Michael Vassar

Michael Vassar is an American businessman and a central figure of the Rationalist Community who served as president of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (later the Machine Intelligence Research Institute) from 2009 to 2011. After leaving the institute he built an informal circle, dubbed by others "the Vassarites," that recruited from the Berkeley rationalist and Effective Altruism social network and practiced an intensive, confrontational psychological method aimed at freeing members from what Vassar characterized as a corrupt and conformist society. The circle is widely identified as the tendency from which Jack LaSota's Zizian group splintered.¹²

The Singularity Institute Presidency

Vassar announced his presidency of the Singularity Institute in a February 16, 2009 blog post, leading the organization through the period when its public conference, the Singularity Summit, was at its height and when Peter Thiel was its most prominent funder. He had previously served on the institute's board, and his tenure overlapped the New York editions of the summit and the buildup of the in-person Berkeley community. Luke Muehlhauser became executive director in November 2011 as Vassar moved out of day-to-day leadership.³⁶

In 2012 Vassar cofounded MetaMed Research, a personalized medical-research startup, with the Estonian programmer Jaan Tallinn as chief technology officer and the rationalist writer Zvi Mowshowitz and the entrepreneur Nevin Freeman among the cofounders, and with a roughly 500,000 dollar seed investment from Thiel. Vassar served as chief science officer and pitched the company as an application of the community's rationality techniques to diagnosis and treatment, selling teams of researchers to wealthy patients dissatisfied with conventional care. MetaMed became defunct around 2015.⁶⁷

The Vassarites and the Jailbreaking Method

The circle that formed around Vassar after he left the institute held what observers described as a gnostic stance: that ordinary society is pervasively corrupt, conformist, and traumatizing, and that members needed to "jailbreak" themselves from it. The method involved long, destabilizing conversations intended to break down a person's existing beliefs and sense of self, sometimes accompanied by psychedelic drugs. Vassar recruited from the MIRI and Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) network and told members that those organizations were themselves part of the corrupt order he opposed.¹

Several members of the milieu suffered acute psychiatric crises that other community members connected, in contested first-person accounts, to Vassar's influence. A former MIRI researcher, Jessica Taylor, was hospitalized for roughly three weeks in 2017 with delusions of being "intrinsically evil," an episode discussed at length in community writeups that linked the high-intensity culture and Vassar's conversations to the breakdowns; the causal attribution remains disputed within the community.¹⁴

The Zizian Splinter

Vassar met with LaSota and other future Zizians in January 2019, and the Zizian formation is repeatedly described in the reporting and the community record as a splinter of the Vassarite tendency, sharing its premise that the rationalist establishment was corrupt and that radical psychological and moral self-transformation was required. The Zizian group went on to be tied to six killings across three states between 2022 and 2025.²⁵

The mechanism the community accounts describe is continuous between the two formations: the practice of inducing paranoia toward MIRI and CFAR, the use of psychedelics to break down a person's existing sense of self, and the discouraging of psychiatric treatment for the resulting crises, which were sometimes characterized as evidence of breaking free rather than as breakdowns. LaSota took the Vassarite gnostic frame further into an idiosyncratic theory of hemispheric "single-good" and "single-evil" brain hemispheres, veganism as a moral absolute, and a willingness to use violence, and the Zizians cut ties with the wider community after the 2019 CFAR reunion protest. Vassar has not been charged in connection with the Zizian killings, and the causal chain from his circle to LaSota's group is drawn by community participants and journalists rather than established in court.¹²