The Wild, Murderous Rampage of the Zizians
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21 plus and present in Illinois. Must be first online real money wager. $5 deposit required. Bonus issued is non-withdrawable bonus pass that expires seven days after receipt. Restrictions apply. See full terms at fanduel.com slash sportsbook. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. It's mid-November 2019 in Sonoma County, Northern California. And Sergeant Brian Parks has just received a call. Somebody has dialed 911 from the Westminster Woods, a wilderness camp and retreat center a few miles down the road.

Several people, he's told, have blocked the camp's entrance and exits with their vehicles. They're clad in black robes and masks, and they're conducting some kind of demonstration, although what it's about is unclear. Local cops often get calls about protests at the Bohemian Grove, a secretive men's club not far from Westminster Woods, frequented by titans of industry and politics, and often accused of being a meeting point for the Illuminati.

But this ain't that. On this day at Westminster, there are two gatherings. One is a group of elementary school kids attending a rope class. The other is a workshop for the Center of Applied Rationality, a Bay Area nonprofit aiming to develop, in its own words, "clear thinking for the sake of humanity's future." It's the kids that worry Sergeant Parks. The hairs on the back of his neck stand to attention.

A new 911 call reports that one of the black cab protesters is carrying a gun. In fact, there are five of them, and one of them's got a hatchet. At this point, Park thinks it's one of two things, an active killer or a hostage standoff. Parks upgrades the call to a Code 3, a lights and sirens emergency. He speeds off to the camp, finding a red Toyota Prius blocking his path.

Beyond it, he can see three figures in black cloaks wearing Guy Fawkes masks pacing about and chanting. He unholsters his gun. Parks moves on the site, ordering the protesters to get down on the ground. As they do, they demand same gender pat downs, which is tough because Parks can't figure whether they're men or women or pretty much anything beneath those black robes. Deputies take down the trio and cuff them.

By this point, the children and their teachers are taking shelter in buildings on the property. The rationalists aren't even there. Organizers are told them to steer well clear. Parks and a deputy approach the three on the ground. As they do, a fourth rowed figure emerges. When they yell for the person to put their hands up, the figure falls back as if slipping on ice and then struggles with the deputy before being cuffed. Parks orders in a SWAT team, which evacuates the kids.

As it turns out, there are only the four protesters on site. One of them's got pepper spray, but nobody's armed. And the fifth, hatching-wielded member, it's a maintenance worker who's armed himself amid the madness. Parks and his team rounds up the protesters and send them cuffed to a detention facility in nearby Santa Rosa. As they do, one of the protesters turns and pipes up to an officer. I know your face, they tell him.

You are slavers. You are Nazis. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

Hello and welcome to the weekly podcast that dives into the weird world of crime, whether it's gangs, scams or bans of transgender rationalists on a violent tear across the United States. I am your host, Sean Williams, in a cold but sunny Wellington, New Zealand.

And I'm joined today not by Danny Gold, but Evan Ratliff, a New York-based writer, reporter, podcaster, author of the brilliant book The Mastermind about crazy crime boss Paul LaRue. You may remember our chat from a few years back, but also recently of an insane feature at Wired magazine called The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians.

Yes, you may have heard that about the Zizians from News Stories of Late, this group of Bay Area rationalists who've gone on a murder spree. Well, they're not only fascinating, but they're pretty tough to nail down, which is why Evan's here and you're listening to this show, of course. And we're also going to get into Evan's podcast, Shell Game, which is about AI and scams and lots of stuff that crosses directly into the underworld podcast path.

Okay, Evan, we just heard a pretty weird situation from your story in Wired. You got a couple of cops in Northern California. In fact, the Bohemian Grove, which I'm sure a lot of people listening or watching the show are going to know about.

Um, which is known for these secretive weird meetings. So the cops have been called to what seems like a demonstration of four trans women in black robes and masks chanting something together besides some elementary school kids on a day trip. And these trans women appear to be part of some kind of rationalist esoteric kind of eschatological cult. Um, and the SWAT team has been called of course, and the group has been arrested. And as they're getting taken to jail, they're calling everyone Nazis and kind of threatening them. So, um,

That's a pretty normal way to start a feature article. Let's crack it open. Yeah, yeah. I guess let's start by talking about who the hell these folks are.

and what they're doing at the Bohemian Grove to even begin with. Because I guess you could probably talk about that for about an hour to begin. Yeah, I mean, every part of this particular story is a kind of like, how much time do you have situation in terms of who they are, what they believe, what they were doing there, what happened. I mean, I distilled it down to a tidy 14,000 words for the magazine. So brevity is maybe not my specialty in this one. But essentially...

this group of people, they're a small...

ideological group, like loosely described with some extreme and complicated beliefs around artificial intelligence, around psychology, how their own brains work, and around veganism. And there's sort of like a swirl of ideas. And they emerged from this community in San Francisco that's pretty well known by Bay Area people and actually like wider known now that AI has kind of taken a hold called the rationalists.

They sort of call themselves the rationalists. And this is, you could almost think of them like a splinter group from the rationalists with more extreme views. And I can talk about the mainstream views of the rationalists. But one thing to note about them just from the top is they don't really even describe themselves as a group. They don't...

actually claim necessarily to be an organization or that they have a leader or that they have sort of like designs and goals. Like they'll say, we're just a group of friends, basically. We were just a group of friends who got excluded from this group partly because we were trans.

Now, I think if you look at them from the outside, there's a reason why a lot of people call them a cult, or at least say they're cult-like. And it's because of sort of a pretty charismatic leader who seems to attract people to her ideas and the nature of those ideas, which I think by most measures are pretty extreme.

on a variety of fronts. Yeah, it seems so. I mean, one of them believing, maybe I'm getting this wrong, but the hemispheres of the brains can be completely different characters or people and they can be different genders and they can be awake and asleep and they can be kind of learning different things. Basically, it's kind of like an

Well, I don't know if it's sort of an inbuilt schizophrenia of the mind or something like that. Could you explain this, really? Yeah, I don't know if I can explain it, but you've sort of encapsulated the basics of it. Like, you have these two hemispheres of your brain. They can have essentially different identities, including gender identities. But I think the most fundamental aspect of it is that they can be...

Each of them can be good or non-good. So you can have someone who's sort of like good in one hemisphere and non-good in the other hemisphere. You can have someone who's double good, good in both hemispheres, which is by their count extremely rare. And it just so happens that Ziz, who's like nominally the leader of the group, uh,

uh is double good according to her own analysis so you know that's useful coincidentally the theory seems to uh give her a certain moral standing um and then there's this stuff around sleep where they were experimenting with with hemispheric sleep like you could sleep with one eye open and keep watch and things like that which like basically results in just getting no sleep and if you're already in a situation where you're sort of isolated

possibly dealing with some mental health issues and you're also depriving yourself of sleep on a regular basis as part of experimenting on yourself. This is not a good recipe for coherent and well thought out ideas to emerge. I think before we kind of pull away into some of the group's activities themselves, it's kind of useful to remind people on this show that what your story does really well is kind of parse some of the

I don't know, I guess the headlines or the descriptors for this group that people have thrown out there, right? So they've invariably described in the media as like an ultra-vegan cult or a trans cult or a group of anarchists. I mean, I guess the editors of the Dailies and the Newswires needed this kind of simple way to describe them, but...

I guess there isn't one, really. They're really kind of fluid, I guess, in a lot of what they're thinking. Yeah, I think so. I mean, their actual ideology emerges from this rationalist thinking, part of which is about AI and the threat that super intelligent AI could destroy humanity. And, you know, that's an...

old idea. I mean, old in terms of a couple of decades. I mean, it's older than that in science fiction, but in terms of there being a kind of movement build-up around

the possibility that that could happen and what are we going to do about it and how do we align the ai so it's friendly so they like emerged out of that so there's a portion of their thinking which is around that what are we doing to stop ai from becoming super intelligent and unaligned so that it might destroy us intentionally or accidentally then they also happen to be

many of them, maybe all of them, extreme vegans. I mean, they come to believe that people who eat meat are monsters and, you know, that element of their ideology kind of merges in a strange way with the AI ideology because one of their complaints about so-called mainstream rationalists or mainstream thinkers about AI is that they don't include animals.

In trying to align the AI. So they're trying to align the AI so it doesn't kill humans, but they don't actually do it for animals. So that was one of their complaints. But then, of course, they're all trans women, almost all trans women, actually. They're all...

Most of them are trans. The vast majority are trans women. And then there's a person here or there. But so they have issues when it comes to how trans people are treated in society, how they were treated by the rationalists. And those things also come into play. So it becomes this sort of like you can refract whatever you're kind of like...

cultural ideal that you want to pursue or cultural hobby horse that you want to pursue, you can kind of like refract it through this story. And that's what many of the tabloids and other coverage did was, you know, for right-wing people, they're like, Trantifa, like a mix of like a trans cult and, you know, people saying like, well, they're

this was always going to happen like they're they built up this extreme trans ideology but like that it doesn't explain in any way what actually happened and i think part that's partly because i'm not sure you can quite explain in any coherent way what happened partly because when it comes to the violence that surrounded them

none of it really feels like a product of the ideology. It's not like they killed the head of a factory farm. So then you'd be like, oh, vegan. It's not like they killed an executive at OpenAI. And you'd be like, oh, I see. The violence just, they spiraled into it. So I think there's a lot of other mental health issues that came into play

without diagnosing anyone and like those things merged with these ideologies and that's where things just sort of fell apart. Yeah, I mean it's on paper they're supposed to be rationalist but everything is so irrational. Is it so irrational that it's rational? I couldn't quite get my head around that like everything is so led by these incredibly dark, incredibly strong and conflicting emotions that

I didn't really get where the rationalism even came in at points in it, and I guess that's the kind of confusion about them. Yeah, I mean, I feel that's the thing that's confusing, I find, in reporting on even the rationalist community. And there's a number of, like, what people would call cults or cult-like groups have sort of emerged out of this community.

And the community itself, like it started around these AI ideas. And like a lot of people may have encountered Eliezer Yudkowsky, who's, you know, he's sort of like the godfather of some of the organizations that,

this emerged out of. One of them's called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and the other one's called the Center for Applied Rationality. So it basically started as this kind of almost technical thing where they're like, how do we program AI so that it's friendly towards us? That was the original idea. And then they were like, well, how do we get people together who are smart and thinking rationally to help us do that? And then they kind of thought, well, let's just build a whole kind of like

philosophy around thinking rationally and addressing questions, you know, without sort of like a lot of the societal context that makes it difficult to ask and answer the right questions. And you kind of like get that far and you're like, oh, that makes sense. And you can find lots of examples of rationalist writing. It's amazing, like quite interesting and quite in-depth.

But then at the same time, they have like an, as far as I can tell, insatiable appetite for interpersonal drama. And part of this, there's a little bit of this in the story, like all these people got attracted to the Bay Area and young people in particular, very smart people, often with technical degrees. And housing is very expensive. So they end up living in these kind of group situations.

And there's just a lot of just absolutely toxic situations. And because of that, that ends up clouding what it is they actually want.

are intending to do like if you start reporting on them or dealing with them you end up talking about just like interpersonal dramas between these people that you can't even follow like and this smaller group you know what we call the zizians they just took that to an extreme like every you could read literally thousands of words on their behalf about like

the dramas between them and the rationalists and this and that and the other, like, on Tumblr. And it's just sort of this endless, like, spewing of kind of, like, everyone's feelings, which is, there's, the irony is, like, it's supposed to be driven by rationalist thinking. Yeah. They just come across as, like, the worst college roommates that you could ever meet.

come across like complaining that, I don't know, your whispering at 1pm was ruining their like their online forum posting about, I don't know, like it just comes across as completely crazy. There was a line I read and listened to your story and there was a line when I listened to it I started laughing out loud because I think in one of the court cases one of the defendants calls their defense counsel on

What was it? Omnicidal? And says the lawyer wants everything in the universe to die. And that's why they want to ditch the council, which is incredible. Yeah, it's like that college experience, but combine it with everyone there believes that they are sort of

being pulled into a mission to save humanity. Like, the purpose-driven nature of it is part of what gives it this fuel. And people feel like if they aren't doing enough to help save humanity, they feel guilty about it. They have these discussions about, are you net positive or net negative to the world? They're literally saying, like, are you a useful person in the world? Or are you a waste of space in this world? And it's like, how devoted you are to trying to stop humanity from being destroyed. And it's just like,

If you just inject that idea into young people who are trying to figure out who they are in the world already, I mean, not all these people are young, but the people in the story, not the people in the rationalist community, but people in the story. And I just think it creates this dynamic where it's like,

just the jargon and the disputes and it just becomes overwhelming. And some people, they can't quite get it out of their heads. They're really struggling to live life without this kind of taking over their psyche in some way. Yeah, they should make podcasts and they wouldn't have that long-winded conversation about being a net good of that.

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It's a show where I read old books in the public domain to help you get to sleep. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Classic stories like A Tale of Two Cities, Pride and Prejudice, Winnie the Pooh. Stories that are great for adults and kids alike. For years now, Sleepy has helped millions of people catch some much-needed Zs, start their next day off fresh, and discover old books that they didn't know they loved.

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Learn or were you up in Vermont at that point? Well, the case originally was all California. So when I picked it up, it was it was all happening in California. And that was I mean, my editor at Wire, John Gravois, like he actually been following it since the beginning. That protest at near the Bohemian Grove, that was in 2019. So he had been sort of like following it and, you know,

Trying to see where it was going to go and what the story was. And then he brought me on in 2023. And at that point, there had been one person, there had been two people killed. There's some, like, alleged suicides that are associated with the group. But in terms of

One person killing another, let's say. There had been two people killed, including their landlord and one of the group in a very strange incident in which they pulled knives and swords on the landlord and the landlord shot them and they stabbed the landlord. Actually, what am I saying? I'm misspeaking. The landlord had not been killed. He had just been stabbed through the eye.

He shot one of them. So he was still alive. And then right when I came onto the story, there was a double murder in Pennsylvania of a couple who were the parents of one of the members of the group, if we call them a group. I'm just going to keep calling them a group, even though they would object to being called a group. And there were suspicions, and continue to be suspicions, that

uh, that she was involved, uh, that others from the group might be involved. And so that's kind of like when I came in. So the court case that I was started following was in Pennsylvania where they had come back to Pennsylvania following the double murder. The police had picked up three of them, the daughter, whose name is Michelle. And then Ziz, who's the leader, uh,

and one other, and they held them for a little while. They had to let two of them go, including the daughter, and then Ziz was kept in custody for like eight months,

seven six to eight months and she kept having hearings so I I attended those those hearings as sort of like that was my initial way into the case sounds um an incredibly masochistic thing to do to sit for a lot of these trials but that then says and I guess um I I guess we could learn a bit more about who she is as well and sort of her influence on all of these people but um

Yeah, why don't we start there? Who is Ziz then, and how does she come to be such a revered member of whatever this community is? Her name is Ziz El Soda. She was born in Alaska. She was a smart kid. She...

got a degree in computer science and then started to go to graduate school and then along the way got into rationalism and also effective altruism which is the other pillar of this that we haven't talked about. SBF kind of stuff. Yeah, exactly. So this sort of

The idea of earning to give, making a bunch of money so that you can give it to these causes, the main cause being preventing artificial intelligence from destroying the world. And so she was going to grad school, working at startups, maybe trying to do that earn to give thing, but then decided both that that wasn't her path, but also she got into the Bay Area rationalist community pretty tightly for a couple of years. And

She started to have complaints about the way the rationalist community was going about both their daily business in terms of like how they dealt with trans people, how they organized their meetings, how they allegedly had paid a blackmail to someone who put a website up about sexual assaults that happened within the community. And then she kind of started

separating herself. She and another rationalist went to live on a boat.

And they were going to kind of create this fleet of boats where people could live because of the aforementioned real estate price problem in the Bay Area, the housing price problem. And so that's when the two of them started kind of coming up with these ideas about what they call mental tech, like the hemispheric stuff, all sorts of other philosophies around the way you should be in the world, what double good people should do, etc., etc.,

And they also decided to protest the mainstream rationalist community because they were upset about, partly about this alleged blackmail situation, which is like really too complicated to go into. That's like being blackmailed from the future. This is the blackmail from the future. Well, that's a different thing. There is a philosophical issue around the thinking of the rationalists, which I will just summarize by saying,

that you should never give in to blackmail. That's the end point of the philosophical thought. My takeaway from that part of the story was that I felt really sorry for you having to write that part of the story. You should see the drafts. I've never written so many drafts of three paragraphs in my life. Just endless sending them back and forth, being like, does this make sense? And being like, no, this doesn't make sense.

trying to make sense of something that fundamentally like i'm not sure many of the people involved even could articulate it to you yeah um but in any case so you're the greatest rationalist on the planet potentially at the moment i will say like surprisingly uh the rationalist community

did not hate the story in terms of the way I described things. That was partly because I think there were some stories that were much worse than mine in terms of like putting them in certain boxes and just getting a lot of ideas just flat wrong. And so I could like, I'd spent so much time on it that I could stand out amongst this crowd for, they were like, Oh yeah, that's pretty much right. Like they would read it and say like, yeah, yeah, I would, I would say it this way, but, um,

Um, so I appreciated that in the end. That's cool. Um, so they, so Ziz and, um, a couple acolytes go and live on a boat. Um, I mean, we can, we can attribute all of this down to house prices being too high, which is, which is a nice conclusion to make, but it,

So then Zizgo is missing, right? Yeah, then they have the protest. And the protest, I mean, part of the reason I started the protest is there's a

We can never know, but there's a part of me that thinks that none of this ever would have happened if the protests had just gone down differently. Because they basically went, the organization, the Center for Applied Rationality, which they had been a part of, they wanted to go give a talk at this retreat, and they got canceled from giving the talk. So they were like, okay, we're going to show up with these flyers and then tell them what our complaints are, the blackmail and other things.

But then they decided to do that, number one, without alerting the police in advance, which is something you would do if you ever protest. Number two, dressed in Sith robes, wearing Guy Fawkes masks. That's a pretty big mistake. That's one that, if no one's expecting that, people can get pretty upset, you know, if you haven't thought it through. And number three, that there was a group of children at the same facility who were just like, they're doing a ropes course. And like...

That triggered a whole idea that, oh, there was a rumor that they had a gun. And then basically the SWAT team came in. And so they were arrested in a pretty rough manner. And I think that partly is what sort of set them off down this road. And then they were facing, at one point, felony charges for these protests, which were really just like...

They had blocked the entrances and there were trespassing charges and things like that. So anyway, then at a certain point during these sort of court hearings for those charges, Ziz disappears. And she actually falls off a boat in the San Francisco Bay. And there is a Coast Guard search overnight looking for her. And they can't find her and they declare her dead. And...

that about five months, I don't want to give too much of the story, but about five months later, it turns out that in fact, she did not fall off the boat. Or if she did, she fell off the boat right next to shore and swam to it. And then we have the episode with this landlord in California, which is pretty, I mean, it's a surprising level of violence given this group's

I mean, you know, it kind of comes out of nowhere, really, the sort of level of violence this guy goes through in California.

And then how does things escalate then? Because Ziz is kind of presumed dead for a long time. The group is, again, quite amorphous, right? So how does it kind of pop up again? Yeah, they're kind of, and they're sort of dispersed. Well, in the landlord incident, again, like, I almost started the story by saying, like, this is a real estate story. Like, they're living on this property where they just put up, like, box trucks, like, these kind of, like,

trucks and containers and trailers and they're sort of converted into these like really mediocre living spaces and this they're paying a little rent to this guy and they stop paying their rent and then he starts having the property owner all these disputes with them and then it culminates in like

stabbing him many times, including with the samurai sword through the chest and him shooting them. So then one of them dies, two more are arrested. They're in custody on murder charges of their own friend because of the felony murder law in the United States. And then it's kind of like quiet for a little bit, but then Michelle Zajko, one of the other people involved, her parents are murdered. And

two months later. So that's when they resurface again. It's like in the vicinity of this double murder. That's when I started following it. But that was at the beginning of 2023. So then really nothing happened

for a year I mean almost two years and then at the beginning of this year they resurfaced again when a border border patrol agent was killed in Vermont uh by two people who were associated with the group one of them was killed in a shootout and that's what brought it the kind of like National attention meanwhile the landlord who had survived this incredibly violent attack was also murdered

by another person who it's not clear. I mean, he was connected to the group, but it's not clear what his ideology is exactly or why he did it, but he murdered him. He was, the landlord was the only witness to his own attack. So all of this happened in January. And that's when like, really it was like, oh, violence is just circling these people. Is this when, I mean, from a reporter's perspective as well, you've been following the case for what, a couple of years by this point, it all just erupts. And I guess now,

What are you, shoulder to shoulder with everyone from the AP to the Guardian to the New York Times? How crazy was that to suddenly get around? I mean, it's wild to be in the middle of sort of like a breaking news moment when you're not a... I'm just not a breaking news reporter. In fact, I try pretty hard to stay away from stories that are going to have even one other...

I mean, most of the time these days you can't avoid. There's always some documentary filmmaker or someone on a good story. Like, you can't have it all to yourself. But this kind of frenzy, I mean, it was...

It's what you would expect, I guess, if you sit down and think about it. But just like people that I had talked to who no one had been interested in the story, even though, you know, like I talked to the sister-in-law of the murdered couple and I've been talking to her for a couple of years. Like I met her at a court hearing and there were zero reporters that ever came to this court hearings. Not one. I never saw another reporter. And then, you know, the people like that are getting 40, 50 calls, like just, just,

Just one after the other. Like, all these, like, reporter, reporter, reporter, reporter. Everybody doing their job. But it does create this... It can kind of make you crazy because...

On the one hand, I was like, oh, yeah, I was really on to something here. And also, like, maybe I should have done it sooner. I don't know. Like, all the calls that I had intended to make over the years that I was like, well, I've got all the time in the world. Suddenly, I couldn't even get those people because I was just one of many people trying to call them. So that was, of course, very frustrating. But at the same time, it did kind of, like, give it this salience. I mean, we had said, we had put it on hold, and I had...

literally said like well either they're going to get arrested or they're going to kill someone else and like when those things happen we will get scooped but we'll have the full story so we basically took a few weeks to kind of like tie up the ends and get the more current stuff in there and then went with what we had

How many good and bad books did you have to read about rationalism to kind of get your head around these guys? Or was it just like pouring through millions and millions of pages of forums and stuff like that? It's the latter. Or was it both? It's the latter. There's actually not like a lot of books on them. I mean, there's books written...

The main book is written by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which is like a Harry Potter fanfic book that is done through the lens of rationality, which everyone in the rationalist community, not everyone, but many people read, and it's very integral to their philosophy. So I think book-wise, that's probably the only book book. But I mean, I read God knows how many tumblers and...

They have a forum called Less Wrong, which is actually like, there's amazing stuff on Less Wrong. Like, I don't like to categorize the rationalists in one way or the other, because if you go on Less Wrong, you will find unbelievable discussions about issues with just like the most erudite people oftentimes writing about them. And writing about them in this way that the rationalist community does, where they sort of like, they just take an issue on, even if it's a controversial issue, and

They just sort of like, well, what can we learn here? And it is quite rational in the way that you would hope that it would be. But there's also just like, there's a lot of text. So, you know, when it came to this group or to the Zizians or just to Rationality in general, there's just like...

a lot to read. And that was part of, it was like my hobby for two years. I would just read, read stuff occasionally or reread stuff occasionally. Just thinking like, is anything ever going to happen with this? Like, why am I spending my time on this? Um, I guess like, I mean, people listening to this might be gathering, gathering it, but the, the, the core aspect of this is, is right. That, that the, the core aspect is the hold that Ziz has over these people and the, and the things that they're willing to do.

In her name or in the name of what they believe is kind of this higher rational purpose? How would you sort of describe the hold that she has over this? Yeah, I mean, we actually, I don't think in the story we described it as a cult ourselves. And that was not, I mean, I think people oftentimes, media will describe things as cult-like and it's more of a legal thing. But it was more because...

It is truly not, it's not quite in the vein of like a leader who sets up shop and just attracts people from around the world to like come to them. Here's my ideology. Like you believe it, then you do X, Y, or Z.

She had written all of these ideas, which are real mishmash of ideas, but they did attract people to her. And I think if you want to argue it's a cult, really what happened in January with the Border Patrol killing is probably the best example. Like two young people, incredibly smart young people, one who grew up in Germany, one who grew up in Seattle, became attracted to these ideas.

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep Podcast.

I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster.

I'm Richard Serrett. Join me on Strange Planet for in-depth conversations with the world's top paranormal investigators, alien abductees, Bigfoot trackers, monster hunters, time travelers, alternative archaeologists, remote viewers, and more. As I was on the way to Area 51, I was stopping on the side of the road and just taking measurements, and I found this one spot where time slowed down by a fraction of a second. It's not supposed to do that.

From the two big categories, animal mutilations and human abduction, you have to conclude that genetic material is being harvested. Well, I reached for a rifle and I turned and looked and it was already moving away and it was descending the bluff. There's no way any human could have went down it. It was probably a 75 degree angle straight down almost. On Richard Serrett's Strange Planet, we're redefining reality.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Do not go any further. Turn around. Go home. Music City 901 is a true crime podcast unlike anything you've heard before. I'm Brandon Hall. I've been a 901 dispatcher for over 25 years. I've heard it all. And now, so will you. I don't know where's your emergency? No, somebody just came in and shot my daughter and my husband. They shot them?

Each episode, I break down real emergency calls and the chaos behind them, from the voices on the phone to the action on the street. Real 911 audio, police body cam, and the stories behind them, straight from Nashville and beyond. This isn't just crime. It's the front line of it. Music City 901.

Listen on any podcast app. And like, so they were clearly driven to a place where they felt this kind of like, I don't know, moral certainty or the nature of the threat all around them or what it, we don't know exactly what it was that drove them to come out firing. But I think it's, it would be fair. I don't think it's unfair to say like the charismatic leader of

attracted them like over the internet just just through like old tumblr writings you know and then eventually through yeah yeah through like chats directly to them and then eventually in person to this idea of like isolating ourselves living in box trucks they love box trucks but that's one of the things that makes it like

i mean there's lots of examples of like but they weren't like that's smart about what they were doing i mean first of all i mean i should say none of them have been convicted of any of these crimes so far so they're all just like crimes that are surrounded and they're accused of there are seven of them that are like in jail on various charges including multiple of them that are on murder charges but they weren't like master

master killers in the way. Quite the opposite in some cases. Yeah, I mean, there's like, at the end, there's a nationwide manhunt for them. They're all over the news. They're all over the tabloids.

Everybody knows that they love box trucks and they're living in box trucks. And three of them, including Ziz, are just caught in Maryland just parking their box truck on some guy's property. And the guy comes out and they're like, can we stay on your property for a month? And he's like, no, I'm going to call the police. I'm going to call the police right now. So they were just divorced from reality again. This is a long answer to whether or not they were a cult. They were

I don't think that they were living in the mainstream world in many senses. And so even the, whether you think they're sinister, they were not like, they didn't seem to be plotting in a very coherent way. Yeah, I guess I just want to ask you as well, like in terms of your own kind of disappearing into this rabbit hole of all of this,

kind of incredibly dense philosophical speak. You mentioned something towards the foot of the story. It's this, is it Rocco's Basilisk? This kind of like problem that is posted to Less Wrong that kind of winds people into knots. And yeah, tell us about that and kind of whether you felt that you yourself were kind of falling into this thing as you were investigating this. Yeah, so basically

So Rocco's Basilisk is basically, it's a user named Rocco on this forum, Lesrong, many years ago, came up with this idea. And the idea was, well, because I should say this community, they often operate in sort of like game theory. So they'll create these sort of game theory situations to try to understand what AI will do in the future. What would a super intelligent AI do? And

there's all kinds of theories that if you start reading, you'll be like, what's Newcomb's theory? What's this? What's that? You have to know all of this game theory stuff to even understand what they're talking about. But this idea was that, well, if you had a super intelligent

being in the future that was like, I'm the smartest thing that's ever lived. And therefore, in some sense, like the most important thing that's ever existed, I shouldn't say lived, existed. And it's like brought into being by maybe by AI or

training itself and there's this takeoff and then suddenly it's super intelligent. Then one of the things it might say is, well, I should have existed before and like anyone who prevented me from coming into existence, I will now exact revenge on that human being. So if there were people who tried to stop this, then

i'm going to destroy them and not just destroy them but i'm going to torture them for eternity because it would have an ability to do that maybe like keep you alive forever but also torture you because it's super intelligent so there's many things it can do we can't hardly imagine but even worse than that it might say well if you didn't actively work to bring me into existence if you knew that i could exist but you didn't actively work to bring me into existence then i will also torture you forever

And this is really messing with people's heads because the people are, their whole purpose is trying to stop super intelligent AI from like taking over. And so they would be victims just by virtue of knowing about it. It turns you into a potential victim. Now, this was significant for Ziz because Ziz sort of said, well,

I've considered this and I still want to stop it and that's part of the reason she viewed herself as like double good and she couldn't be blackmailed because she conceived this I mean she didn't come up with it but she thought through this whole thing but then concluded like no I'm so moral I'm still gonna try and stop AI but this was so like for a while they banned they banned it on the less wrong form they banned that you couldn't mention it because mentioning it

It's what they call an info hazard. Just knowing about it, you could be subject to it, so they didn't want anyone to read about it. They eventually unbanned it because Eliezer Yudkowsky, the sort of... He's not really the leader, but let's say philosopher-in-chief of this

this group of people, he sort of said like, well, they wouldn't bother actually. The super intelligent AI is just not going to bother with this. Like it's got bigger fish to fry essentially. So they let it back on, but it's still, it's an influential idea. And also it, it really got in my head too. Cause it was sort of like, for me, the idea that like, once I took on the story, like now I knew about all this stuff, I could neither,

Deliver the story because it didn't have an ending it wasn't clear what was gonna happen for a long time or like what it all meant But I also couldn't let it go because like there was something significant happening And so I kind of felt trapped like there was a part of me that was like I wish I had never learned about this story to begin with Did these people I mean someone should teach these guys about Catholicism. It sounds like they would fit quite nicely with it

Yeah, it's a crazy story, obviously. We're going to put the link online. And honestly, I salute you for sort of delineating this stuff because it is utterly crazy. And as an assignment for a journalist, it would give me heart palpitations thinking about someone reaching out to me for that. But we're not going to just talk about that as well. I wanted to chat to you about another one of your projects. If people don't know Evan's work, it's sort of like often...

sort of convenes tech and crime and sort of worlds that are changing as we kind of understand how what AI, I guess, and stuff like this is affecting our lives. And you put some of that into a podcast called Shell Game, which people should listen to. It's fantastic. And it's about, I guess, this brave new world of AI that we're sort of stepping into. Most of us, me included, wouldn't know a huge amount about it beyond the headlines. But

it it's sort of i mean it's it's hard to describe i guess um i guess it's better to let you describe what the show is and how you sort of first stepped into this world because does it begin with the crime or does it kind of begin with a the idea of what ai even is it kind of begins with the crime i mean i i'm always i'm always interested in scams you know like i i'm

endlessly interested in scams and their variety and how they change and morph over time and like how they intersect with technology. And then I'm also very interested in identity. Like when people say like, what do you cover? You know, kids, parents at the playground kind of thing. I say, well, it's like the intersection of technology and crime and identity. That's like where most of my things live. And for a while, I really was not, I mean,

I was not that interested in AI. I've covered AI in the past and like back to this thing about too many reporters covering it, like once AI became this sort of like chat GPT frenzy and there's sort of endless essays about like, it can do writing for us. Like, what does that mean? And you know, this and that, like I was, I checked out a little bit and I was like, you know what, I'm going to go find another lane and do something else.

But then I got interested in the voice cloning aspect. Like I had seen a little bit about its ability to clone your voice. And that kind of got me on two fronts. One, like being a podcast podcaster, like you start to think like, huh, well, what does that mean for me? Like,

can they clone my voice like I have like hundreds of hours of my voice out on the internet like anyone can clone my voice and impersonate me but then also like wow think of the scams that you could run with this thing that was one of the first things I thought like and it's true like you could run amazing scams with this technology so then I thought okay well I'm gonna try to dive in and figure out what to do with this so I cloned my own voice and then

I thought, well, what if I could, I would send people clips, you know, and it got a good laugh. And so I thought, well, what if I could just call people using this voice, but it was just like ChatGPT was powering it. Like I wasn't even there.

And it turned out that not only could you do that, and I made it work after a while, there was actually platforms that were built for that, for telemarketers to try to employ AI instead of people in a call center. And so I just used that technology. And once I started calling people with it, starting with my wife and then other people. Yes, pretty hilarious. Like customer service people, then I was like, oh, this shit is crazy. Because

as much as you might hear about ai like the experience of encountering something that you expect to be real but is not that's what most interested me like how do people react when they encounter this thing so then i just went crazy with it and i just basically if you made or received a call like if you called me or received a call from you for a period of months like you weren't talking to me you were just talking to an ai version that sounded like me

It reminded me of, do you remember from years back there was that Tim and Eric sketch about the FaceTime party snoozer where you could like, you could stand in a party and be asleep and there was a mask that was talking to people on your behalf and you're just like snoring in the background and dribbling. It was like that. That's it exactly. It's like, it's kind of like terrifying how

I mean, like, you know, 99% of people are going to pick up that this is an AI speaking to you after a certain amount of time. But like, it is pretty full on. And it shocks me how far down the rabbit hole we are with it already. And there obviously, this is like the techno utopian line is that what we're all just going to be sitting reading books or watching sport or whatever while an AI does our job for us, right? Makes sense.

I don't know, like makes calls and takes meetings and stuff. It's bizarre. And it kind of makes sense as an end point of where we're going with all this. But obviously the scammers are onto this too. So what kind of stuff did you discover was being done?

Well, on the other end, like on the scam telemarketer end, so I set up a line. I set up a phone line and I attached what they call voice agents. So the voice agent had my voice, it was powered by usually ChatGPT, and then it was attached to a phone line. I have a bunch of these. I have dozens of these things. And one of them, I just try to put it out in the world as much as possible so that it would get called randomly by telemarketers and scammers.

and is surprisingly easy to accomplish. I've just checked it this morning. It gets like 50 calls a day. Oh my God. It didn't take long for it to start getting calls. But then over the course of working on the show, which I started at the beginning of last year, basically early 2024, by the summer, it was getting calls from other AIs who were being employed by the scammers. Because one of the issues with scamming is that it's a...

it's often a volume game. They're just making a ton of calls. Most people are hanging up, they're getting mad. But if you get someone who says, oh, yes, I am interested in health insurance. Yes, oh, cryptocurrency? Explain it to me. Then they actually often transfer you to a closer, like another person who can then bring you along to actually getting your information. That's like the oldest scam in the book, right? That is the Nigerian...

You know, print scam or whatever that is. You send a million things out there, one comes back, but it's made you thousands and thousands of dollars. Yeah, exactly. But then so, but of course you have to employ, I mean, scamming is now like an industrial endeavor. Like there's call centers full of people trying to scam people. But of course you've got to pay, although they're not always paid. There's the whole issue of like people who are essentially enslaved people.

in Asia in particular. Yeah, we've done a bunch of shows on that. It's crazy in Southeast Asia. Exactly, yeah. But you have to have people do that. But if you can have an AI that sounds reasonably human...

in a way that people won't detect, that can actually do the weeding out for you, can make the hundreds of calls, never sleeps, and then once you answer a couple of questions in the affirmative, then send you to a human closer. Like, that's good business. And that is absolutely what they're trying to do, both like

the full-on scammers, but also many of the sort of like offshored telemarketing schemes. Like now my AI often talks to other AIs, you know, for the beginning of the call. And then because it always engages, because I've prompted it to always be engaging with any caller, really, it then ends up with the human who's sort of like...

you know, either tries to close them or realizes at some point and then starts yelling at it. Although recently I've... It's been going for a year. So like I got tired of listening to the scam calls. So now at the current moment, it will only talk about classic rock. So like no matter what the person calls, it just like tries to get them. And occasionally they will. They'll be like, Pink Floyd or Rolling Stones, you know? And it'll get like a guy being like, I like Pink Floyd, you know?

just to try to move the conversation along. It's pretty amazing what you've done because it feels like listening to the show that it's almost like you've created a museum piece of this particular moment in time. It feels like we're right at the edge of the... We're stepping through the doorway and you've got this artifact that shows where we're headed. And it is so...

it's like you're when you're listening to the show it's like you're constantly in the uncanny valley you're always it's so unsettling um there are moments where

like when you when you get won't go into too much detail because i want everyone to listen but when you're getting your ai to talk to a psychologist like a real psychologist and it is so creepy and i think you are saying at that moment you're like oh my god i want to like i want to die i need to step into this conversation but it's it it just feels like oh my god this is where we're at and if you want to understand about how this stuff works like you've got to listen to show because it's

I don't know, man. Like, as probably the most lay person with this stuff that's imaginable to be, it's kind of terrifying and just completely enthralling at the same time. I mean, where were you before you kind of started doing it? And how did you kind of progress as you went further down the hole with it? Well, at the beginning, I was... I mean, I've been pretty...

I've been relatively dismissive of AI, but that's partly because I had reported on AI when it just didn't work at all. It didn't do anything useful. And a lot of people got into this mentality too, where it's like, early in my career when I was doing more just straight tech stuff, and people are selling something as being incredible, and then you kind of like...

Every town has a dark side.

This is Andrew Fitzgerald from the Everytown Podcast, where every single week we dive into insane and mysterious true crime stories, most of which you've never heard of. Stories like the bizarre disappearance of Tyler Davis in Columbus, Ohio, a 29-year-old father trying to find his way back to his hotel when he disappeared and was never heard from again, or the

and Elizabeth Shove from Lugoff, South Carolina, who was abducted from her driveway by a madman and taken to his underground bunker in the woods. We give you all the details you're interested in hearing about without any fluff or fillers, because ain't nobody got time for that. We cover everything from psychopaths to poltergeists, so go check out the Everytown podcast, because Everytown, no matter how nice it may seem, has a dark side.

Have you been wanting to explore the vast, grimdark galaxy of the Warhammer 40k universe? Well, the Lorehammer Podcast has you covered. From the big things like dimensional horrors that tear at our reality from the warp, to the little things like the never-ending nightmare of life in a manufactorum, we've got it all. With hundreds of episodes available, every dark corner, every twisted truth, every bit of lore will be revealed.

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Okay, this is a crazy one. The highly anticipated second season of the hit podcast Proof is finally here. Proof is an investigative true crime podcast co-hosted by Susan Simpson of Undisclosed and Jacinda Davis of Evil Lives Here.

Proof made headlines for its first season in 2022 after proving the innocence of two Georgia men serving life sentences for murdering their friend Brian Bowling when they were just 17 years old. So 25 years later, on December 8th, 2022, both men were freed based on evidence that was unearthed in Proof in the podcast, which again, insane. In the second season of Proof, Murder at the Warehouse, it's called,

Susan and Jacinda, they're back on the case again, this time traveling the streets of Manteca, California, to uncover who really murdered 18-year-old Rene Ramos.

On June 5th, 2000, Ramos' body was found buried under a pile of debris inside the shell of a new Home Depot building. Despite tips hinting at alternate suspects, tips that were ignored until now, Rene's boyfriend, 18-year-old skateboarder Jake Silva, and Tai Lopez, the 33-year-old uncle of one of Jake's close friends, were arrested and convicted of her murder.

Fans of true crime and investigative series won't want to miss this riveting new season. Again, last season, they got someone off. They got two people off of a murder. So follow the case as Susan and Jacinda uncover long overlooked evidence about what really happened to Renee by listening to proof murder at the warehouse, wherever you get your podcasts. But as I went along, like I had all these feelings that I tried to inject into the show, uh,

that are kind of like, on the one hand, this is terrifying because they've designed it to be human-like. It is a human impersonator. That's how they built it. They could have built it a different way, actually. And the things they describe about how wonderful it already is and what it's doing, like it can do protein folding design. Like it didn't actually have to be able to speak like a human in order to do that, you know? But they specifically decided to

feed it you know the whole internet to to make it something that tried to predict what a human would say at any given situation like that's the route they took and so it does that like it's quite good at impersonating a human and that feels very scary but then if you experience it a lot especially in conversation not like chatting to it like asking a question but like speaking to it which like i made a lot of people do against their will but also i have had to do as well um

it kind of it fades a little bit because it's like it's the most boring human impersonator that you could possibly come up with and it's also like weirdly hilarious like not intentionally hilarious like when it tries to make a joke it is not funny but it's actually like hilarious to listen to because it's it is like put together like two of the most boring people you know and then just be like you have to keep talking no matter what

And that's what you get if you put two of them in conversation with each other. I could never get over that. I still like listening to the AI version of me talking to the AI version of me because it's so fucking weird. It's bizarre. I was trying to get at that. Does it make you go crazy? Listening to yourself speaking in this kind of just off-color way the whole time, how do you even cope with that? A little bit. It didn't make me go

I don't know how crazy I am, but like it, it definitely like, it was like, I think I described it like for the therapy session, it was like simultaneously like, um,

eavesdropping on someone else's therapy session and also like listening to a recording of myself just like talking about my mental health issues and so but there was a part of me that was like well i fed it all this information about myself like my whole history like i wrote a whole dossier that i gave to it so it would you know quote unquote understand me even though it doesn't understand anything it's just drawing from that

text, but then listening to it, I would actually be like, no, wait, is that an issue that I have? It kept talking about vulnerability. If you put me in a room, I would not be like, I have a problem with vulnerability.

But that's just something in its training data that probably comes up a lot with what it's been trained on. That's a common issue that a man of a certain age might have. But if you're listening to essentially yourself speaking, you're like, well, maybe it's seeing something that I'm not seeing when it's talking about that, when it's bringing that up. Maybe it's reading between the lines. Christ, that's meta. Yeah.

yeah so it did kind of it did kind of mess with my head a bit and then I messed with my friends and family's heads themselves I mean I feel like they got it worse than me because they they thought they were going to be talking to me and then they would realize that it was something else but I hadn't even told anyone that this was even possible so there were a lot of people like what the is this like what is happening right now like really really freaked out um so I tried to capture that as well because I feel like

we're all experiencing that or starting to experience that in a little bit, a little way. Yeah. It is. And to bring it back to the crime, I guess, because we should. This is like, the money that is made by this stuff is staggering, right? It's phenomenal. So it's not, this isn't chump change at all. This is not something that is like at the very periphery of organized crime around the world. This is like,

This is right in the middle of the black hole of it, right? This is making billions of dollars. It's like crazy stuff. Yeah, I mean, the type of scams that this can supercharge are, yeah, multi-billion dollar scams, like business email compromise, which I've written about in the past. That is absolutely just through the roof with AI because...

This is when people are imitating a company's email in order to get, I don't know, the treasurer or the finance department to wire like a million bucks, right?

much cheaper, but also the impersonation ability is incredible. So there already have been examples of you clone the voice of the CEO, you have that voice call a mid-level employee and say, oh, this deal...

is just coming together like we need to transfer this money like you do don't tell anyone else this is the nature of the scan like don't tell anyone else and like send a wire to here and like you would think you and us you and i sitting here like oh that would never work but like it absolutely works and it's worth like yeah yeah millions hundreds of millions billions of dollars to be able to achieve that and so there's already just like

I mean, there's the grandparent scam. People pretend they clone someone's voice. There's so many voices on Instagram. Everyone's out there making videos. They can clone your voice, contact a relative using that voice, say that you're in trouble, say that you need money. This is like a classic old scam that, again, is now like...

can be made so much more real. They used to just have, like, a person pretend to be you, and your relative most of the time would be like, "Doesn't sound like him." But now they have the ability to, like, just get you over the line to start believing, and then, like, you're trapped in this world, and you'll do anything they say.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy stuff. Obviously, we'll put a link to the show in the show descriptions here as well. And yeah, it's called Shell Game. You get it wherever you get your podcasts. Evan, what are you kind of working on at the moment then? I mean, you're climbing out of two pretty...

gigantic kind of meta research holes um are you gonna are you gonna go for something a bit easier next time or is it more is it more crazy stuff sadly no no i'm working on season two of shell game actually we've got that up and running so that's supposed to be done by the fall and then i've got another magazine story that i've been working on for now going on six months about

a scam type situation. So every time I think like, I just want to talk to people again who want to speak to me, you know? Like I used to do science stories and often the researchers, they were really eager to speak to me. And for years, I haven't done anything where anyone who involved really, really wants to talk to me. I went through a period, I think last year and the year before that of doing stories about con artists and scams. And I was like, I need to put this to bed just for a bit because

These people, I mean, they're just so difficult. They're just, they're kind of like the ego and the constant conniving and the trying to manipulate and also kind of hating you at the same time. It's pretty exhausting to just be at that desk every day. So I personally have a couple of easier stories I'm working on. Not nice stories, not like friendly stories, but they're not reconized. So yeah, my heart goes out to you for that.

But Evan, thank you ever so much for joining us. Yeah, we'll obviously keep up with your work in the future and hope to have you back. Thank you. Huge fan of the podcast. I'm honored to be here. Didn't wear your t-shirt though, so I'm pretty upset. I didn't wear my t-shirt. It seemed too aggressive to wear my t-shirt. My complaint about the t-shirt actually is that the t-shirt says don't Instagram your crimes. But

Among there's a small group of people for whom that sentiment is not what we want like you and I want people I have reported multiple stories from people Instagramming their crimes So I actually want people to Instagram their crimes, but I do support the sentiment to stay out of trouble You should in fact not Instagram your crime Yeah, I think maybe we have to put like an asterix on the on the back and like some some kind of disclaimers But yeah, I said take your point Cheers, Evan. We'll speak to you soon

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