Speaker 1: Also media, Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where I,
Speaker 1: Robert Evans, am going to war like a one man
Speaker 1: like Rambo, like one of the later Rambo movies, not
Speaker 1: the first one that was actually about the cost of
Speaker 1: PTSD and Imperial War, but like the later ones where
Speaker 1: he's a one man army. I'm doing that, and I'm
Speaker 1: doing it against Microsoft because I fucking hate co Pilot.
Speaker 1: With me to talk about how much we hate Microsoft
Speaker 1: co Pilot, my producer Sophie Lichterman, and our wonderful guest
Speaker 1: David Borie. David, how do you feel about Microsoft co pilot?
Speaker 2: Ah Rambo three, let's go okay, okay, okay, kill a
Speaker 2: ton of brown people.
Speaker 1: Well, no, I mean this one. We're just it's just
Speaker 1: like Microsoft co pilots. We're killing Okay, all of them
Speaker 1: are not really people.
Speaker 2: It's so bad.
Speaker 1: The outlook is terrible. Microsoft has really gone far off
Speaker 1: of making a lot of products that people hate to use.
Speaker 3: Speaking of speaking of products people hate to use, David
Speaker 3: said before we started recording that he was excited to
Speaker 3: hear this story. I just watched it.
Speaker 4: Know.
Speaker 3: Where we're starting on this story is page twenty one
Speaker 3: of the script, and where we add the script is
Speaker 3: page forty nine.
Speaker 1: WHOA, I I made a mistake in doing this. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna admit that right now before we get further, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna say I aired in this. And it's you know,
Speaker 1: I've made peace with the inevitability of fucking stuff up,
Speaker 1: especially when like every week you're doing a different chunk
Speaker 1: of history and we're veering from like we're talking about
Speaker 1: fucking seventeenth and eighteenth century France and then like now
Speaker 1: we're talking about like a fucking gay you died, a
Speaker 1: genocide and Darfur or whatever. Right, like you're going to
Speaker 1: these are all important topics, but like you simply can't
Speaker 1: every single week cover the breadth of stuff that we
Speaker 1: do and not you're gonna misspeak, You're gonna make errors
Speaker 1: and stuff. And when it comes to like I'm talking
Speaker 1: about I'm talking about like not obviously those are important,
Speaker 1: but you know, if I fuck up some fact about
Speaker 1: like early nineteen hundreds Germany, I'm not going to be
Speaker 1: like too bent out of shape because it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's no perfection in this. But in this case,
Speaker 1: it's this tiny little community that nearly all of the
Speaker 1: reporting on has been like deeply incomplete, and I feel
Speaker 1: like I like the stress over, like what do I
Speaker 1: include in here? And the other problem is that none
Speaker 1: of these people have editors, and so all of everybody
Speaker 1: in this story has a blog, and every blog post
Speaker 1: is like forty thousand words.
Speaker 2: So it's just like, now, just say, what media are
Speaker 2: you able to get this? Is? You're getting this all
Speaker 2: straight from the source, right, A.
Speaker 1: Lot of it's I mean I read, I've read most
Speaker 1: of Zizz's blog entries, and I've at least done like
Speaker 1: little surveys of the blogs of everybody else involved in this.
Speaker 1: There were also a couple of very helpful compilations that
Speaker 1: like people, there's like one like a former Sometimes it's
Speaker 1: like former members of the community. Sometimes it's folks who
Speaker 1: are like rationalists that were trying to warn other rationalists
Speaker 1: about Zizians. But like people in and around the community
Speaker 1: have put together compilations where they'll like clip mixes of
Speaker 1: news stories and like conversations online come and obviously these
Speaker 1: folks like nasty work, yes, yes, and I'm deeply great, well,
Speaker 1: we'll have source links at everything in here. I note
Speaker 1: when I'm kind of like pulling something from something directly,
Speaker 1: but like, I'm very grateful to the maniacs who put
Speaker 1: together these like documents that have helped me piece together
Speaker 1: what's happening. Because really, if you're coming in as an outsider,
Speaker 1: if you weren't like embedded in this community while all
Speaker 1: is crazy shit was going on, it's a little it's
Speaker 1: kind of impossible to like get everything you need to get.
Speaker 1: You have to refer to these interior sources. It's just
Speaker 1: the only way to actually understand stuff.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, I as an out cider, I don't know
Speaker 5: what's going on.
Speaker 2: I don't know where it's going for sure. I don't
Speaker 2: know where it's going.
Speaker 1: It's going, we know where it ends, which you know
Speaker 1: what it ends. A member of Congress shows up at
Speaker 1: the library in Vermont that the US and Canada shares
Speaker 1: because a border patrol agent was murdered there and threatens
Speaker 1: to take over Canada, and that's all. Like, there's a
Speaker 1: degree to which you can kind of tie heightened tensions
Speaker 1: between the US and Canada to the murder of this
Speaker 1: border patrol agent, which itself is directly tied to the
Speaker 1: fact that Alicia Jedkowski wrote a piece of Harry Potter
Speaker 1: fan fiction.
Speaker 2: I love it all goes back to that.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, it all comes back to bad Harry Potter
Speaker 1: fan fiction. So part three we spent last episode talking
Speaker 1: about zizz Is moving to the Bay and their first
Speaker 1: interactions with the rationalist community. That big Sea Far conference
Speaker 1: they went to that was very reminiscent, had a lot
Speaker 1: of exercises reminiscent of like Sin and on ship.
Speaker 5: Right, very very a lot of talking murder, Yes, a
Speaker 5: lot of talk a murder.
Speaker 1: These people love theorizing about when it's okay to kill people.
Speaker 1: Constant factor at all of this, which.
Speaker 2: Is can't be a step in a good direction.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, you should. You should be aware of.
Speaker 1: There's like, if your community is talking about like the
Speaker 1: ethics of escalating to murder in random arguments too much,
Speaker 1: maybe be a little worried.
Speaker 2: If someone sits down next to you and says, how
Speaker 2: would you murder me? Or whatever? This right? You always
Speaker 2: got to get out of that room.
Speaker 1: Yeah you want to, You want to, You want to
Speaker 1: leave immediately.
Speaker 2: And even more if they're like, yeah, that's the right way,
Speaker 2: even worse sign and then.
Speaker 1: If they're like, yeah, would you would you perform necrophilia?
Speaker 1: In order to, in the past scare people away from
Speaker 1: attacking you, like, get out of that room, leap bad.
Speaker 1: This is not a crew you want to be a
Speaker 1: part of. Yeah, maybe just take a pickleball or pickleball.
Speaker 1: People never talk about necrophilia playing pickleball.
Speaker 2: I don't think one time. I don't think one time.
Speaker 1: No, they all talk about how they're getting knee replacements,
Speaker 1: and that's beauty of pickleball exactly. So, in spite of
Speaker 1: how obviously bad this community is, Ziz desperately wants to
Speaker 1: be in the center of the rationalist subculture, and that
Speaker 1: means being in the Bay. Unfortunately, the Bay is a
Speaker 1: nearly impossible place to survive in if you don't have
Speaker 1: shitloads of money, and one of the only ways to
Speaker 1: make it in the Bay if you're not rich is
Speaker 1: to wind up in deeply abusive and illegal rental situations.
Speaker 1: You know this, David, I'm I'm not spreading any news
Speaker 1: to you.
Speaker 2: Shout out to my landlord, mister lou.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 1: Ziz winds up in a horrible sublet with a person
Speaker 1: she describes as an abusive alcoholic. I was there. I
Speaker 1: don't know if she was the problem. In this part like,
Speaker 1: I obviously I've got one side of this story, but
Speaker 1: her claim is that it ends in physical violence. Ziz
Speaker 1: claims he was to blame, but she also describes a
Speaker 1: situation where they're like, after a big argument, bump into
Speaker 1: each other and he calls the cops on her for assault.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't put it past Ziz to be leaving some
Speaker 1: parts out of this. But also I know a bunch
Speaker 1: of people who wound up in horrible sublets with abusive
Speaker 1: alcoholics who assaulted them in the Bay Area.
Speaker 3: And then La.
Speaker 2: Chrislist is a crap shoot.
Speaker 1: Craigslist is a crap shoot. Yeah, every time I always
Speaker 1: I feel like they need to like qualify with like
Speaker 1: this is just his's account. But also this sounds like
Speaker 1: a lot of stories I know people have had.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's tough to get by there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so she calls the or he calls the cops
Speaker 1: on her, and then yeah, they do nothing, and he
Speaker 1: attacks her in her bedroom that night. So she decides
Speaker 1: to like he's like throwing a chair at her and shit,
Speaker 1: So she decides, I got to get out of this
Speaker 1: terrible fucking sublet. And unfortunately, her next best option, a
Speaker 1: very common thing in the rationalist community is to have
Speaker 1: whole houses rented out that you fill with rationalists who
Speaker 1: don't have a lot of money. It never rents by
Speaker 1: the artists yet kind of like artists or like content
Speaker 1: producer houses, it never explodes. People never have horrible times
Speaker 1: in these. This particular rationalist house is called liminal because
Speaker 1: you know, gen Z loves talking about their liminal spaces
Speaker 1: on the Internet. One resident of the house reacts very
Speaker 1: negatively when Ziz identifies herself as a non transitioning trans
Speaker 1: woman and basically asks like, when are you going to leave?
Speaker 1: So she has, you know, she says that as soon
Speaker 1: as she arrives one of the other residents's transphobes, she
Speaker 1: can't stay there very long. Again, all sounds like a
Speaker 1: very familiar Bay Area housing situation story. She bounces around
Speaker 1: some short term solutions airbnbs, moving constantly while trying to
Speaker 1: find work. She gets an interview with Google, but the
Speaker 1: hiring process there is slow. There's a lot of different
Speaker 1: stages to it, and it doesn't offer immediate relief from
Speaker 1: her financial issues. Other potential offers fall through as she
Speaker 1: conflicts with the fundamental snake oiliness of this era of
Speaker 1: silicon Valley Development, ziz blames on the fact that she
Speaker 1: couldn't feign enthusiasm for companies she didn't believe in. Quote,
Speaker 1: I was inexperienced with convincing body language, inclusive lies like this.
Speaker 1: I did not have the right false face, but very
Speaker 1: quick to think up words to say so, like I'm
Speaker 1: not good enough at lying that I'm excited about working
Speaker 1: for an app to you know, help you do your
Speaker 1: laundry better, which is like a third of the bay.
Speaker 5: Yeah, right, yeah, And once again she has like flashes
Speaker 5: of like, oh, wow, you really you really have strong
Speaker 5: morals and all the aim. Yeah, she's a strong resume, right,
Speaker 5: it wasn't she does she wants like an award as
Speaker 5: a NASA intern, Right, She's still yeah, she's she really
Speaker 5: is good at a lot of this stuff. In all
Speaker 5: of these Zizians, as silly as their their beliefs about
Speaker 5: philosophy and like cognitive science are, they're all extremely a
Speaker 5: comp in their fields.
Speaker 1: Nearly. It's a it's good evidence of the fact that
Speaker 1: like it's always a mistake to think of intelligence as
Speaker 1: like an absolute characteristic, like I am a genius software engineer,
Speaker 1: therefore I am smart. It's like no, no, no, you
Speaker 1: you're you're you're you're dumb at plenty of things, mister
Speaker 1: software engineer.
Speaker 2: I don't sell yourself. Sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So she does start to transition during this period
Speaker 1: of time. She goes on finasteride, which helps to avoid
Speaker 1: male pattern baldness, and she starts experimenting with estrogen and
Speaker 1: anti androgens. She'd wanted to avoid this for I'm sure
Speaker 1: she had a variety of reasons, but as soon as
Speaker 1: she starts taking hormones they have such a positive effect.
Speaker 1: She describes it as a hard to describe felt sense
Speaker 1: of cognitive benefits, and she decides to say stay on them.
Speaker 1: By October, she'd committed to start writing a blog about
Speaker 1: her own feelings and theories on rationalism, and her model
Speaker 1: here was Yudkowski. She names this blog Sin Seriously, and
Speaker 1: it was her attempt to convince other rationalists to adopt
Speaker 1: her belief about like veganism and such. Her first articles
Speaker 1: are like pretty bland. It's the scattered concepts and thought experients,
Speaker 1: very basic stuff like can God create a rock so
Speaker 1: big God couldn't move it? And then like throwing a
Speaker 1: rationalist spin on that. So it's you know a lot
Speaker 1: of this is like, oh, maybe in an area in
Speaker 1: which college didn't cost two hundred grand, you could have
Speaker 1: just gotten a philosophy degree, and right, that would have
Speaker 1: made you happy. Like, right, you just wanted to spend
Speaker 1: a couple of years talking through silly ideas based on
Speaker 1: dead Greek guys.
Speaker 2: Well you know the Bay is the place to do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, unfortunately, so she starts to really show an
Speaker 1: interest early on though, and this is where things get
Speaker 1: unsettling and enforcement mechanisms, which are methods by which individuals
Speaker 1: can like blackmail themselves into accomplishing difficult tasks for personal betterment.
Speaker 1: She writes about an app called b Minder, which lets
Speaker 1: you set goals and punish yourself with a financial bit
Speaker 1: penalty if you don't make regular progress. And she's really
Speaker 1: obsessed with just the concept of using enforcement mechanisms to
Speaker 1: make people better, writing often you have to break things
Speaker 1: to make them better. So not a great path going down?
Speaker 1: Here is she following this herself like she's working on
Speaker 1: She's trying to use some of these tactics on herself
Speaker 1: to make herself to deal with like what she sees
Speaker 1: as her flaws that're stopping her from you know, saving
Speaker 1: the cosmos. Great stuff, a lot I've brought pressure to
Speaker 1: put on yourself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this poor woman has been under the highest stakes
Speaker 2: this whole time.
Speaker 1: Well, and that's again that that comes. That's not Zizz,
Speaker 1: that's the entire rationalist subculture. The stakes are immediately, we
Speaker 1: have to save the world from the evil AI that
Speaker 1: will create hell to punish everybody who doesn't build it,
Speaker 1: and that actually will talk about this later. That breaks
Speaker 1: a ton of people in this She is not the
Speaker 1: only one kind of fracturing her psyche in this community.
Speaker 1: So right around this time, she's bouncing around short term
Speaker 1: rentals and like desperately trying to get work. She meets
Speaker 1: a person named Jasper Wynn, who at that point identified
Speaker 1: as a trans woman. Now those by Gwynn Danielson and
Speaker 1: uses by them pronouns. That's what I'm gonna refer to them,
Speaker 1: but for clarity's sake, I'm gonna call them gwyn or Danielson,
Speaker 1: even though they went by a different name at this time,
Speaker 1: because that's what they're called now. Gwinn was a fan
Speaker 1: of Zizz's blog and had some complex rationalist theories of
Speaker 1: her own. They came to believe that each person had
Speaker 1: multiple personalities stored inside their brain, a sort of like
Speaker 1: mutation of the left brain right brain hypothesis, and each
Speaker 1: of these sides of your brain was like a whole,
Speaker 1: like intact person, right, Like great, yeah, no, cool, No,
Speaker 1: you guys are gonna be fucking with your head's real heart. Great.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: So Ziz falls in love with Gwynn's ideas and she
Speaker 1: starts bringing them up in rationalist events, trying to brute
Speaker 1: force them into going mainstream among the community. But people
Speaker 1: are like, this is a little weird even for us,
Speaker 1: and she does not succeed in this, and as a result,
Speaker 1: she and Danielson and a couple of other friends start
Speaker 1: like talking and theorizing together separately from the bulk of
Speaker 1: the community. So now again you've had this. They're starting
Speaker 1: to calve off from the broader subculture, and they're starting
Speaker 1: to like really like dig ruts for themselves in a
Speaker 1: specific direction that's leading away from the rest of the rationalists.
Speaker 2: Literally, all that cold stuff.
Speaker 1: Huh, all that colt stuff, all that cold stuff. Now,
Speaker 1: Gwynn and Ziz largely like bonded over their struggle paying
Speaker 1: Bay Area rints, and together they stumbled upon a solution
Speaker 1: beloved by generations of punks and artists in northern California
Speaker 1: taking to the sea specifically. It's great, it's great. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've known like three separate people who lived on boats
Speaker 1: in the Oakland Harbor because it was like, this is
Speaker 1: the only way I can't afford to live in the bay.
Speaker 5: My little brother went to school right right outside of
Speaker 5: San Francisco, and his principal lived on a boat right
Speaker 5: just like a mile away from the school, and everybody
Speaker 5: loved it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, everybody loved it. I mean, I gotta say,
Speaker 1: everyone I know who lived on a boat lived on
Speaker 1: a shitty boat. But I'm also not convinced there are
Speaker 1: boats that any, boats that stay nice for very long.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it feels like you would be dank. I guess
Speaker 2: is the word.
Speaker 1: Dank is a good description of boat life, I think.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Gwinn's boat was anchored off the Encenal Basin, and
Speaker 1: Ziz found this a pretty sweet solution. She goes over
Speaker 1: to stay over one night and while they're like hanging out,
Speaker 1: staying up, probably taking drugs, they don't like usually write
Speaker 1: about it, but from like other community conversations, I think
Speaker 1: we have to assume an awful lot of the time
Speaker 1: when these people are staying up all night and talking,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of like ketamine and stuff being used
Speaker 1: to that isn't written into the narrative.
Speaker 2: That also goes along with it, also.
Speaker 1: Goes along with the Bay Area pills and powders are
Speaker 1: big yeah quote. They talked about how when they were
Speaker 1: a child, their friend who was a cat had died
Speaker 1: and they had to use their own retroactive paraphrasing sworn
Speaker 1: an oath of vengeance against death. Fucking. These are just
Speaker 1: people doing great, very healthy from the opposite of what
Speaker 1: you want a kid to learn when their pet dies.
Speaker 1: Is like, yeah, you know, death is inevitable. It happens
Speaker 1: to everything. You know, it'll happen to you one day,
Speaker 1: and it's sad, but just something we have to accept. No, no,
Speaker 1: no wars death.
Speaker 2: No. They were like, no, no, no, I can fix this.
Speaker 1: Okay, I as a parent have failed in this situation.
Speaker 1: This was an unsuccessful step in my child's development. Maybe
Speaker 1: no more pets for a while, Maybe no more pets.
Speaker 1: Gwynn also spent way too much time online, which is
Speaker 1: how they wound up reading hundreds of theoretical articles about
Speaker 1: how AGI artificial general intelligence would destroy the world. And again,
Speaker 1: AGI is like a mainstream term now because a fucking
Speaker 1: chat GPT came out a couple of years ago and
Speaker 1: everyone started talking about it at this point two sixteen seventeen.
Speaker 1: It's only like real people who are really into the
Speaker 1: industry in a nerdy way who are using that frame,
Speaker 1: Like regular people on the street don't know what you
Speaker 1: fucking mean when you're talking about this stuff, but this
Speaker 1: is a term that is in use among them. And
Speaker 1: like Ziz Gwyn moved to the Bay Area to get
Speaker 1: involved in fixing the problem. They were another kin, are
Speaker 1: you familiar with this online community? Which one other kin?
Speaker 2: Other kin? No, I have no, I've never heard of that.
Speaker 1: It's like a it's like the Mormonism of furreedom almost like.
Speaker 2: That that's that's the same you say.
Speaker 1: I don't mean like it's harmless, right, Like these are
Speaker 1: people who there's a mix of beliefs. Some of them
Speaker 1: like literally believe they're like fantasy creatures. Some of them
Speaker 1: just like yeah.
Speaker 3: To be like yeah, like half identify as like it
Speaker 3: a non human creature.
Speaker 2: Right, Oh, Like their furry persona is they're true.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, kind of. That's close enough for government work.
Speaker 1: And in Gwin's case, it's even different where I don't
Speaker 1: think they believe they are literally a dragon, but they
Speaker 1: believe that when there's a singularity and the robot god
Speaker 1: creates heaven, they'll be given the body of a dragon
Speaker 1: because the robot god will be able to do that.
Speaker 1: It's a good singularity at least. That's why this is
Speaker 1: all so important to them, making sure it's like a
Speaker 1: nice AI so they'll be able to get their animal
Speaker 1: friends back and get their dragon body. Til is old
Speaker 1: time tale, as old as time again. A lot of
Speaker 1: this could be avoided by just like processing death and uh,
Speaker 1: stuff like that a little better. But we don't do
Speaker 1: that very well in our society anyway. We've got a
Speaker 1: lot of people who are committed to denying that. So
Speaker 1: I'm not surprised like this happens at like the corners
Speaker 1: right Like this is this is just a little downstream
Speaker 1: from that Brian Johnson guy tracking his erections at night
Speaker 1: and trying to get the penis of a nineteen year old.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like.
Speaker 1: A massive sanity gap between these two things.
Speaker 2: It's I think I think it's I think we're drinking
Speaker 2: from the same well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so this is a result or so, Zizz
Speaker 1: commits herself to turning Gwynn to the dark side, which
Speaker 1: is a term she started to use. Obviously, it's a
Speaker 1: Star Wars term and it comes out as a result
Speaker 1: of her obsession with It's called acrasia. Akrasia is an
Speaker 1: actual Greek term for a lack of will power that
Speaker 1: leads someone to act in ways that take them further
Speaker 1: from their goals in life. It's an actual, like I
Speaker 1: think akrasia often it was like an early term for
Speaker 1: like what we call adhd right, like people who have difficulty,
Speaker 1: like focusing on tasks that they need to complete. One
Speaker 1: of the promises of rationalism was to arm a person
Speaker 1: with tools to escape this state of being and act
Speaker 1: more powerfully and effectively in the world. Ziz adds to
Speaker 1: this some ideas crib from Star Wars. She decides that
Speaker 1: the quote unquote way of the Jedi, which is like
Speaker 1: accepting moral restrictions you know about like not murdering people
Speaker 1: and the like, is a prison for someone who's like
Speaker 1: truly great and has the opportunity to accomplish important goals.
Speaker 1: Right if you're that kind of person. You can't afford
Speaker 1: to be limited by moral beliefs. So in order to
Speaker 1: achieve the kind of vegan singularity that she thinks is
Speaker 1: critical to save the cosmos, she and her fellow rationalists
Speaker 1: need to free themselves and from the restrictions of the
Speaker 1: Jedi and become vegan scyth. That's more or less where
Speaker 1: things are going here. So here I should note that
Speaker 1: while Gwynnin's's are spinning out on their own, everything that
Speaker 1: you're seeing from them, these feelings of grandiosity and cosmic significance,
Speaker 1: but also paranoid obsession are the norm in rationalists in
Speaker 1: effective altruist circles. There's a great article in Bloomberg News
Speaker 1: by Ellen Hewitt. It discusses how many in the EA
Speaker 1: set would suffer paralyzing panic attacks over things like spending
Speaker 1: money on an ice dinner or buying ice cream, obsessing
Speaker 1: over how many people they'd killed by not better optimizing
Speaker 1: their expenses, and quote in extreme pockets of the rationality community,
Speaker 1: AI researchers believe their apocalypse related stress was contributing to
Speaker 1: psychotic breaks. Marie employee, and that's one of these organizations
Speaker 1: created by the people around Yakowski. Jessica Taylor had a
Speaker 1: job that sometimes involved imagining extreme AI torture scenarios. As
Speaker 1: she described it in a post on Less Wrong, the
Speaker 1: worst possible suffering in AI might be able to people
Speaker 1: at work, she says, she in a small team of
Speaker 1: researchers believed we might make God, but we might make
Speaker 1: mess up and destroy everything. In twenty seventeen, she was
Speaker 1: hospitalized for three weeks with delusions that she was intrinsically
Speaker 1: evil and had destroyed significant parts of the world with
Speaker 1: my demonic powers, she wrote in her post. Although she
Speaker 1: acknowledged taking psychedelics for therapeutic reasons, she also attributed the
Speaker 1: delusions to her job's blurring of nightmare scenarios. In real life,
Speaker 1: in an ordinary patient, having fantasies about being the devil
Speaker 1: is considered megalomania, She wrote here. The idea naturally followed
Speaker 1: from my day to day social environment and was central
Speaker 1: to my psychotic breakdown. Oh man, just taking ketamine and
Speaker 1: convincing yourself you're the devil, normal rationalist stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, hey, we've all been there, right.
Speaker 1: We've been there now.
Speaker 5: In fact, no, this is the least relatable group of
Speaker 5: people i've ever heard of.
Speaker 1: No, no, exactly, because there it's this like grandiosity, it's
Speaker 1: this absolutely need to whatever else is going on, even
Speaker 1: if you're like the bad guy, feel like what you're
Speaker 1: doing is like of central cosmic significance. It's this fundamental
Speaker 1: fear that all is integral to all of these tech guys.
Speaker 1: It's at the core of Elon Musk too, that like,
Speaker 1: one of these days you're not going to exist and
Speaker 1: very few of the things that you valued in your
Speaker 1: life are going to exist, and there's still going to
Speaker 1: be a world because that's life.
Speaker 5: That's just yeah, that It's so crazy how it boils
Speaker 5: down to just like yeah, man, well I don't know
Speaker 5: what you thought was going to happen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, bro, sorry, Yeah, that's just how that's just how
Speaker 1: it goes. You know, We've got like ten thousand years
Speaker 1: of like philosophy and like like thinking and writing on
Speaker 1: the subject of dealing with this, But you didn't take
Speaker 1: any humanities and your STEM classes. So no, you know
Speaker 1: that you're just trying to bootstrap it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you just watched Star Wars again and decided you
Speaker 2: got to figure it out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you watch Star Wars one hundred and thirty seven
Speaker 1: times and figured that was going to your a place
Speaker 1: reading a little bit of fucking Plato or something. Maybe
Speaker 1: it didn't work. Also, again, the ketaminees not helping.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, God to be a fly on
Speaker 2: that wall.
Speaker 1: Oh god. Yeah, the rationalist therapists are raking it in, oh.
Speaker 2: Man, honestly well deserved.
Speaker 1: But yeah, some talk about info hazards.
Speaker 2: Jesus.
Speaker 1: So I have to emphasize here again that I want
Speaker 1: to keep going back to the broader rationalist community because
Speaker 1: I felt like a risk of this is that I
Speaker 1: would just be talking about how crazy this one lady
Speaker 1: and her friends were, and it's like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: Everything they're doing, even the stuff that is a split
Speaker 1: off and different in like more extreme than mainstream rationalism,
Speaker 1: is directly related to shit going on in the mainstream
Speaker 1: rationalist community, which is deeply tied into big tech, which
Speaker 1: is deeply tied into like the Peter Teal circle. A
Speaker 1: lot of these folks are close to in and around
Speaker 1: the government right now, right So like that is it's
Speaker 1: Ziz is not nearly as much of an outlier as
Speaker 1: a lot of rationalists want people to think. Right, Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: at rationalists meetups, Ziz began to pushing this whole vegan
Speaker 1: syth thing hard and again meets with little success, but
Speaker 1: she and Gwyn gradually start to expand the circle of
Speaker 1: people around them. Meanwhile, in her professional life, that Google
Speaker 1: interview process moves forward. Ziz says that she past every
Speaker 1: stage of the process, but that it keep getting dragged out,
Speaker 1: forcing her to ask her parents for more help. In November,
Speaker 1: around the time her blog started to get a following,
Speaker 1: she says Google said she'd passed the committee and would
Speaker 1: be hired once she got picked for a team. Now
Speaker 1: I don't know what happens after this, she says. Google
Speaker 1: asks for proof of address, which she doesn't have. She's
Speaker 1: just turned twenty six, and she's not on her parents'
Speaker 1: health insurance either. She's been pages describing what is a
Speaker 1: very familiar nightmare scenario to me of like trying to
Speaker 1: get proof of address so you can get a job
Speaker 1: and life continue getting like, you know, get on Cali
Speaker 1: med and stuff. And I do think it's probably worth
Speaker 1: acknowledging that, Like, as her brain is starting to break
Speaker 1: and she's she's getting further and further into all these
Speaker 1: delusional ideas, She's also struggling with being off of her parents'
Speaker 1: health insurance and like trying to find stable housing in
Speaker 1: the bay and like that influences the situation.
Speaker 2: And still in the process of transitioning, right.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, exactly, And still in the process of transitioning. Yes,
Speaker 1: a heavy workload, you're doing too much to your brain, right, yes, so,
Speaker 1: And then she makes the worst possible decision, which is
Speaker 1: to live with her friend Gwynn in her tiny sail
Speaker 1: in their tiny sailboat, which is now anchored by the
Speaker 1: Berkeley Marina. Again, this is not like a houseboat. This
Speaker 1: is like a sailboat with one small room.
Speaker 2: Right, it's got a court like yeah, there's like a
Speaker 2: bed table in.
Speaker 1: A sink, writing, like a little bathroom probably maybe a kitchenette.
Speaker 1: But it's not like livable for two people.
Speaker 3: Somebody who's like ever lived into small space with your
Speaker 3: roommate knows just like, no matter where you're at, it's horrible,
Speaker 3: bad idea.
Speaker 1: And imagine if that's shitty tiny apart meant that you
Speaker 1: remember from your past was a boat just disastrous and
Speaker 1: this is not a good situation. This would later write,
Speaker 1: I couldn't use my computer as well. I couldn't set
Speaker 1: up my three monitors, there was no room, couldn't have
Speaker 1: a programming flow state. For nine hours, I had trouble sleeping.
Speaker 1: The slightest noise in my mind kept alerting me to
Speaker 1: the possibility that someone like my roommate from several months ago,
Speaker 1: was going to attack me in my sleep. So this
Speaker 1: is not a healthy situation. And both Gwynnon's's have endured
Speaker 1: some specific traumas, and both are also prone to flights
Speaker 1: of grandiosity and delusion. And now they are trapped all day,
Speaker 1: every day together in a single room where their various
Speaker 1: neuroses are clashing with each other and their only relief
Speaker 1: is talking for hours about how to save the world.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, this is a it's a real villain story.
Speaker 2: You couldn't get any worse than this.
Speaker 1: It couldn't. And it's like, at this point, I don't
Speaker 1: think either of them is like intentionally doing anything bad.
Speaker 1: You've just you've kind of created a cult where like
Speaker 1: you're trading off on being the cult leader and cult
Speaker 1: member for each other, Like you've isolated each other away
Speaker 1: from the world, and you're spending time brainwashing each other
Speaker 1: together in your little boats. Yeah, how often do you
Speaker 1: think they were leaving that boat not nearly long enough?
Speaker 1: And Gwynn is on what Ziz describes as a cocktail
Speaker 1: of stimulants. Quote mapped out the cognitive effects of each
Speaker 1: hour they were on them. They get very angry if
Speaker 1: Ziz interrupts their thoughts at the wrong time. And also
Speaker 1: like Ziz isn't really sleeping, so they're just talking for
Speaker 1: hours and getting on each other's nerves at the same time.
Speaker 1: But also like building these increasingly elaborate fantasies about how
Speaker 1: they're going to save the cosmos and it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's not great. Through these conversations they do develop Gwinn's
Speaker 1: multiple personalities theory, mixing in some of Zizz's own beliefs
Speaker 1: about good and evil. And I want to quote another
Speaker 1: passage from that Wired article that's summarizes what they come
Speaker 1: to believe about this. A person's core consisted of two hemispheres,
Speaker 1: each one intrinsically good or non good. In extremely rare cases,
Speaker 1: they could be double good, a condition that so happened
Speaker 1: with Lesoda identified in herself and this is consistently going
Speaker 1: to identify herself as intrinsically good, so she's both sides
Speaker 1: of her personality are only good. But most people are
Speaker 1: at best single good, which means part of them is
Speaker 1: non good or basically evil, and they're at war with
Speaker 1: this other half of their brain. That's a whole person
Speaker 1: that's evil, which is why the other people can't be
Speaker 1: trusted to make decisions. You know, like, increasingly, this's attitude
Speaker 1: is going to be like, only intrinsically good people can
Speaker 1: be trusted to make good decisions, only the double goods,
Speaker 1: only the double goods. That's such like a you know,
Speaker 1: you're making your own life or well speech. This this
Speaker 1: is a bad sign. Yeah, so, Zizz is google ambitions
Speaker 1: fall apart at this time. They don't really give us
Speaker 1: a good explanation as to why. I kind of think
Speaker 1: they started bombarding their contact with Google with like requests
Speaker 1: about why the process wasn't going faster, and maybe Google
Speaker 1: was like, ah, maybe we don't need this person. Ziz
Speaker 1: concludes failing at Google was good because she's gotten she'd
Speaker 1: gotten ten thousand dollars from unemployment at this point. Quote
Speaker 1: this means I had some time. If they hired me soon,
Speaker 1: it would deprive me of at least several months of freedom,
Speaker 1: and which of course she is continuing to work out
Speaker 1: her theories with Gwynn on the sailboat. Also, if that's freedom,
Speaker 1: it's really not freedom.
Speaker 2: I maybe maybe work. I heard the Google campus has
Speaker 2: a lot of things to do, and.
Speaker 1: It's the kind of the what if. I think maybe
Speaker 1: at this point she still could have pulled out of
Speaker 1: this tailspin if she'd gotten a job and worked around
Speaker 1: other people and socialized not on the sailboat, but also
Speaker 1: a real consistent thing with Zizz is at this point
Speaker 1: she has no willingness to do the kind of compromise.
Speaker 1: And I'm not just talking about the moral compromise, but like,
Speaker 1: even going to work a job for a company, you're
Speaker 1: going to spend a large part of your day doing
Speaker 1: a thing that like you wouldn't be doing otherwise, right,
Speaker 1: because that's what a job generally, that's just work. And
Speaker 1: Ziz feels like she can't handle the idea of doing
Speaker 1: anything but reading fan fiction and theorizing about how to
Speaker 1: give herself superpowers. Right, that's the most important thing in
Speaker 1: the world because the stakes are so high, So she
Speaker 1: like like ethically can't square herself with doing anything she
Speaker 1: needs to succeed in this industry. Where she has the
Speaker 1: skill to succeed. And this is this is another trait
Speaker 1: she's got in common with the rest of the rationalist
Speaker 1: EA subculture that that Bloomberg article interviewed a guy named
Speaker 1: quaou Chu Yuan, a former rationalist and PhD candidate who
Speaker 1: dropped out of his PhD program in order to work
Speaker 1: in AI risk. He stopped saving for retirement and cut
Speaker 1: off his friends so he could donate all of his
Speaker 1: money to you know, EA causes and because his friends
Speaker 1: were distracting him from saving the world. And these are
Speaker 1: all this all cult stuff, right. Cults want you to
Speaker 1: cut off from your friends, they want you to give
Speaker 1: them all your money. He's doing but he's doing it
Speaker 1: like independently, Like there's not like a single leader. He's
Speaker 1: not like living on a compound with them. It's just
Speaker 1: once you kind of take these beliefs seriously, the things
Speaker 1: that you that you will do to yourself are the
Speaker 1: things people in cults have done to them.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: In an interview with Business Insider, Yan said, you can
Speaker 1: really manipulate people, and you're doing all kinds of crazy stuff.
Speaker 1: If you can convince them, this is how you can
Speaker 1: prevent the end of the world. Once you get into
Speaker 1: that frame, it really distorts your ability to care about
Speaker 1: anything else.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: That's yeah, that's kind of a thing. It's harder to
Speaker 1: talk about this than like could people talk about Ziz
Speaker 1: as like, oh, it's a cult leader and she had
Speaker 1: her you know, Vegan trans Ai death cult or something,
Speaker 1: and you know, I feel like that's not close enough
Speaker 1: to the truth to get what's like to get how
Speaker 1: this happened, right, because what happens with Ziz is very cultish.
Speaker 1: But Ziz is one of a number of different people
Speaker 1: who have cabbed off of the rationalism community and had
Speaker 1: disastrous impacts. But it happens constantly with these people because
Speaker 1: like it's such.
Speaker 2: An engine for it.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's an engine for making cults.
Speaker 2: It's it's this is a cult factory for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're creating a cult factory.
Speaker 5: Oh no, to give you the base ideas and then
Speaker 5: you can just kind of franchise it how you'd like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And a lot of prominent rationalists who news is
Speaker 1: at the time have since gone out of their way
Speaker 1: to describe her as like, you know, someone on the fringes.
Speaker 1: Anna Salomon of Seafar described her as a young person
Speaker 1: who was hanging around and who I suspect wanted to
Speaker 1: be important. And Anna claim, is there anyone here who
Speaker 1: doesn't want that? Within this No, that's all of them, right,
Speaker 1: that's the whole community. And like Anna was emailing directly
Speaker 1: gave that gave Ziz, like some of the advice that
Speaker 1: Ziz considered like key to her moving to the Bay
Speaker 1: Area and stuff. Right like these these these people, like
Speaker 1: the rationalists are really really want you to think that
Speaker 1: this was just like some fringe person. But she's very
Speaker 1: much tied in to all of this stuff, right, So
Speaker 1: for her part, Ziz doesn't deny that failing to convince
Speaker 1: other rationalists was part of why she pulled away from
Speaker 1: mainstream rationalism. But she's also going to claim that a
Speaker 1: big reason for her break is sexual abuse among people
Speaker 1: leading in the rationalist community. And there's a specific case
Speaker 1: that she'll cite later that doesn't happen to until twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: But this is a problem people were discussing in twenty
Speaker 1: seventeen when she's living on that boat. The representative story
Speaker 1: is the case of Sonia Joseph, who was the basis
Speaker 1: of that Bloomberg news piece. I've quoted from a couple
Speaker 1: of times, and it's a bummer of a story. Sonya
Speaker 1: was fourteen when she first read Ydkowski's Harry Potter and
Speaker 1: the Methods of Rationality, which is set her on the
Speaker 1: path that led her to moving to the Bay Area
Speaker 1: in order to get involved in the rationalist EA set.
Speaker 1: And she's focused on the field of AI risk. And
Speaker 1: I'm going to read it a quote.
Speaker 3: This week has been so long that I completely erased
Speaker 3: the Harry Potter part of this story from my brain.
Speaker 1: It's never drops too far below the surface. I cannot
Speaker 1: overemphasize how important this Harry Potter fan fiction is to
Speaker 1: all these murders. I want primary texts are getting abused. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: it's a primary text of the movement. Wow, I'm going
Speaker 1: to read a quote from that Bloomberg article. Sonia was
Speaker 1: encouraged when she was twenty two to have dinner with
Speaker 1: a fortyish startup founder in the rationalist sphere because he
Speaker 1: had a close connection to Peter Teal. At dinner, the
Speaker 1: man Bragg that Yudkowski had moderate modeled a core Harry
Speaker 1: Potter like fit professor in that fanfic on him, Joseph
Speaker 1: says that He also argued that it was normal for
Speaker 1: a twelve year old girl to have sexual relationships with
Speaker 1: adult men, and that such relationships were a noble way
Speaker 1: of transferring knowledge to a younger generation. Then, she says
Speaker 1: he followed her home and insisted on staying over. She
Speaker 1: says he slept on the floor of her living room
Speaker 1: and that she felt unsafe until he left in the morning. Jesus,
Speaker 1: so great. You know, bragging about your Harry Potter, how
Speaker 1: you helped inspire the Harry Potter fan, and then explaining
Speaker 1: how twelve year old girls should have sex with adult men.
Speaker 1: Good stuff, got rational.
Speaker 5: I gotta say, that's a crazy brag to get chicks. Yeah,
Speaker 5: you know it was.
Speaker 2: You know, one of those characters. I'm the snake.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm the snipe of this. By the way, what
Speaker 1: do you think about twelve year olds? Awesome? I have
Speaker 1: a close connection to Peter Teal.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Cool, oh man. As that Bloomberg article makes clear, this
Speaker 1: is not an isolated issue within rationalism. Quote, sexual harassment
Speaker 1: and abuse are distressing, are distressingly common. According to interviews
Speaker 1: with eight women at all levels of the community, many
Speaker 1: young ambitious women described a similar trajectory that were initially
Speaker 1: drawn in by the ideas, then became immersed in the
Speaker 1: social scene. Often that meant to attending parties at EA
Speaker 1: or rationalist group houses, or getting added to jargon filled
Speaker 1: Facebook messenger chat groups with hundreds of like minded people.
Speaker 1: The eight women say casual misogyny threaded through the scene
Speaker 1: on the low end brick. The rationalist adjacent writer says
Speaker 1: a prominent rationalist once told her condescendingly that she was
Speaker 1: a five year old and a hot twenty year old's body.
Speaker 1: Relationships with much older men were common, as was polyamory.
Speaker 1: Now there was inherently harmful, but several women say those
Speaker 1: norms became tools to help influential older men get more partners.
Speaker 1: And this is also this isn't just rationalism, that is
Speaker 1: the California ideology. That is the Bay Area tech set, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, very techy.
Speaker 1: Yes a man, and it's all super fucking gross the
Speaker 1: whole year a five year old and a hot twenty
Speaker 1: year old's body thing. What the fuck? Man? How do
Speaker 1: you say that? Not hurl yourself off the San Francisco
Speaker 1: Bay Bridge?
Speaker 2: Vile?
Speaker 1: That's fucked up, dude, that's bad. Speaking of bad to
Speaker 1: the bone are sponsors. Ah, we're back. So this is
Speaker 1: important to understand in a series about this very strange
Speaker 1: person and the strange beliefs that she developed that influenced
Speaker 1: several murders. Ziz had many of the traits of a
Speaker 1: cult leader, but again, she's also a victim first of
Speaker 1: the cult dynamics inherent to rationalism. And what she's doing
Speaker 1: next is she breaks away with a small loyal group
Speaker 1: of friends, and she does create a physical situation that
Speaker 1: much more resembles the kind of cults we're used to
Speaker 1: dealing with, particularly scientology, because next she's going to take
Speaker 1: Oh wow, me and Gwnn living alone on this boat.
Speaker 1: We kind of hate each other and neither of us
Speaker 1: is sleeping, and our emotional health is terrible. But we've
Speaker 1: made so many much progress on our ideas. Maybe we
Speaker 1: should Maybe we should make this a bigger thing, right,
Speaker 1: Maybe we should get a bunch of rationalists all living
Speaker 1: together on boats.
Speaker 2: She needs a work life balance.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, no, what she thinks she needs is she
Speaker 1: calls it the Rationalist fleet, which is she wants to
Speaker 1: get a bunch of community members to buy several boats
Speaker 1: and live anchored in the bay to avoid high bay
Speaker 1: area rent so they can spend all their time talking
Speaker 1: and plotting out ideas for saving the cosmos. Oh man,
Speaker 1: so great, and.
Speaker 5: I get it right. It's expensive here. I want to
Speaker 5: get some boats with my friends. It does sound cool.
Speaker 1: We won't go insane together, obviously, you know. She buys
Speaker 1: a twenty four foot boat for six hundred dollars off
Speaker 1: of Craigslist. And I don't know much about boats, but
Speaker 1: I know you're not getting a good one for just
Speaker 1: six hundred dollars.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: No, like a living boat, like a full boat, like.
Speaker 2: A foot boat.
Speaker 1: Yes, a full boat.
Speaker 2: Oh man, that had to be a piece of shit,
Speaker 2: to be a shitty, shitty, colossal piece of shit. Yeah.
Speaker 1: She names it the Black Signet, and she starts trying
Speaker 1: to convince some of her idea a lot of these
Speaker 1: people who have gathered around her to get in on
Speaker 1: the project. Eventually, she, Danielson, and a third person puts
Speaker 1: together the money to buy a boat that's going to
Speaker 1: be like the center of their fleet, a seventy year
Speaker 1: old Navy tug boat named the Caleb, which was anchored
Speaker 1: in Alaska.
Speaker 2: This is like a.
Speaker 1: Ninety four foot boat. It's a sizeable boat, and it
Speaker 1: is also very old and in terrible shape. That's the
Speaker 1: that's the crown jewel of the food, right right, that's
Speaker 1: our flagship. Man, Danielson sale, They buy this thing with
Speaker 1: this third guy, Dan Powell, who's at least a navy veteran,
Speaker 1: so like, you know, okay, that boot calls boat adjacent,
Speaker 1: but he's I get the feeling. Nobody says this, but
Speaker 1: David Powell says that he put tens of thousands of
Speaker 1: dollars into buying the Caleb. And I just know from
Speaker 1: what Danielson and Ziz wrote about their finances, neither of
Speaker 1: them had nearly that much money. So I think, by
Speaker 1: far he invests the most in this project. And I
Speaker 1: don't want to insult the guy, but he says he
Speaker 1: did it because he quote considered buying the boat to
Speaker 1: be a good investment, which boats aren't. Boats are never
Speaker 1: an investment comically, so like known to nothing depreciates like
Speaker 1: fucking raw salmon depreciates slower than a boat. I think
Speaker 1: his attitude is I'm going to become like the slumlord
Speaker 1: of a bunch of or at least landlord to a
Speaker 1: bunch of boat rationalists. But I think correct, I don't
Speaker 1: know how you expect this to pay off seventy year
Speaker 1: old tug boat for a bunch of like poor rationalists,
Speaker 1: punk kids to live in. Who was that ever supposed
Speaker 1: to work? What's the P and L statement you put
Speaker 1: together here?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 2: What was the what was the timeline on him getting
Speaker 2: his money back? He thought?
Speaker 1: Oh god, I have no idea. He absolutely takes a
Speaker 1: bath on this ship, right, yeah, he claims, And I
Speaker 1: belie leave him that Ziz lied to him about the
Speaker 1: whole scenario to get his money. I do think this
Speaker 1: was essentially a con from her, he says. Quote Ziz
Speaker 1: led me to believe that she had established contacts in
Speaker 1: the bay and that it would be easy for us
Speaker 1: to at least get a slip, if not one that
Speaker 1: was approved for overnight use. And as it turns out,
Speaker 1: when we were coming through the inside passage from Alaska,
Speaker 1: it was revealed that we did not have a place
Speaker 1: to arrive.
Speaker 2: Wait, oh, I didn't realize he sailed it down from Alaska.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they all sail it together, them and a couple
Speaker 1: other rationalists that they pick up. They make a post
Speaker 1: on the internet being like, hey, any rationalists want to
Speaker 1: sail a boat? Down from Alaska, talk about our ideas
Speaker 1: while we live on a boat.
Speaker 5: Oh man, so these people need space, yes, just get
Speaker 5: a warehouse.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, well get the ghost ship. Fire had happened
Speaker 1: by that point, so I don't think warehouse space was
Speaker 1: easy to get. Yeah, but this, I think this would have.
Speaker 1: I think you're right. In an earlier era, they have
Speaker 1: just wound up living in like a warehouse and maybe
Speaker 1: all died in the horrible fire because that there were
Speaker 1: issues with that kind of life too, But they would
Speaker 1: have been an option besides the boat thing. Anyway, the
Speaker 1: Caleb is not in good shape.
Speaker 2: Again.
Speaker 1: This boat is seventy plus years old. It is only
Speaker 1: livable by punk standards, and while it was large enough
Speaker 1: it is a ninety four foot boat you can keep
Speaker 1: some people on there, it's also way too big to
Speaker 1: anchor in most municipal marinas, especially since the boat has
Speaker 1: three thousand gallons of incredibly toxic diesel fuel and it's
Speaker 1: not really seaworthy, which means there's this constant risk of
Speaker 1: poisoning the water as it sits in that the authorities
Speaker 1: are just going to be consistently like, guys, you can't
Speaker 1: have this here, guys, you simply can't have this here,
Speaker 1: so they just.
Speaker 2: Got to operate out and inter national waters like a
Speaker 2: cruise ship.
Speaker 1: No, they're just kind of illegally anchoring places and hoping
Speaker 1: that it's fine and periodically getting boarded over it. Another
Speaker 1: crew member on the right down from Alaska who's just
Speaker 1: kind of there. They're just there, you know, for the adventure.
Speaker 1: So they they leave and don't come back after they
Speaker 1: get to the bay. But this person expressed an opinion
Speaker 1: that Ziz consistently came off as creepy but not scary.
Speaker 1: At one point, he says that she confronted him and
Speaker 1: told him he was transgender, and when he's like, no,
Speaker 1: I'm really not, she told him he was.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: She does this a lot, tells people I know that
Speaker 1: you're this, this is and it works like that's how
Speaker 1: a number of her followers get to her. But she
Speaker 1: also it doesn't work a lot of time. A lot
Speaker 1: of people are like, no, I'm not you know whatever
Speaker 1: it is you're saying. She does this to Gwynn too,
Speaker 1: so I don't doubt his story. Like she just kind
Speaker 1: of decides things about people and then tries to brute
Speaker 1: force them into accepting that about herself, and when there
Speaker 1: are people who are like both desperate for like approval
Speaker 1: and affection and also who are housing insecure and need
Speaker 1: the boat or wherever to live with her, those people
Speaker 1: feel a lot a number of them feel like a
Speaker 1: significant pull to just kind of accept whatever Ziz is
Speaker 1: saying about them.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, when you're desperate in that way, you
Speaker 2: kind of definitely find yourself to have a roof over
Speaker 2: your head, like.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, And it's a very normal cult thing, right,
Speaker 1: Like this is an aspect of all of that kind
Speaker 1: of behavior. Now, by this point, a few other people
Speaker 1: have come to live in the Rationalist fleet. One of
Speaker 1: them is Imma Borhanian, a former Google engineer, and Alex Leatham,
Speaker 1: a budding mathematician. The flotilla became a sort of marooned
Speaker 1: aquatic salon. Wired quotes Zizz as emailing to a friend
Speaker 1: at the time, We've been somewhat isolated from the rationalist
Speaker 1: community for a while, and in the course developed a
Speaker 1: significant chunk of unique art of rationality and theories of
Speaker 1: psychology aimed at solving our problems. Excited for this psychology
Speaker 1: you built on the boat, yeah, Wired continues as Lesoda
Speaker 1: articulated their goals had moved beyond real estate into a
Speaker 1: more grandiose realm. We are built trying to build a cabal,
Speaker 1: she wrote. The aim was to find abnormally intrinsically good
Speaker 1: people and turn them all into Gervais sociopaths, creating a
Speaker 1: fundamentally type of group than I have heard of existing
Speaker 1: before sociopathy was at a road would allow the group
Speaker 1: members to operate unpooned by the external world.
Speaker 2: Yeah that is because you had said that before, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: they had been that's sort of what they're looking to be.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're obsessed with this idea of which is initially
Speaker 1: like kind of a joke about the office, but they're like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: it actually is really good to have this sociopath at
Speaker 1: the top who like moves the and manipulates these like
Speaker 1: lesser like fools and whatnot and puts them into positions
Speaker 1: below them. Like that's how we need what we need
Speaker 1: to be in order to gain control of the levels
Speaker 1: of power. We have to make ourselves into Ricky Gervais sociopaths. Yeah, great,
Speaker 1: what a good ideology.
Speaker 2: I love that they still love pop culture though you know.
Speaker 1: They're obsessed with it. And again this is you can't
Speaker 1: talk about this kind of shit if you're if you're
Speaker 1: regularly having conversations with people outside of your bubble, like.
Speaker 2: Exactly it's the thing. Yeah, if you have somewhere to go, yeah,
Speaker 2: if you have anywhere to go this campaign.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes. If you've got a friend who's like a
Speaker 1: nurse or a contract if drinks with once a week
Speaker 1: and you just talk about your ideas once, they're gonna
Speaker 1: be like, hey, this is bad.
Speaker 2: You need to stop.
Speaker 1: You're going out of a bad road. Do you need to
Speaker 1: stay with me? Are you okay?
Speaker 2: This is clearly a cousin.
Speaker 1: Yes, someone.
Speaker 2: This would be so upsetting for someone to just casually
Speaker 2: talk about it like a paint and sip or like Ricky.
Speaker 1: Servas somebody there. Breaks with mainstream rationalism had gone terminal. GW.
Speaker 1: Gwynn criticized the rest of the central rationalist community for
Speaker 1: quote not taking heroic responsibility for the outcome of this world.
Speaker 1: In addition to the definitely accurate claims of sexual abuse
Speaker 1: within rationalism, they alledged organizations like Sea Far we're actively transphobic.
Speaker 1: I don't know how true that is. Some of the
Speaker 1: articles I've read. There's a lot of trans rationalists will
Speaker 1: be like, no, there's a very high population of trans
Speaker 1: people within the rationalist community. So people just agree about this.
Speaker 1: It's not my place to come to a conclusion. But
Speaker 1: this is one of the things that Zizz says about
Speaker 1: the central rationalist community. Ziz had concluded that transgender people
Speaker 1: were the best people to build a cabal around because
Speaker 1: they quote from Zizz's blog, had unusually high life force.
Speaker 1: Ziz believed that the mental powers locked within the small
Speaker 1: community of simpatico rationalists they'd gathered together were enough to
Speaker 1: alter the fate of the cosmos if everyone could be
Speaker 1: jail broken into sociopaths.
Speaker 2: And yeah, these are all double goods as well.
Speaker 1: Well, no, she's the only double good. Actually, she becomes
Speaker 1: increasingly convinced that they're all just single good right, And
Speaker 1: this is like her beliefs about heroism from the last episode.
Speaker 1: If you've got the community and the hero, the community's
Speaker 1: job is to support the hero, right, like blind support, right,
Speaker 1: blind support, no matter what. And a lot of the
Speaker 1: languages is using here in addition to being you know,
Speaker 1: rationalist language. This is all like scientology mixed with gaming
Speaker 1: and fantasy media. She talks about the need to install
Speaker 1: new mental tech on she and her friends. They which
Speaker 1: is like tech is like a scientology term, right, Like
Speaker 1: that's that's like a big thing that they say. She
Speaker 1: and her circle start dressing differently. Ziz starts wearing like
Speaker 1: all black robes and stuff to make her look like
Speaker 1: a syth or some sort of wizard. Her community adopts
Speaker 1: the name vegan anarco transhumanism and starts unironically referring to
Speaker 1: themselves as vegan scyth.
Speaker 2: In the boat community when they move in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just like, what is going I just wanted to
Speaker 1: I'm just an alcoholic. What's happening? I just wanted to
Speaker 1: be like Quint from John's Oh no, Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm just here because my wife.
Speaker 1: Left, right. I think might a different way than a
Speaker 1: grape white attack. Now looking bad?
Speaker 2: Yike? Oh man.
Speaker 1: So around this time, Gwynn claims she came up with
Speaker 1: a tactic for successfully separating and harnessing the power of
Speaker 1: different hemispheres of someone's brain. The tactic was uni himus
Speaker 1: spheric sleep, and this is a process by which only
Speaker 1: one half of your brain sleeps at a time. In
Speaker 1: a critical write up, publishes a warning before the killings
Speaker 1: that are to come. A rationalist named Apala Mojave writes,
Speaker 1: normally it is not possible for human beings to sleep
Speaker 1: with only one hemisphere. However, a weak form of UHS
Speaker 1: can be achieved by stimulating one half of the body
Speaker 1: and resting the other like hypnosis are fasting. This is
Speaker 1: a vulnerable psychological state for a person entering UHS requires
Speaker 1: the sleeper to be exhausted. It also has disorienting effects,
Speaker 1: so they are not quite themselves. And I disagree with
Speaker 1: them that, like, there's no, they're not just actually sleeping
Speaker 1: with only one hemisphere. And in fact, I think they
Speaker 1: may have taken this idea from Warhammer forty thousand because.
Speaker 5: Its do because yeah, what are you talking about?
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's not a thing. Like, yes, if you
Speaker 1: don't let yourself sleep for long periods of time and
Speaker 1: like kind of let yourself zone into a meditative state,
Speaker 1: you'll get a trippy effect. You will become altered. You're
Speaker 1: altering your state, and you cant This is why colts
Speaker 1: deprive people of sleep. You can fuck with people's heads
Speaker 1: a lot when they're in that space, but this isn't
Speaker 1: what's happening.
Speaker 5: I like to think of them on the boat, just
Speaker 5: only using one half of their body.
Speaker 1: Line right, like one eye open, watching the office.
Speaker 2: Furiously taking notes.
Speaker 1: So this is how that write up describes the process
Speaker 1: of uni hemispheric sleep. One you need to be tired.
Speaker 1: Two you need to be laying down or sitting up.
Speaker 1: It is important that you stay in a comfortable position
Speaker 1: that won't require it to you to move very much.
Speaker 1: In either case, you want to close one eye and
Speaker 1: keep the other open. Distract the open eye with some
Speaker 1: kind of engagement. Eventually you should feel yourself begin to
Speaker 1: fall asleep on one side. That side will also become numb.
Speaker 1: The degree of numbness is a good way to track
Speaker 1: how deep into sleep the side is. Once into UHS,
Speaker 1: it is supposed to be possible to infer which aspects
Speaker 1: of your personality are associated with which side of the brain.
Speaker 1: And the goal of hemispheric sleep is to jail break
Speaker 1: the mind into psychopathy fully right, And that's how Ziz
Speaker 1: describes it is that's the goal. That's the goal, that's
Speaker 1: their goal. Got to make ourselves into psychopaths so we
Speaker 1: can save the world. But it also gets used. You
Speaker 1: could use it to like I have this thing. I
Speaker 1: don't like that I react this way in this situation.
Speaker 1: So get me into this sleep pattern and you like
Speaker 1: talk me through and we'll figure out why I'm doing it,
Speaker 1: and we'll They describe it as using tech to upgrade
Speaker 1: their mental capabilities, right, so they're just kind of brainwashing
Speaker 1: each other. They're like fucking around with with some pretty
Speaker 1: potentially dangerous stuff. And again, drugs are definitely involved in
Speaker 1: a lot of aspects of this, which which is not
Speaker 1: usually written up, but you could you just have to
Speaker 1: infer given that there's some disagreement or there's some disagreement
Speaker 1: around all this. But it seems accurate to say that
Speaker 1: Gwynn is the one who came up with the hemispheric
Speaker 1: sleep idea, but a lot of the language around how
Speaker 1: tactic it was used and what it was supposed to
Speaker 1: do came from Ziz. And again, the process is just
Speaker 1: sleep deprivation. Right. This is cult stuff. It's part of
Speaker 1: how cults brainwash people. But it also wouldn't have seemed
Speaker 1: inherently suspicious to rationalists because part of that subculture. Being
Speaker 1: part of that subculture and going to those events had
Speaker 1: already normalized a slightly less radical version of this behavior,
Speaker 1: as this piece in Bloomberg explains, at house parties, rationalists
Speaker 1: spent time debugging each other, engaging in a confrontational style
Speaker 1: of interrogation that would supposedly yield more rational thoughts. Sometimes,
Speaker 1: to probe further, they experimented with psychedelics and tried jail
Speaker 1: breaking their minds to crack open their consciousness and make
Speaker 1: them more influential or agentic. Several people in Taylor and
Speaker 1: this is one of the sources sphere, had similar psychotic episodes.
Speaker 1: One died by suicide in twenty eighteen and another in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one. So in the mainstream rationalist subculture, they
Speaker 1: are also trying to like consciously hack their brains using
Speaker 1: a mix of like drugs and meditation and social abuse,
Speaker 1: and people kill themselves as a result of like the
Speaker 1: outcomes of this. This is already a problem in the
Speaker 1: mainstream subculture.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let alone this extremist offshoot right yep.
Speaker 1: In her own writings at the time, Ziz describes hideous
Speaker 1: fights with Gwinn in which gwyn What tries to mentally
Speaker 1: dominate in mind control Ziz, they've both become believers and
Speaker 1: new theories is has that's basically like she uses the
Speaker 1: term mana, which she is. She describes as like your
Speaker 1: ability to persuade people, which is, if you can convince
Speaker 1: someone of something, it's evidence that you have an inherent
Speaker 1: level of like magical power. And someone with naturally high
Speaker 1: manna like Ziz can literally mind control people with low manna.
Speaker 1: That's what she believes she's doing whenever she tries to
Speaker 1: talk someone into something about themselves, is she's mind controlling them.
Speaker 1: And she and Gwinn have mind control battles. At one
Speaker 1: point they start having like one of these arguments where
Speaker 1: basically Gwinn threatens to mind control Ziz and Ziz threatens
Speaker 1: Gwin back, and this starts of verbal escalation. And the
Speaker 1: way Ziz describes this escalation, which is, again these are
Speaker 1: two sleep deprived, traumatized people fucking with each other's heads
Speaker 1: on a boat. But the way that Ziz describes the
Speaker 1: escalation cycle is going to be important because this has
Speaker 1: a lot to do with the logic of the murders
Speaker 1: that are to come. I said that if they were
Speaker 1: going to defend a right to be attacking me on
Speaker 1: some level and treat fighting back as a new aggression
Speaker 1: and cause to escalate. I would not at any point
Speaker 1: back down. And if our conflicting definitions of the ground
Speaker 1: state were no further retaliation was necessary. Meant that we
Speaker 1: were consigned to a runaway positive feedback loop of revenge.
Speaker 1: So be it. And if that was true, we might
Speaker 1: as well try to kill each other right then and there,
Speaker 1: in the darkness of the Caleb's Bridge at night, where
Speaker 1: we were both sitting lying under things in a cramped space,
Speaker 1: I became intensely worried they could stand up faster. Consider
Speaker 1: the idea from World War One mobilization is tantamount to
Speaker 1: a declaration of war. I stood up, still silent, waiting
Speaker 1: see see first off, and there's other people there is Well,
Speaker 1: it's not just yes, And just like the logic of well,
Speaker 1: obviously if you attack me, then I'm going to counterattack you,
Speaker 1: and then you're going to counterattack me, which means eventually
Speaker 1: we'll kill each other. So we should just kill each
Speaker 1: other now, like when you are taking your advice on
Speaker 1: how to handle social conflict from the warring European powers
Speaker 1: that got into World War One.
Speaker 4: Maybe not a good like positive example, it's just so
Speaker 4: like even in understanding how they got there, it still
Speaker 4: is such a stress.
Speaker 2: Like, even having all this.
Speaker 1: Back, it's still like, yeah, really taking some leaps, It's
Speaker 1: it's yeah, I mean just having a fight with your
Speaker 1: friend and then opening your locket which has like Kaiser
Speaker 1: Vilhelm and the tzar in it and going what would
Speaker 1: you guys do here?
Speaker 2: Yeah, ancestors guide me.
Speaker 1: And again, but you know, part of what's going on
Speaker 1: here is this timeless decision theory bullshit, right. Ziz believes
Speaker 1: that she makes it clear at this point when they
Speaker 1: start having a conflict that the stakes will immediately escalate
Speaker 1: to life or death. Gwinn won't risk fucking with her, right,
Speaker 1: but by doing this, she also immediately creates a situation
Speaker 1: where she feels unsafe. However, in that conflict, gwyn yields,
Speaker 1: and Ziz concludes that the technique works right, and so yes, yes,
Speaker 1: what she thinks is her man is strong and this
Speaker 1: is a good idea for handling all conflicts. Right. So
Speaker 1: I'm going to increasingly teach all these people who are
Speaker 1: listening to me that this is the escalation loop that
Speaker 1: you handle every conflict with, right. Great stuff. One of
Speaker 1: the young people who got drawn as is at this
Speaker 1: time was Maya Passek, who blogged under the name Squirrel
Speaker 1: in Hell. She wrote about mainstream rationalist stuff, citing Yakowski
Speaker 1: and Elon Musk, but in her blog there's like a
Speaker 1: pattern of depressive thought. In one twenty sixteen post, she
Speaker 1: mused about whether or not experiencing joy and awe might
Speaker 1: be bad because it biases your perception. So this is
Speaker 1: this is a young person who I think is probably
Speaker 1: is dealing with a lot of depressive yesses and the
Speaker 1: classic stinking thinking, right, and maybe the community is not
Speaker 1: super helpful to her. She was working to create a
Speaker 1: rationalist community in the Canary Islands. She's kind of trying
Speaker 1: to do the same thing Ziz did, But like in
Speaker 1: an island where it's cheaper to live, is this something.
Speaker 2: That can exist a lot of places like.
Speaker 1: Share Yeah, I mean yeah, if you've got cheap rent,
Speaker 1: you can get a bunch of like weirdos who work
Speaker 1: online to move into a house with you. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like that's that's always possible. She found Zizz's blog and
Speaker 1: she starts commenting on it. She's particularly drawn to Zizz's
Speaker 1: theories on manna and Zin's theory in Gwynn's theory about
Speaker 1: hemispheric personalities and one of her most direct cult leader moments.
Speaker 1: Ziz reaches out directly to this to Maya as she's
Speaker 1: like posting on her blog and emails her saying, I
Speaker 1: see you like some of my blog posts. Truly a
Speaker 1: sinister opening. Yeah, my true companion, Gwyn and I are
Speaker 1: taking us somewhat different than Maria. That's the organization, one
Speaker 1: of the rationals organization approaches, they call each other, that's
Speaker 1: how they get for their true companions, true opinions. At
Speaker 1: this point, or taking a somewhat a different approach than
Speaker 1: the Myria approach to saving the world without much specific
Speaker 1: test technical disagreements. We are running on somewhat pointed to
Speaker 1: by the approach. As long as you expect the world
Speaker 1: to burn, then change course. Right, So basically we still
Speaker 1: expect the world to burn, so we can't keep doing
Speaker 1: what the other rationalists are doing. And she lays out
Speaker 1: to this, this girl she meets through a blog post
Speaker 1: her plan to find abnormally intrinsically good people and jail
Speaker 1: break them into Gervais's sociopaths. She invites Maya to come
Speaker 1: out and it's I don't think this happened, but they
Speaker 1: do start separately journeying into unbucketing, and Maya gets really
Speaker 1: into this uni hemispheric sleep thing, and Ziz is kind
Speaker 1: of like coaching her through the process. She tells Maya
Speaker 1: that one of her hemispheres is female, because Maya's a transor,
Speaker 1: and Ziz tells her one of your brain hemispheres, each
Speaker 1: of which is a separate person, is female, but the
Speaker 1: other is male and quote mostly dead, and your suicidal
Speaker 1: impulses are caused by both the pain of being trans
Speaker 1: and also the fact that there's this dead man living
Speaker 1: in your head that's like taking up half of your
Speaker 1: brain's space, and so you really need to debucket in
Speaker 1: order to have a chance of surviving, right, Okay, So.
Speaker 2: She needs to be jail broken to be free.
Speaker 1: To be free, and Maya will basically replace her sleep
Speaker 1: entirely with this uni hemispheric sleep crap, which exacerbates not sleeping,
Speaker 1: exacerbates your depressive swings, and leads to deeper and deeper
Speaker 1: troughs of suicidal ideation. She is believed to have died
Speaker 1: by suicide in February of twenty eighteen. She posts a
Speaker 1: what is essentially a suicide note that is very rationalist
Speaker 1: in its verbiage literally titled decision theory and suicide, and
Speaker 1: this is the first death directly related to in Gwen's ideas.
Speaker 1: But I think it's important to note that, like the
Speaker 1: role mainstream rationalism plays in all of this, suicide is
Speaker 1: a common topic at se FAR events, and people will
Speaker 1: argue constantly about whether or not, like a low value individual,
Speaker 1: it's better for them to kill themselves, right, is that
Speaker 1: like of higher net value to the world. And it
Speaker 1: was also used as like a threat to stop women
Speaker 1: who were abused by figures in the community from speaking up.
Speaker 1: And this is from that Bloomberg article. One woman in
Speaker 1: the community, who asked not to be identified for fear
Speaker 1: of herprisals, says she was sexually abused by a prominent
Speaker 1: AI researcher. After she confronted him, she says she had
Speaker 1: job offers rescinded and conference speaking gigs canceled, and was
Speaker 1: disinvited from AI events. She said others in the community
Speaker 1: told her allegations of misconduct harmed the advancement of AI safety,
Speaker 1: and one person suggested an agentic option would be to
Speaker 1: kill herself. So there is just within rationalism this discussion
Speaker 1: of like it can be agentic, as in, like you
Speaker 1: are taking high agency for your to kill yourself if
Speaker 1: your net if you're going to be a net harm
Speaker 1: to the cause of AI safety, which you will be
Speaker 1: by reporting this AI researcher who molested you, right, and.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because you're taking them man, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Shit, these people aren't Like all this whole community is
Speaker 1: playing with a lot of deeply dangerous stuff and a
Speaker 1: bunch of people are going to have their brains kill,
Speaker 1: either kill themselves or have suffer severe trauma as a
Speaker 1: result this, all of this, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Escaping this is even putting yourself back together after living
Speaker 2: in this way seems like it would be such a task.
Speaker 1: Again and likely any cult part of the difficulties like
Speaker 1: teaching yourself how to speak normally again, how to not
Speaker 1: talk about all this stuff?
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, not identify as a vegan sith.
Speaker 1: Right, right, because like I gotta say, like there's and
Speaker 1: people who are really in the community will note like
Speaker 1: a dozen different other concepts and terms in addition to
Speaker 1: like vegan sith and gervais as sociopaths and shit that
Speaker 1: I'm not talking about that are important to this is ideology.
Speaker 1: But like you just can't. Like I had to basically
Speaker 1: learn like the like a different language to do these episodes,
Speaker 1: and I'm not fluent in it, right, Like you have
Speaker 1: to triage like what shit do you need to know?
Speaker 2: You know? Yeah, it's so deep, it's night, so deep.
Speaker 1: Deep and silly. Let's do an ad break and then
Speaker 1: we'll be done and we're back. So I'm just going
Speaker 1: to conclude this little story and then we'll end the
Speaker 1: episode for the day. So this person, Maya, has likely
Speaker 1: killed themselves at the start of twenty eighteen, and Zis
Speaker 1: reacts to the suicide in her usual manner. She blogs
Speaker 1: about it. She took from what had happened, not that
Speaker 1: like debucketing might be dangerous and uni hemispheric sleep might
Speaker 1: be dangerous, but that explaining hemispheric consciousness to people was
Speaker 1: an info hazard. She believed that people who were single,
Speaker 1: good like Maya were at elevated risk because learning that
Speaker 1: one of the whole persons inside them was evil or
Speaker 1: mostly dead could create a reconcilable conflict, leading to depression
Speaker 1: and suicide. And she she comes up with a name
Speaker 1: for this. She calls this passex doom. That's what she
Speaker 1: like names the info hazard that kills her friend who
Speaker 1: she is like fucking with their head. So that's nice, Yeah,
Speaker 1: as nice as anything else in this story. Is I
Speaker 1: think you might have been the doom here.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I it's you with the whole problem. But now,
Speaker 5: but now it's an info hazard to explain. Yes, a person's.
Speaker 1: Like to explain your theories.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah to a person who can't handle it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And she thinks she comes to the conclusion it's
Speaker 1: a particular danger to explain it, like to single good
Speaker 1: trans women, who are the primary group of people that
Speaker 1: she is going after in terms of trying to recruit folks.
Speaker 1: So she like admits her belief is that this this
Speaker 1: thought thing I've come up with is particularly dangerous to
Speaker 1: the community I'm recruiting from. But it's the only it's essential.
Speaker 1: This information is absolutely essential to saving the world. So
Speaker 1: you just have to roll the dice.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It isolates herself within her own group that she's created.
Speaker 1: Well, yes, And it also she is then consciously taking
Speaker 1: the choice. I know this is likely to kill or
Speaker 1: destroy a lot of the people I reach out to,
Speaker 1: but I think it's so important that it's like worth
Speaker 1: taking that risk with their lives. Yep, good stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Anyway, how are you feeling?
Speaker 2: Got plug?
Speaker 5: I am I I am okay, I'm I'm I. You
Speaker 5: know what, I'm deeply sad for these people who are
Speaker 5: so lost, and I'm also pretty interested because this is crazy,
Speaker 5: but I'm okay.
Speaker 1: I'll be great, happy to happy, to happy to have
Speaker 1: to see that. Well, everybody, this has been Behind the
Speaker 1: Bastards a podcast about things that you maybe didn't think,
Speaker 1: maybe didn't need to know about how the Internet breaks
Speaker 1: people's brains. But also a lot of people surprisingly close
Speaker 1: to this community are running the government now, so maybe
Speaker 1: you do need to know about it. Sorry about that
Speaker 1: info hazard.
Speaker 6: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 6: dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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