messed up power dynamics.
I should note that this is not necessarily her crusade here is not necessarily a sort of moral like, you know, for the sake of the victims of this harassment or assault issue. It's that she thinks that if the messengers of rationalism are imperfect in this way, that it will damage their ability to pursue the goals of AI safety, of AI alignment.
And so in 2019, she and three of her followers, I suppose at this point we can say, go to a CIFAR reunion and they blockade the entrance. They wear Guy Fawkes masks in the manner of anonymous and they pass out flyers basically elaborating that Eliezer Yudkowsky does not deserve to be leading the rationalist movement. This obviously freaks out the people at CIFAR who call the cops.
Sonoma County sends in a SWAT team who basically by all accounts assaults Ziz and her three followers and they get arrested and thrown in jail in Sonoma County. And this on both sides represents a kind of escalation of For the rationalists, the establishment rationalists, such as they are, they realize that this Zizian group is maybe potentially dangerous.
So a website gets created called Zizians.info that's a sort of warning website about interacting with Ziz, about... Ziz as a potential cult leader, what they call an info hazard, which is like somebody who has knowledge that if you know it, it might drive you insane or compel you to do bad things.
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Chapter 6: How did the Zizians respond to their legal troubles?
From this point on, I think you can see a more militant, if I can use that word, a more militant Zizianism.
Coming up after the break, Max returns to tell us what a more militant Zizianism led to.
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