--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Monday, March 3rd.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Coming up on the show, a Silicon Valley intellectual society kicked them out. Now, they're tied to a killing spree.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Breaking news out of Vermont for you tonight. A U.S. Border Patrol agent has died along with another person in a shootout.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: That's right. The Border Patrol agent was killed in the shootout, as was one of the suspicious passengers.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, in California. There was a landlord in Vallejo, California, that was stabbed to death.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: New at 10, Vallejo police are investigating the city's first homicide of the year. Officers say they found one man who had been stabbed.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The killing of the Border Patrol agent and the landlord occurred within three days of one another.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: On the face of these two murders, you'd think they'd have nothing in common.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And then the authorities revealed the suspects. And they were both young. They were both computer scientists. They were both vegans. And they're both interested in artificial intelligence safety.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Computer scientists, vegans, interested in AI safety. Those characteristics of the alleged suspects were familiar to an influential community of thinkers in California called the rationalists.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: It's a very potent, brainy, brilliant community that's having a big influence in tech.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And somehow from this community emerged this group of violent militant vegans.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Monday, March 3rd.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The rationalists are a loose group of intellectuals, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: They get together in person and in online forums to ponder philosophical ideas, like how do we make better decisions? Or how do we know what's true?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: They like to talk about, debate big existential questions.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: They love reason, logic, and probability.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: A lot of people may have not heard about the rationalists, but they're very influential.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Many rationalists today are devoted to developing artificial intelligence in a way that's safe for humanity.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: They talk a lot about this idea of the robot apocalypse, of an evil AI killing off humanity, and they spend a lot of their time trying to prevent that.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: When you think about a robot apocalypse, most Americans are like, that's in a movie.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But to them, this is very serious.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The rationalist movement has drawn some influential people.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Early on, venture capitalist Peter Thiel funded a rationalist research organization.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And former open AI researcher Paul Cristiano now leads the federal government's AI Safety Institute.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Has the rationalist movement had a real impact on AI safety?
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Absolutely. I feel like they sort of spearheaded this whole movement to slow down AI to make sure AI is done in a way that doesn't harm people.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I mean, the development of AI has been so rapid, right?
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And often in Silicon Valley, you don't have a voice that's saying we need to slow down and do things in a different way.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Much of the rationalist-heady conversations take place online.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: There's this famous online forum called Less Wrong where they debate everything, the rationalists.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: They love debating everything.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: This post is a collection of 11 different proposals for building safe, advanced AI.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Less Wrong is filled with long-winded and complex posts.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: To give you a sense of what it's like on the Less Wrong forum, we asked the journal team to read some examples.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The stereotyped image of AI catastrophe is a powerful, malicious AI system that takes its creators by surprise and quickly achieves a decisive advantage over the rest of humanity.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: I shall argue that the most critical aspects of today's and tomorrow's world-scale ethical problems have and will have to do with algorithms, not robots.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: It's a lot of very high IQ people, a lot of software engineers, very brainy people.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: When I entered college, they told me a Harvard education would empower me to do anything I want.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The world would be my oyster.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: They attract a lot of people who don't feel comfortable in other areas of society, like transgender folks, autistic folks, contrarians like atheists.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Throughout my life, I've often thought that other people had beliefs that were really repugnant and stupid.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Below are all the cruxes I could identify from my conclusion that veganism has trade-offs.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And the community really, for a long time, didn't care who joined.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: They welcomed anyone. They welcomed any idea. They were eager to embrace anyone and any idea, no matter how outlandish it seemed to the outside.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: This welcoming intellectual online forum caught the eye of a budding rationalist in Alaska, a promising computer programmer fresh out of college.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: I'm just going to refer to her by her last name, Lasota.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Lasota was a brilliant young computer scientist from Alaska, graduated magna cum laude, came to the Bay Area, you know, about a decade ago, looking to work in tech and looking to get into this rationality movement.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: In the Bay Area, Lasota found community and an identity.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: She came out as transgender.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: She embraced veganism.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: She was interested in startups.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And she started living on a tugboat in the waters south of San Francisco with a handful of other like-minded rationalists.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So Lasota comes into this mix in about 2016 and loves it.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: But even in this community of oddballs, Lasota stood out.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Over time, Lasota's persona evolved into something more conspicuous and extreme.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And she started going by the name Ziz.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Ziz, which is an alien villain from an online comic, Lasota started wearing black robes everywhere and started adhering to this philosophy of they call it vegan Sith.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Is what they call it after the people in Star Wars.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The bad guys from Star Wars are the Sith.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Yeah. The emperor was a Sith.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Very bad. Yeah. Controlling everything.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Exactly.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: At one point, Ziz wrote a cryptic blog post about what she called her, quote, journey to the dark side.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And people started to get creeped out.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: You know, just a very intense person, tall, blonde hair, long blonde hair, wearing dark robes, talking intensely about veganism, and talking about, allegedly on online forums, about punishing meat eaters.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: You know, very violent stuff, about having Nuremberg trials for meat eaters.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The rationalists began distancing themselves from Ziz.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: They started calling her and her friends on the tugboat the Zizians.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Have any of Ziz's followers said anything about why they were drawn to her?
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: We have not been able to talk to people who were Zizians themselves.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But we've talked to parents of people who were drawn into the Zizians.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And what people said is that the followers were all somewhat insecure, people who didn't quite fit in, even in this community, and who were really drawn to that militance that Ziz had.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Ziz was very charismatic for that community.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The Zizians began developing their own theories.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Ziz was interested in an idea that the left and right sides of the human brain could be separated into two different identities.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: To study this, she and other Zizians attempted to keep one half of their brain awake while sleeping.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The Zizians wanted to present their research at rationalist organizations like the Center for Applied Rationality in Berkeley.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The organizations were rather dismissive.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: They said, we don't think, you know, this is real research.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And they turned down their offer to speak about it.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And that's really when the transformation took a very dark turn.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: In 2019, Ziz and three other Zizians showed up at a Center for Applied Rationality alumni reunion event.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: They protested this reunion of rationalists wearing dark robes and Guy Fawkes masks.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: They blocked the entrance.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: This was very dramatic for the rationalist movement.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And the police had to come and arrest them.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And this really represented the beginning of the hostility and the split from the rationalists.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: As part of the split, the Zizians publicly blasted the rationalist movement.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Said they were corrupt, said they were anti-trans, and believed that her group was, you know, the real, true, pure group.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The rationalist organizations denied the Zizians' accusations.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But soon, the growing rebellion didn't seem like it mattered.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Because by the summer of 2022, the Zizians' run appeared to be over.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And why is that?
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: That's because the Coast Guard gets a call in August of 2022 saying that Lasota has gone overboard on a ship in the San Francisco Bay.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The Coast Guard searched the waters of the Bay Area for Ziz's body, but nothing turned up.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Ziz was presumed dead.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: They run an obituary in a newspaper in Alaska saying, quote, Loving adventure, friends and family, music, blueberries, biking, computer games and animals, you are missed.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Their leader was gone, but the Zizians lived on.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: That's after the break.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: We'll be right back.
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--:-- Ryan Knudsen: About three months after Ziz's obituary was published, the Zizians ran into trouble.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The group had moved off their tugboat and onto a plot of land in Vallejo, California.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But they weren't making rent, and their landlord tried to kick the Zizians off his property.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The landlord, who's 80 years old at the time, a guy named Curtis Lynn, is trying to evict these Zizians, and they attack him with knives and a sword.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: He loses an eye, but he has a gun.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: He shoots back.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: He loses an eye?
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Yeah. Yeah, he loses an eye.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: He shoots back during the violent confrontation.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: One of the Zizians is killed.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Two of them are arrested.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And who should be spotted at the crime scene?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: None other than the supposedly dead Lasota.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Ziz. Ziz is alive.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So she faked her own death?
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Ziz faked her own death.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: That's exactly right.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: A prosecutor's email to Ziz's attorney confirmed the sudden reappearance.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Ziz was, quote, alive and well.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: She wasn't charged in the sword attack on the landlord, but two other Zizians were.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: They've both denied the charges.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: What happens next?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Ziz shows up in an even more sinister spot across the country in Pennsylvania just a few weeks later.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: On New Year's Eve in 2022, an older couple in Pennsylvania was shot and killed in their home.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: When the police went to question the couple's daughter, they found her at a hotel with Ziz.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: But when they approached Ziz to talk to Ziz, Ziz just plays dead and lies there.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Won't say anything.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: They arrested Ziz for alleged obstruction.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Her attorney disputed the charges.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Ziz made bail and then vanished again.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: After the murders in Pennsylvania, the rationalist community in Berkeley really starts to get freaked out.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Someone puts what they call a community alert on this forum called Less Wrong, where the rationalists like to debate things.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And they say, you know, people are concerned that Ziz and her associates are violent and that there's a real threat here.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: That post went out in early 2023, putting the rationalists on high alert.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But after that, the Zizians went quiet and no one really heard from them.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Until this past January, when those two killings happened.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: A U.S. Border Patrol agent, we have learned, has died along with...
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The Border Patrol agent in Vermont and that landlord in California.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Officers say they found one man who had been stabbed.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The landlord in California was the same man who lost his eye in the sword attack a few years earlier.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And he was set to testify against the Zizians in that case when he was killed.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: All told, six people have died in connection with the Zizians.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: There's the landlord, the Border Patrol agent, the couple in Pennsylvania, and two Zizians themselves, who were killed during the various confrontations.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The motivation behind these killings is still unclear.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: In February, Ziz was arrested on trespassing, obstruction, and gun charges following a manhunt.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: A judge ordered that she be held without bail.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: She's denied any wrongdoing.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: How is the rationalist movement processing what's going on?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Someone posted on the Rationalist Forum about why do so many rationalists turn crazy?
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: A leader in the rationalist community, a person named Oliver Habrika, made a post on Less Wrong inviting the rationalists to do what they do best, debate and reflect.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: This time, the topic of the discussion was themselves.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: We asked one of our colleagues to read it out loud.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I think there is a common thread between a lot of the people behaving in crazy or reckless ways, that it can be explained, and that understanding what is going on there might be of enormous importance in modeling the future impact of the extended Less Wrong social network.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: These rationalists are asking questions like, Were there dynamics in our group that sort of bred cult-like behavior that led to this sort of thing?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I think a lot of this is just that we aren't very conventional, and so we tend to develop novel standards and social structures.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Another thing they've been talking about a lot is how open the community was.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: They really just would allow anyone to come and go, and they feel like that openness has really helped them and helped the movement do things that other folks couldn't do, but also let in people who, you know, were not welcome elsewhere for a good reason.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: There are fewer norms that we share with more long-lived groups, which might act as antibodies for the most destructive kinds of ideas.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But at the center of it is sort of a soul-searching.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: It's like, did our movement go wrong in some way?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And it's reminiscent of the soul-searching that took place after Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of, you know, one of the biggest frauds in history.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, who was convicted of fraud, was a follower of a movement called Effective Altruism, which has a lot of overlap with rationalism and its approach and community.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Since his conviction, the Effective Altruism movement has suffered reputational damage and increased scrutiny.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And after that, people ask, well, you know, is there something wrong with this movement that this guy turned out so badly?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And it's a very similar situation now.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Do you think that this incident with the Zizians might damage the rationalist movement's reputation or the movement itself?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Yeah, that's a really great question.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: How is it going to change this movement that's had so much influence in Silicon Valley?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I think the one thing it might do is make people look at their movement a little more askance, you know, with a little more suspicion in their mind when they're talking about AI safety.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: You know, will people take them seriously in these really important debates?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: When they have this group of militant vegans that came from their ranks.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: That's all for today.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Monday, March 3rd.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: We're out every weekday afternoon.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Thanks for listening.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: See you tomorrow.
