Welcome to tech Stuff. This is the story. Each week on Wednesdays, we bring you an in depth interview with someone who has a front row seat to the most fascinating things happening in tech today. A conversation with Evan Ratliffe,
an investigative journalist and podcast host. He's reported for two years on a fringe group of young tech people who became obsessed with the dangers of AI, and he believes that the best entry point to their story is November twenty nineteen, when police in Sonoma County received a nine to one one call from a tranquil wilderness camp and a retreat center tucked into the redwoods of northern California.
They had a protest, so that there are only four people really involved at this point.
This is Evan Ratliffe.
They showed up wearing black robes, which they would describe as sith robes. They wear a guy fowx masks. They parked their cars in a way that seemed to block the entrances and exits of this center called Westminster Woods, where the reunion was supposed to be held.
Evan says that day the camp was hosting two groups of visitors. One was a gathering for a nonprofit called the Center for Applied Rationality or CFAR. The members of this group described themselves as rationalists, people who believe pure, unbiased rational thinking is not only possible, but the key to preventing artificial intelligence from destroying humanity. The protesters in the woods north of San Francisco had belonged to CFAR themselves, at least up until very recently.
They were becoming disaffected with that Center for Applied Rationalities people called SEAFAR. They were going to present on some of their complaints. They were then disvi to the reunion because people were becoming concerned with some of their aggressiveness, and they brought these flyers which had these incredibly obscure complaints about this group that no one could understand who wasn't sort of like, directly involved in.
This invitation or not. The former rationalists wanted to make their voices heard and their presence felt. But the problem was another group of visitors at the Westminster Woods.
So in addition to the reunion that was supposed to be taking place, there was a bunch of kids who were there for a ropes course. And when these people in masks and robes showed up out of nowhere and blocked the interests in exosues. They called the police. The police believed that this could be like an active shooter type of situation, a hostage situation, so they came in
with the SWAT team. They came in guns drawn, and they took down these four protesters, and then they had helicopters they had I mean, it was a very very dramatic situation, and that kind of set off a long string of these events.
A long string of confounding increasingly violent events that would eventually capture the world's attention, at first in the tech community and then beyond. These protesters became known to the general public as the Zizians.
Violence potentially linked to members of a Bay Area born cult like group known as the Zizians. The Zizians a radical death cult known as the Zizians. Six people have been killed in some way associated with this collection of people, and that includes the shooting of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont and the stabbing of a man in Vallejo who was once their landlord, the double murder of one of their parents. So this violence has sort of surrounded them, and it's not entirely clear.
What it all adds up to.
Complicating the picture is the media frenzy that's been surrounding this group. The Zizians have been described as a trans vegan cult or a trans death cult in headlines all over the world. But behind these culture war buzzwords and odd details about the group and its members, there's a larger story to tell about Silicon Valley, its culture, and what happens to a community that's grappling with the future
of humanity head on. It's a community Evan Ratliffe knows well the essence of which he captured in his article for Wired titled the Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians. Evan has been reporting on Silicon Valley for more than two decades, and he told us that his first exposure to the germ of this story was actually back when he was a researcher for Wide Magazine.
I worked on this story called Why the Future Doesn't Need Us by Bill Joy, and it was a hugely influential and popular story. It was probably the most popular story that Wired Magazine had ever done to that date for sure, and.
I don't know, maybe since what year is this?
This was two thousand. I believe the premise of the story was that humans were developing this technology that potentially could cause our own destruction, and one of the technologies was sort of robotics and artificial intelligence. And so at that time I started researching and paying attention to people who were having discussions around this issue.
Could artificial intelligence develop in such.
A way that it could eliminate the need for humans, It could accidentally destroy humans, it could intentionally and malevolently destroy humans. I was very interested in this topic, and some of the figures at that time ended up starting a kind of movement to understand and solve the problem of what they call the AI singularity and AI alignment. So the idea that AI could become super intelligent, and if it's going to become super intelligent, we have to
align it. We have to make sure it's aligned with our human desires, otherwise it will leave us behind, intentionally or accidentally. So that's what became rationality, which is the ideology that the Zizians emerged from.
What role does Yakowski playing all of this.
Eliezer Judkowski is the founder of the organizations that have sort of most committed to these ideas. Now I want to be very careful to say like he not only does he have nothing to do with the Zizians per se, Like you know, I would say he's like anti zizion As everyone in the rationality community like they're afraid. They were afraid of these people, like they're truly afraid, literally
afraid for their lives. They had to have extra security at their meetups because these people were at large throughout twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three. So Eliezer Judkowski started something called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute but let's just call it Miry and Mary was essentially developed to research the question of will AI eventually destroy us? And what can we do about it? How can we align AI and this? It kind of attracted very very smart
people around it. It attracted a good bit of funding, including from Peter Teel, and then also they sort of developed this ideology called rationalism, which sort of spun out
of it. And Eliezioedkowski was also involved in founding this, you know, Center for Applied Rationality, where their idea was, well, not only should we think about this question AI, we should also think about everything through this rational lens, this lens where we kind of strip away both emotion and societal pressure and we just try to think about things more logically and rationally. And that became almost like a movement in and of itself that attracted.
People to the Bay Area.
And so the philosophy rationalism has been influential in Silicon Valley. But I think when it comes to like aligning AI, I would think even the people associated with MIRI and these organizations would say like they haven't been particularly effective, if at all.
In creating alignment.
I mean, there are some people inside Open AI and other companies that believe in this stuff, but a lot of times they're just resigning because they can't get any traction in the organization. The organization just wants to get bigger and frankly make more money.
Who exactly are the Zizians and what can you tell us about zis Lesota.
So zizz Lesda is you know, nominally the leader of the group, the Zizians. If you read their own writings, you know she says, I'm not the leader of the group like I lead without authority, is what she writes. But she she is a as many of the members are.
She's a technically gifted person, she's trained as a computer engineer and then got into this world of rationalism and effect of altruism, which is the sort of putting your money towards sort of utilitarian causes where you're trying to benefit the most people.
This was Sam bankman Fried's purported crusade exactly.
Sam bankatried both made effective altruism more famous and also you know, caused it untold damage to its reputation. But I mean there were maybe half a dozen, maximum twelve people you could say were sort of like the Zizians. Now new people emerged early this year who no one had known about, including myself, So there could be more people who are influenced by this ideology or involved in some way that no one knows about. But for the time being, we sort of have a handle on the
people who were involved. As far as the ideology, I spent a long time in the ideology. First of all, I don't think it's completely coherent. The things you could say clearly about the ideology is that there's a belief in veganism the value of all life or sentient life. And you know, one of the big complaints was that people who were focused on AI alignment were not focused on aligning the AI to be friendly towards humans and animals, just humans. And there's a belief, I think in sort
of like the moral absolutism around those issues. So the people involved believe that they have the moral authority to sort of pursue those issues in the world. So that's what's so baffling about this situation is they have the ideology, they've written many hundreds of thousands of words of the ideology, but if you look at the people who have died, it's very hard to connect it to the ideology. They
seem like random people connected to the group. And that's why I sort of go back to this sort of moral absolutism that you know, allegedly if they were involved in these violent acts. When you adopt a stance that all of humanity is at risk and you are the person who has the moral fortitude to solve that problem, it can open you up to all sorts of acts that you're kind of like allowed by your moral code to carry out.
When we come back us how Zizla Sota's disappointment in the rationalist community led to the formation of the Zizians. Welcome back to a conversation with Evan Ratliffe about the Zizians, a confounding group of young tech people who got their start in the rationalist movement. Some media outlets have gone so far as to call the Zizians a cult, which would imply a level of recruitment on the part of
Zizla Sota, the nominal leader of the group. But to Evan, the recruitment process seemed more like disenchantment.
I think people just kind of gravitated. There were other disaffected people, some of whom were also trans women, and I think they just kind of gravitated towards this group. They felt a little outcast, and so they kind of ended up here. Now, I think many people in rationality would say like they all had a variety of potentially mental health conditions that were contributing to this. I think people in the group would say they were neurodiverse and
that was something that maybe brought them together. Part of what I would say happened with the Zizians speculating, we can't say for sure, but if as a person who's consumed a lot of their writings is that they showed up and they ended up sort of like disappointed with the social situation, and also like what these people were doing to solve the problem that they're so religious about,
so they were disaffected by that. So you have all of these people saying like AI is going to change the world, but the people who are trying to restrain AI are completely failing at doing that. So it's not terribly surprising that some people would come to join that, you know, if we call it like a religious religious idea and then say like, oh, you're not.
None of you were actually living it, So we're going to go live it.
We're going to be the real people who can really do what you're saying you're.
Going to do.
So it's a swirl. It's a swirl of different potential reasons. But it wasn't like a cult where someone's like actively going out and like trying to pull people in.
I wouldn't say.
That swirl of disaffectation. The first kind of like dramatic manifestation of that was the scene you described with the guy Fawkes mask and syth cloaks.
Yes, I mean that was the place where they really broke from the organization, the Center for Applied Rationality, and also sort of demonstrated that they were up to something else.
And after that, after the arrests, did that make this small group closer or did it push them apart? And what were the years between the arrests in twenty nineteen at the protest and the first murders that are allegedly connected to the group, what happened between those times.
I think the arrests really did bring them together slash push them further outside of society. You know, they were facing these sort of ongoing legal charges. Then they were filing a federal lawsuit for abuse and torture by the police. And they also, you know, they had our hard time finding a place to live. You know, they had been they had tried living on boats in the Bay Area for a while and then that didn't work out, and so then they were moving from sort of airbnbs one
to another. But you know, if you stayed at an Airbnb and you're wearing black sith robes all day and acting very strangely, like, pretty soon you're gonna kicked out of that Airbnb. So they ended up living on this property in Vallejo where they were sort of semi squatters with these trailers, and so I think partly it was
getting arrested. And then partly it was this they were just kind of falling out of society more and more because the combination of their behavior and their reputation was causing them to not be able to find like a proper place to live, and then that was making the problem worse, and it sort of compounds itself.
And how did the alleged Mudis begin.
Well, the first incident of real violent was when they were living on this property in Vallejo and the landlord was in the process of trying to evict them. So basically the landlord had taken them on the property. Then during COVID they had stopped paying any rent. A lot of rent back rent had accrued, and then by twenty twenty two they were continue to not pay rent, and he went to the authorities.
And was going to get them evicted.
And then allegedly one of their number lured him to one of their trailers saying there was a water leak, and they started stabbing him with knives. One of them stabbed him with a samurai sword, and he had a gun. He pulled out the gun, he shot and killed one of them, and he survived that stabbing.
He shot another one who survived.
One of them died, so two of the members, two of the people associated with it, were arrested at that time and had been in jail ever since and have never gone to trial. And then he survived, only to later be murdered by another member of the group earlier this year.
And one of the other things that comes across you reporting is that people affiliated with the group started to get very scared for their own lives because of Ziz, and also that Ziz was putting pressure on them to commit murders.
Yes, there was a person named Michelle Zagko who was sort of loosely involved with this collection of people.
Out in the Bay area.
Then she moved to Vermont with a friend possibly kind of partner of hers, and then but she was in communication with Ziz and there and blogging about it, and they're both they're all they're always writing on Tumblr and blogging, and you know, a lot of this is public because they wrote about what was happening at the time, and Michelle wrote about how Ziz was saying that she should kill the person that she was with, that she was living with to prove her loyalty or to prove what
kind of person she was, and they had this like back and forth about it, and if, of course, as an outsider, if you read this, you think, well, this is insane.
These people have just.
Lost their minds, like this, this is not real. But that you know, not that long after that, Michelle's Ashco's parents, Richard and Rita Zajko, were brutally murdered in their own home in Pennsylvania, and shortly after the murder, three people in the group, including ziz Lasota, the nominal leader, were detained in Pennsylvania. One of them was the daughter of
the couple who had been murdered. It's a strange thing to follow, I guess, I would say, because you see intimations of violence and then suddenly there is real violence, and it's like not totally clear how they're exactly connected or why one may have allegedly led to the other.
And the border patrol as what was that stand up? Do we know what the allegations are as to why that shooting could.
The basic facts, according to prosecutors in the court documents so far, are that there were two people whose names are Ophelia Baucolt and Teresa Youngblud, who were in Vermont. They were walking around wearing all black, often wearing tactical gear and carrying guns or at least carrying a gun. So naturally someone at a hotel where they were staying
just called it in to the police. The police and Homeland security agents started sort of monitoring them, following them around, and then eventually a border patrol agent pulled them over. And when they were pulled over, they just they came out firing and this one border Portroyjan was killed. It's not actually clear who fired the shot that killed the border Platajian. One of the two, Aphelia Alcoult, was also
killed in the shootout and the other one survived. Teresa Youngblutt, so she is facing trial for potentially for the shooting of the border Portrayjan who tragically died.
And Ophelia in Theresa. As far as we can define them Zizzians in so far as they follow the writings of Ziz.
Yeah, I mean as loosely conceived Zizzians. They connected with Zizz.
They were known to have stayed in a property in North Carolina prior to this incident, where Ziz also seemed to be staying, so they seemed to be connected to the group, but again, these are the two that no one knew for many years, including people in the rationalist community who knew them, had no idea that they were being influenced by these ideas of Zizilsoda, much less that they were like directly connected to people in the group.
Coming up, what the Cizians can tell us about the current moment in Silicon Valley and tech existentialism stay with us, I guess going back to where we began and the kind of rationalists in the Bay Area. Grace Byron wrote in the Nation that the group is quote an offshoot
of the tech adult libertarian politics of Silicon Valley. Has this group and his actions paused Silicon Valley libertarians ration is to kind of inspect their own beliefs and question how this level of extremism was able to emerge from that set of ideas, or is it mol being dismissed as a group of kind of fringe figures who say she goes to their minds.
I think you see a bit of both.
I think there are people who just say well, and any large group of people, there are some people who have mental health issues, and these people happen to have been very extreme versions of that On the other hand, one of the things that I admire about the best
of the rationalists is that they're constantly self reflecting. I mean, that's partly what they do is they can't stop writing about their own philosophy and like how it's changing and what it means and different cases where it could be applied, and has this gone wrong or has that gone wrong? So I think you can find a lot of self reflection around the Zizians and sort of like, what is it about our philosophy that attracts this sort of person I mean, they're not the first extreme group to emerge
out of the rationalists either. There have been a couple of other ones, not to the extent of violence, but you know, a couple of ones that people loosely.
Describe as cults.
So I think there has been some reflection on that. Now, whether or not that sort of filters into any change in their outlook in the world, I'm not sure.
I think it might be.
It's always time for a moment reflection when a lot of people get killed by people who are in your group, But I don't know if it's going to lead to sort of fundamental changes in how they view the world.
And you've wrote that the Zizians are a culture wolf, funhouse mirat for all times. I guess, A, what do you mean by that? And B how did you deal with that challenge in your porting on them?
What I meant was that, I mean, being for instance, pronominantly trans women in the group. You could see honestly, like, let's be clear, like the gleefulness with which the right wing media, for instance, embraced this story. Like I don't I can't think of another way to describe it except like borderline gleefold. The excitement around being able to call something a trans called just seeks just like the thrill.
I mean, I don't want to project onto them, but like if you read the stories, it's always sort of trans culled Trantifa. It's almost like they willed it into existence. They wanted there to be trans violence. Now that's fine, it's part of their story. They are trans women. But I think it's a mistake to choose any one lens and try to force that onto this story. So you know, part of the challenge that we face was even how do you describe people? How do you what names do
you use? Because the court documents often use their given names that they were born with in one gender, but they've lived under different names, and so, you know, we tried to take the most thoughtful approach we could and tried not to layer on those sort of culture war tropes into the story and just of tell the story as it happened, describing the people as they were at the time, and you know, did our best at that. But I think it just it got loose. It became
a tabloid story. It became a social media phenomenon for a while, and so you'll find everyone's approach, whether it's Antifa or trans issues or fascism or you know, you'll find them all kind of rolled into how these people are portrayed.
You mentioned effect vultruism. If we talked about the rationalists, there's been some interesting reporting recently and the information about the kind of rise of Christianity in Sinicon Valley. Do you have a kind of broader thesis about what's going on with faith and tech.
I don't know if I have a completely coherent thesis. I do think that AI scrambles your brain, like I think, if you think about it long enough, it scrambles your brain.
A lot of people try not to pay.
Attention to it that closely for that reason, because because it's easier to sort of say, like AI is going to hit a wall or it's all going to go away, or well, well I have a digital personal assistant and like whatever, it's fine. But I think there are these sort of like fundamental questions around what it means to be human and creativity and work like they're all wrapped up in this technology, and I think it can lead
people to some new places. And so I think people who are really really facing up to what AI is and what it's does, it's not surprising to me that they might end up in an existential place where they're looking for something new, and that's something new might be AI domerism, or that something might be Christianity, it could be effect of altruism. Like I feel like it's natural that these new philosophies and religious ideas would be connected to this, because I think if you spend time thinking
about it, it's hard to get your head around. I mean, I would say this is less like reported than my sort of personal belief that you know, the way the valley is so driven by the startup culture, and startup culture was fundamentally driven by getting huge amounts of VC investment if you can disrupting industries and then blowing up
and then getting vastly wealthy wealth as the ultimate arbiter. Again, not surprising to me that many people would find that empty when they get to it, not least because like most of them never get wealthy, like most of them never kind of like reach that point in the startup culture, like they have failed startups, And so you have a lot of people who are kind of attracted to this because the technistry sells itself as world changing, and it
is world changing. But then they either are doing startups that are relatively meaningless in the world but are meant to like blow up and make money, or they're working sort of like workaday in the tech industry, which they don't find particularly meaningful because they're tweaking tiny, tiny dials at a vast, vast empire like Google or Facebook, And so it seems like a natural environment for people to be looking for meaning that they're not finding in something
that drew them there almost as if it was meaningful, and they're disaffected because they discover that it's not.
Of course, the Zisian story is far from over earlier this month, five members of the group appainting courtrooms across the country from California to Maryland, and there are trials underways determine charges in two violent incidents, also involving cysians. Where do you see the story going next?
Well, currently, there are a lot of people in custody. I mean basically everyone who is involved in the group is either in custody or dead. Now, some of those charges are not particularly serious. So, for instance, ziz Lasoda and Michelle's Agco and another person connected with the group are in cust in Maryland and they're facing gun charges from when the cops showed up and they were kind of living in these box trucks and they had guns.
So they have gun charges and trespassing charges, but they're all misdemeanors. So I think the big question is going to be can the authorities pin any of the larger episodes of violence on these individuals, and if not, I can't see them staying in custody too long because again,
the charge they're facing are not that serious. But I think right now it looks likely that many members of the group, of not all of them, will be in jail or prison for the foreseeable future, but there there are some trials coming up, and they could kind of go either way as to whether they could ever reconstitute
as a group. That seems incredibly unlikely, but like, the philosophy's out there, so you know, it doesn't necessarily take them being anywhere for someone else to look at the philosophy and decide to act on it in some way, or if Ziz were to get out, to start communicating
with and start the whole thing up again. So I think we're at a real inflection moment where the question is are these people for the large part, going to prison or is there some chance that they could get out and sort of start again.
Evan Ratliff, thank you so much, my pleasure. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis, Victoria Dominguez, and Adriana Tapia. It was executive produced by me Karen Price and Kate Osborne for Kneidiscope and Katrina Norvelle for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Instead mixed this episode and Kyle Murder Rodelphine Song join
us on Friday for the Week in Tech. Kara and I will run through all the most important tech headlines, including some you may have missed, and please rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and reach out to us over email at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.