Who are the Zizians?

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 4 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too, and this is Stuff You Should Know.

Speaker 4 This is, I guess, a

Speaker 4 timely, topical true crime edition, the three Ts.

Speaker 5 COA alert.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 I feel I should sound the clacks on on this one.

Speaker 5 Yeah, we're issuing a COA on this one, a pretty robust one, because A, this is something we don't do a lot, which is tackle true crime in

Speaker 5 almost real time as far as the fact that none of this has settled.

Speaker 5 The alleged crimes, we're probably going to say alleged a lot because there's not not even been court dates a lot of times for some of these cases.

Speaker 5 We're talking about potentially six murders in three states by

Speaker 5 a group that may or may not have done it, that may or may not be a cult. So just a big COA there.

Speaker 5 This is one of the true crimes where neither one of us are going to be like, oh, here's my theory on this because just who knows, this has got to play out first.

Speaker 5 And the other big COA is a lot of

Speaker 5 sort of a disproportionate amount of members of the Zizians who we're going to be talking about are members of the trans community. And it's just one of the sort of facts of the case.

Speaker 5 It's obviously no suggestion or judgment on our part of the trans community, but it seems to be a big sort of part of

Speaker 5 this group of people who got together. So just kind of keep all that in mind as we lay all this out there.

Speaker 4 Right. Nice work, Chuck.
Thank you for that. Yeah.
So like you said, we're talking about the Zizians. How did you hear about this? This is your pick.

Speaker 5 You know what? I have no idea. And even went to look to see if somebody has suggested it.
No one had. I think I might have just seen a news story and been like, wait a minute,

Speaker 5 this is something that hasn't been a 10-part Netflix series yet. Right.
So it must be super, super current, which it is.

Speaker 4 My theory is that the great gazoo said, do one on the Zizzians, dum-dum.

Speaker 4 And you were like, hmm.

Speaker 4 I should do one on the Zizians. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Thanks for bringing a joke into this thing.

Speaker 4 So the Zizians are called such because they center around ziz um a trans woman who is often portrayed as the leader of this cult uh and i mean you can make a pretty fair case that at the very least she's the leader or the most influential member because the whole thing's named after her although we should say that this uh group of people do not call themselves the zizians that was a name that was given to them by um somebody who's critical of them an anonymous person who's critical of them yeah but ziz herself

Speaker 4 we know, was born in 1991 in Fairbanks, Alaska. And like the other people that she attracts into her orbit, she was brilliant.

Speaker 4 I mean, very precocious as far as like working on computers goes, as far as mathematics goes.

Speaker 4 I think by the time she was at the University of Fairbanks in Alaska, she had internships at both Oracle, the cloud computing company, and NASA.

Speaker 4 So, I mean, like,

Speaker 4 she had a pretty, pretty great resume, I guess, is what you'd say if you're on LinkedIn.

Speaker 5 Yeah, for sure. And like you said, this is going to be sort of a common thing with everyone who got together with Ziz and the others.

Speaker 5 So in college, Ziz started learning about what's called the rationalist movement or the rationalist community, which were also very science-minded people. They kind of gathered around Silicon Valley.

Speaker 5 And one of the big things with rationalism is, and a lot of this stuff makes sense, like a lot of the stuff that they're laying down, like, hey, let's use logical tools to just always question ourselves.

Speaker 5 Let's not get set in our way of thinking about anything. Let's always revise what we're thinking about everything.

Speaker 5 And one of the key people here, one of the names that you'll hear early and then later on, is a guy named Eliezer Yudkowski, who is an AI researcher who is

Speaker 5 kind of doing something different than what a lot of AI researchers are doing in that he has devoted much of his career to basically saying, hey, warning, this could really go wrong, and I'm going to do everything I can to make sure it goes down in the right way.

Speaker 4 Yeah, he dedicated himself to solving the AI alignment problem, which is how do you create an artificial intelligence whose motivations are totally aligned with humans and we don't accidentally wipe ourselves out with the AI we create.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And like you said, it kind of flies in the face of especially what's going on these days, which is like, hurry up and build an AI or else China's going to do it first and we're going to lose out.

Speaker 4 And there's so much money to be made off of AI.

Speaker 4 And Eleazar Yukowski is a very, very interesting duties, self-taught AI researcher, incredibly brilliant.

Speaker 4 And just by happenstance, I got an email yesterday from somebody at a publishing house that mentioned that he has a new book coming out in September with Nate Soars, one of his collaborators.

Speaker 4 It's called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. And it's about AI.

Speaker 5 Right, which doesn't have a whole lot to do with the Zizians, but that just sets up kind of who this guy is. In 2009, he founded a blog called Less Wrong, as in let's do less wrong.

Speaker 5 And I mean, I assume that's what it means.

Speaker 4 It means so it's about overcoming your biases. Like you want to be less wrong.

Speaker 4 It's all about thinking clearly and not letting your biases guide your thinking, I think.

Speaker 5 Yeah, so they started gathering as, I guess, a de facto sort of community of rationalists. A lot of this, again, is taking place in and around Silicon Valley in Northern California.

Speaker 5 And he founded a couple of Berkeley California-based organizations that'll come into play. The Machine Intelligence Research Institute, or MIRI.

Speaker 5 And again, that's about, you know, minimizing the risks of AI. And then the Center for Applied Rationality, or CIFAR.

Speaker 5 And again, same deal. Clear, unbiased thinking is what they're after, never getting too set in your ways and always trying to revise how you think about things.

Speaker 4 Right. They're also very closely tied with effective altruism, which is essentially using rational thinking to donate your money to the greatest good.
We did an episode on that, if I'm not mistaken.

Speaker 5 We did, my friend.

Speaker 4 All of this attracted Ziz to move from Alaska down to the Bay Area in San Francisco.

Speaker 4 And she got involved with CIFAR, got involved with

Speaker 4 Miri,

Speaker 4 and dedicated herself also to trying to figure out this AI alignment problem too.

Speaker 4 And she,

Speaker 4 the thing about this rationalist community is they are as open as you can be. You can be a Nazi and show up and be like, I'm a Nazi, and here's what I think about everything.

Speaker 4 And they will engage you in debate because that's just what they do. They like no thought processes off the table.
And that attracted a lot of interesting people who were

Speaker 4 the average normie would probably not necessarily feel comfortable sitting in a room with just because, you know, of awkwardness, but also because they probably wouldn't have much to converse about because the people we're talking about in this rationalist community are so brilliant that they probably would not be able to relate to the average person and vice versa.

Speaker 5 Yeah, or at the very least, on some of the radical fringes of whatever movement that they're in.

Speaker 5 Ziz is one of those people and started writing on the less wrong side and her own blog and writing about, again, stuff that's on the more radical end of the spectrum.

Speaker 5 Like, hey, we got to, you know, sort of

Speaker 5 12 monkeys kind of stuff.

Speaker 5 Like, hey, we got to do whatever it takes.

Speaker 5 Some people might think, you know, something we're doing is evil, but if it's in the service of what we think has a good end,

Speaker 5 then that's what we should do.

Speaker 5 Sometimes she calls herself a Sith. as in, you know, Star Wars.
And apparently the name Ziz comes from a speculative fiction story called Worm

Speaker 5 that a lot of rationalists love in which Ziz in the story is a villainous entity that if they listen to for too long, you will go crazy.

Speaker 5 And so Ziz is all of a sudden hanging around the Bay Area, going to these rationalist hangouts and meetings, wearing black robes and sort of dressed like a Sith.

Speaker 4 So all this is what, around 2016, 17 that this is all starting, that Ziz is showing up.

Speaker 4 And again, like I said, this community is very open. So even though Ziz would show up wearing black robes, declaring herself a Sith lord and that that's her religion is Sith.

Speaker 4 But despite that community being open, she still stood out, not necessarily because she wore black robes and called herself a Sith, but more because she was more intensely devoted and dedicated.

Speaker 4 than even the average rationalist, right? So she did stand out some. One of the other things that she was radically dedicated to was veganism and animal rights.

Speaker 4 And this would actually end up separating her from the rationalist community eventually.

Speaker 4 And that you can kind of make a case, it seems like, is the initial schism that caused this wedge that led to all the events that would follow.

Speaker 5 Yeah, like basically, hey, you're trying to protect human life. Like, what about the animals? Like, every sentient animal is a person.

Speaker 5 And these are Ziz's words.

Speaker 5 And, you know, so we got to kick up the

Speaker 5 intensity on the animal front as well.

Speaker 5 The problem with all of this is that this was around San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where it's really, really expensive to live.

Speaker 5 And if you're someone like Ziz, you're not, you know, going out and getting some big tech job where you're making tons of money to afford that condo downtown. So you got to live somewhere.

Speaker 5 And this is when Ziz meets up with...

Speaker 5 somebody named Gwen Danielson,

Speaker 5 had a lot in common, another rationalist, another trans woman, another person who was very much into animal rights.

Speaker 5 And Gwen happened to live on a sailboat in Berkeley, Marina, and said, hey, this is much cheaper rent here. Why don't you just come and live on this boat with me? I'm also into math.

Speaker 5 I'm also into science. And I also have some pretty radical ideas about stuff.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And so the point of this was, if you, and this is Ziz's belief, if you could free yourself from things like paying rent, especially the high rent of San Francisco, and keep your costs down to as minimal as possible, you could devote that much more time to figuring out the AI alignment problem, figuring out how to push Sefar and Miri into protecting animal rights too, like just thinking and learning to think better.

Speaker 4 That was kind of the point. And so I think Ziz initially moved into the sailboat with Gwen Danielson, found that they were not quite exactly compatible roommate-wise, but still friends.

Speaker 4 And so Ziz bought her own sailboat and docked it at the same marina in Berkeley. And they became what was called the rationalist fleet.

Speaker 4 They invited more and more people to come join them at the marina. And they actually went so far as to buy an old tugboat that by this time was in its 70s or 80s, maybe.

Speaker 4 Not a good age for a tugboat. And they actually bought it from Alaska and tugged it down or sailed it down all the way to San Francisco.

Speaker 5 Yeah, the name of this boat was Caleb. So now it's in Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco.
And Caleb was a problem, though. Cable, like you said, was an old boat, an old World War II-era tugboat.

Speaker 5 So it wasn't like, you know, even like a

Speaker 5 mid-70s houseboat would have been a better option, probably.

Speaker 5 This thing, they couldn't, they had a hard time anchoring it.

Speaker 5 It was too expensive to maintain. It would drift out of control and hit other boats.
So it was not, you know, everything they thought it was going to be. So just, you know, sort of park that for now.

Speaker 5 I'm going to say that a lot because we're going to be parking a lot of things as this jumps around.

Speaker 5 And so at this point, we have to introduce some new characters to the scene.

Speaker 5 Again, had a lot in common with Ziz and Gwen in that they were very, very smart, very much into math and science.

Speaker 5 Some were trans and some were non-binary.

Speaker 5 And the first player here is someone named Emma Buranian,

Speaker 5 a programmer, worked at Google, but left Google because they thought the company was corrupt.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 4 And we should say these people fell into Ziz's orbit because Ziz was a prolific blogger and blogged in a way that, like, a lot of the language and thoughts and ideas were impenetrable to all but a certain group of people.

Speaker 4 And these were the people that she ended up attracting through her blog. There's a really great Guardian article about all of this written by Oliver Conroy.

Speaker 4 And Conroy says that there was a glossary that somebody gave him that one of Zig's blog followers created of Zig's words. And that when he printed it out, it was 48 pages long.
So,

Speaker 4 like, she had a certain thing going on that attracted a certain kind of person. And these were the people who were falling into

Speaker 4 her orbit at this time. And we should also say all of these people were in their early to mid-20s.

Speaker 4 I think Ziz was the oldest, maybe at the time, at 26.

Speaker 4 So they were all disaffected, brilliant, often trans, vegan, 20-somethings who were living very close to homelessness in San Francisco in the late 20 teens.

Speaker 5 Yeah, so the second person was Alex Leetham,

Speaker 5 occasionally known as Somni, a mathematician in this case, went to UCLA, studied at UC Berkeley as well. Then we have Michelle Zoshko, a biometrics researcher, another smarty pants,

Speaker 5 and then someone named Alice Monday, who was Zashko's girlfriend and a bit of a mentor, apparently, according to Ziz, to Ziz.

Speaker 5 And they started sort of just getting together, talking about their ideas.

Speaker 5 They came up with a name for one of their theories or sort of their overarching theory called Vegan, anarcho-transhumanism.

Speaker 5 And Gwen Danielson developed this idea that the hemispheres of the brain were basically separate and they could operate independently from one another.

Speaker 5 You can be different genders at the same time. You can be good and evil or good or evil at the same time.

Speaker 5 And they started these experiments called unohemispheric sleep, where they were saying you can be asleep and awake at the same time. One can be asleep and then one can be active and awake.

Speaker 5 And we say this because there are people that have accused

Speaker 5 Ziz and others in the group of basically keeping you sleep deprived through these experiments,

Speaker 5 potentially leading to a couple of suicides that we'll talk about.

Speaker 5 And again, I have no judgment on whether or not they are a cult or not at this point, but if you're making a case for cult, sleep deprivation is a very big hallmark of something that oftentimes happens.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that's like chapter two in the cult leaders playbook. Yeah.
We should say also that unihemispheric sleep theoretically is possible.

Speaker 4 Humans don't do it, but dolphins do, whales do, migratory birds do. So it's not like it just doesn't exist.

Speaker 4 It's humans trying to figure out how to do it themselves so they could think longer, more hours in a day, essentially.

Speaker 5 Yeah. So this group is getting a little more

Speaker 5 upset and aggressive toward the official rationalist movement and community.

Speaker 5 They think, again, that Miri and Sefar,

Speaker 5 you're not doing enough for the animals.

Speaker 5 You need to expand your, I guess, viewpoint on sentient beings and what that means. And you're also biased against trans people.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and there was another thing, too, that Ziz got really upset about. She came to believe that Miri paid off a blackmailer.

Speaker 4 Another way to put it is that somebody accused people at Miri of sexual assault or statutory rape, I think it was, and that they paid the person to go away. Some people would call it a settlement.

Speaker 4 To Ziz, it was a blackmail, paying off a blackmailer, and that you just did not do that, that that violated some of the basic tenets of the rationalist community and the way of solving problems that they use.

Speaker 4 So that with the ethical veganism combined really separated her from this rationalist community.

Speaker 4 And with this growing group around her, they decided that they were going to show up, go to the CIFAR seminar conference that was being held in 2019.

Speaker 4 And they were going to present their problems and their issues in a very rational way, just like CIFAR would want them to.

Speaker 4 And the people who organized CIFAR were were like, you guys are way too aggressive for our tastes. You can't come to this CEFAR retreat.
And one of them said, you've got a Nazi in there.

Speaker 5 So four of them, Ziz, Gwen Danielson,

Speaker 5 Emma Buranian,

Speaker 5 and it gets a little confusing with all the names. And Alex Leetham, they went anyway.
And they had their Guy Fawkes masks on and they had their black hooded robes on.

Speaker 5 They blocked the exits with their vehicles. And they were like, here, you're going to listen to us.
Here's our flyers. Here's our problems and our issues.
And the staff didn't know what was going on.

Speaker 5 They called in a report of a possible active shooter and the cops came.

Speaker 5 They did not have arms on them or anything like that, but they were arrested on charges of false imprisonment and child endangerment because there were kids there.

Speaker 5 It was a campground where they met north of San Francisco.

Speaker 5 And the defendants, we should point out, the four of them did end up filing a suit against the police alleging mistreatment.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so the rationalist community is like, that's it. Not only can you not come to CEFIR retreats, you can't even hang out on the Less Wrong blog.
You can't come to our

Speaker 4 cocktail meetups that we have, which are a lot of fun. So you're probably going to be upset.

Speaker 4 They just got booted out. So now this wedge was a gulf.

Speaker 4 It was a break in communication between the group that would come to be known as Zizians and the rationalist community.

Speaker 4 And with that, that group became more and more isolated and their ideas got a little weirder and a little more far out and a little more aggressive because they were all similar people who were feeding off one another in this isolated situation.

Speaker 4 There weren't people on the outside coming and be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's rethink what you're saying. It was like, yeah, that's a really good idea.
And it just kept going from there.

Speaker 5 All right. I think that's a good, you can kind of park all that stuff for now because the story kind of jumps around the country a bit.

Speaker 5 and when we come back we're gonna pick up with part two a little north of san francisco in vallejo california

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Speaker 4 So, Chuck, one of the outcomes of being like pushed out of the rationalist community, somebody launched a website called Zizians.info. It's still around today.

Speaker 4 And they basically chronicled all the things that they accused the Zizians of being a cult, or that backs up their accusation of the Zizians being a cult.

Speaker 4 And two of the things are something you referenced earlier. There were two suicides by people who were

Speaker 4 said to have gone through this unohemispheric sleep,

Speaker 4 I guess, boot camp. And it resulted in their suicides, allegedly.
So

Speaker 4 the Zizians just have a really bad name at this point. The marina thing is not working out.
The rationalist fleet is kind of sinking, as it were.

Speaker 4 And they just happened to meet somebody at the marina named Curtis Lind, who was a 70-something guy who loved people, loved artists, and had a bunch of land down in Vallejo.

Speaker 4 and said, hey, I want artists to come live down there. You guys seem kind of artsy and odd.
Why don't you come live there for really cheap rent? And the Zizians were like, heck yeah.

Speaker 5 All right. So Curtis Lynn offers,

Speaker 5 you know, them the chance to go live. You know, they paid rent, but I don't imagine it was very much.

Speaker 5 And in this, you know, we're going to be introduced to some more players at this point.

Speaker 5 One of the members of the group that had joined up at this time, her name was Suri Dow.

Speaker 5 And she was fresh out of high school and a leftist blogger and just sort of put a pin in this.

Speaker 5 At one point in a Discord chat, she said that she had had very dramatic fantasies about becoming a knife murderer. And there's, you know, up to 20 people at this time on Curtis Lynn's property.

Speaker 5 The neighbors get a little freaked out. They're like, hey, they're walking around naked sometimes.
They're wearing gas masks.

Speaker 5 Lynn eventually is like, you guys aren't even paying rent anymore.

Speaker 5 And they said, yeah, well, there's a COVID eviction moratorium. So what are going to do about it? So everything just starts going really pear-shaped, as you say, in like 2022.

Speaker 4 Yeah, also, Chuck, I saw that they would carry katanas around like samurai swords. So imagine seeing your neighbor walking around naked, wearing a gas mask and carrying a samurai sword.

Speaker 4 And there's 20 of them. It would be hard, especially in the context of California, to not be like, I think they might be a cult.

Speaker 5 Good point.

Speaker 4 So in 2022,

Speaker 4 like you said, things just really start to take a terrible shape. In August, Ziz's sister and Emma Beranian went to the police and said, our friend Ziz fell over while boating.

Speaker 4 So Ziz died during a boating accident. The Coast Guard launched a huge search.
And I guess after 18 hours, they said there's no way that she could have survived.

Speaker 4 And she was, although they didn't have the body, they still declared her legally dead.

Speaker 4 And her sister was given a death certificate. And around the same time, Gwen Danielson, who was one of the OG

Speaker 4 members of this whole group, she died by suicide too. So this group is just rocked by these two deaths in 2022.

Speaker 5 That's right. So

Speaker 5 while this is happening, it's kind of at the same time, this COVID eviction moratorium runs out. So Curtis Lind is like, all right, now I can actually

Speaker 5 get these people off my property finally, probably like this November.

Speaker 5 Two days before he was able to do that and sort of dropped the news that they were out of there, Suri Dow

Speaker 5 called him in and said, hey, there's a water leak on my property here or in my trailer. You got to come and check this out.

Speaker 5 Curtis Lynn says, I went to address the issue with the water and I was assaulted. They hit me over the head.
They stabbed me with knives. They stabbed me with a katana, with a samurai sword.

Speaker 5 He ended up losing an eye. He was stabbed through the chest.

Speaker 5 Apparently, he alleges that Alex Leatham was the one who stabbed him through the chest. And so he shot Letham and Emma Buranian and killed her dead.

Speaker 5 If you ask the Zizians that were there, they said, no, that's not what happened.

Speaker 5 He'd been harassing us and he just opened fire on us one day.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 the authorities tended to agree or believe Curtis Lind.

Speaker 4 And in fact, Letham and Dow were arrested, charged with attempted murder, and then also charged with the death of Emma Buranian.

Speaker 4 Because apparently in California law, if you do something that causes the death of somebody else, even incidentally,

Speaker 4 you are responsible or you can be held responsible for that death. And the thinking was that Curtis Lynn had to kill Emma Boranion because of the actions of Dow and Leetham, right? Right.

Speaker 4 So now Suri Dow and Alex Leetham are in jail in California. That's where they are.
So just park that, like you said.

Speaker 5 That's right. So

Speaker 5 police took another member of the group at the time. She gave her name as Julia Dawson.
They said, come down to the station with us. We got to question you.

Speaker 5 At the station, she seemed like she was having a medical emergency. So they're like, well, we got to get her to the hospital.
Stat.

Speaker 5 Took her to the hospital, and she disappeared from the hospital. Detectives started investigating what happened there.
And they said, oh, you know who that was? That was Ziz. Ziz is not dead at all.

Speaker 5 And they also determined, guess who else was there? Gwen Danielson. She's actually alive as well.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 So if you've heard our faking your death episode, this is a, it's it's a big deal to fake your death especially successfully so the zizians never thought they were dead or if they did it was for a very short time it was to protect themselves from the authorities one of the other things that was really uh an unsettling find after curtis lind was attacked um they found a a a vat of lie that suggested that they intended to kill him and that they were going to dissolve his body in it.

Speaker 4 So it's starting to become clear, like these people are no no joke. But at the time, this was like

Speaker 4 an isolated incident. It wasn't related to anything else.

Speaker 4 The authorities did not know that this was a group known as the Zizians or anything like that.

Speaker 4 There were pieces that were starting to lay out on the table, but no one had put them together yet.

Speaker 5 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 5 All right, so now you can park all of that because we're going to move once again across the country.

Speaker 5 This time, Pennsylvania is going to come into the picture in 2021. So this is, you know, a little bit before these events,

Speaker 5 Michelle Zashko, that we mentioned, and Alice Monday, who were girlfriends with each other, they moved from California to Vermont, to northern Vermont, pretty rural area.

Speaker 5 And they were joined by a guy named Daniel Blank, another like-minded person. He went to UC Berkeley, bioengineering and electrical engineering co-degree, and then worked at startups.

Speaker 5 And he was also a vegan and

Speaker 5 started to sort of get a little more radical about it. Got distanced from his parents, started judging them for eating meat.

Speaker 5 And he hooks up with Monday and Zoshko in Vermont.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and so by this time, I think, I don't know if you said it or not, I think you did.

Speaker 4 Ziz had credited Alice Monday as being like her mentor.

Speaker 4 She had, she modeled herself largely after Alice Monday, too. Like she was apparently really assertive with her beliefs and ideas.
And Ziz became more and more like that after meeting Alice Monday.

Speaker 4 By this time, though, she considered Alice Alice Monday an enemy, what she called a vampire.

Speaker 4 And I guess Zajko was by

Speaker 4 association, guilty by association. And from what I could tell,

Speaker 4 Alice Monday became her enemy because she and maybe Zajko were warning people away from Ziz, saying like, you need to steer clear of this person. So Ziz considered them enemies.

Speaker 4 And she contacted Zajko and said, hey,

Speaker 4 if you want to earn my trust back, you need to murder Alice.

Speaker 4 And if you don't, I'm going to come to Vermont and murder you.

Speaker 4 And this was the kind of a precarious situation as far as Zajko was concerned, Michelle Zajko was concerned, because, and this really, I think, kind of gets a lot across.

Speaker 4 She was like, I really had to kind of decide, you know, did I want to murder Alice to make Ziz happy, or should I kill Ziz? This is the position that Ziz was putting people in by this time, allegedly.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Should we just just have Jerry drop in the word allegedly, like just every 40 seconds?

Speaker 4 Allegedly.

Speaker 5 Beiging Mr. Herman.

Speaker 5 I know I promised Pennsylvania and we've been in Vermont for a second here, but here's where Pennsylvania comes into play. On December 31st, last day of the year, according to many, in 2022.

Speaker 5 This is about a month and a half after Curtis Lind was stabbed and after that all occurred in Viejo. So Michelle Zosco's parents, Richard and Rita, were murdered in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 5 They have ring camera footage from a neighbor that shows two people arriving at the house a little before midnight. And on the camera footage, you can hear what sounds like mom.

Speaker 5 And then a few seconds later, oh my God, oh God, God.

Speaker 5 And the parents of Michelle Zazzko were found shot in the head, kind of execution style in their bedroom.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 So the Pennsylvania state troopers went to go visit Michelle Zazzko in Vermont, and she's like, I haven't been to Pennsylvania in almost 20 years or more than 20 years.

Speaker 4 And I haven't talked to my parents in a year. So it's not me.
I don't know who killed them.

Speaker 4 And in fact, she showed up to a graveside service a couple of weeks later and I believe was the sole beneficiary maybe of her parents' estate.

Speaker 4 While she was there for the service, she was accompanied by Daniel Blank.

Speaker 4 And I guess they had drawn some attention at the hotel because they were both wearing black and one of them was said to have been carrying a gun around the hotel grounds.

Speaker 4 So the hotel called the police and the police started surveilling them. And after a very short time, they went into Michelle Zajko's hotel room and searched it.

Speaker 4 And I think they searched your car, found something like $40,000 in cash. And they were like, we're just going to take you down to jail.
All this stuff is kind of mounting.

Speaker 4 We still think you might have killed your parents. We're going to take you in for questioning.
And she said something to the hotel person that was there, said, can you contact Daniel Blank?

Speaker 4 He's in another room here and tell him what's going on. And the police were like, I think we'd like to talk to him too.
Went and got a warrant.

Speaker 4 And then they went to Daniel Blank's room shortly after that.

Speaker 5 That's right. They detained him.

Speaker 5 They did not, were not able to keep them for very long. They were released pretty quickly.

Speaker 5 But we should mention, too, in addition to that 40 grand in cash, they also found several prepaid cell phones, which is a bit of a potential red flag as well in Michelle Zashko's car.

Speaker 5 And while they were arresting Blank, there was someone else in the room. They were lying on the floor.
They wouldn't move. They wouldn't speak.
And that was drumroll Ziz.

Speaker 5 So Ziz is getting around at this point.

Speaker 5 Police arrested Ziz on obstruction of justice, disorderly conduct, I guess, just for not, you know, complying, I guess, and getting off the floor and stuff like that.

Speaker 5 It was a misdemeanor charge, but they did hold her in jail. for five months instead of, or I guess in lieu of a $500,000 bail, which Ziz could not afford, obviously.

Speaker 5 And the judge said, all right, we're going to release you. You got to promise to pay $10,000 if you miss court.
She did return to court for that August hearing in a wheelchair pushed by her mom.

Speaker 5 But when the trial date came up of December of 2023, she did not show up.

Speaker 5 So I think that's probably a great place for our second break because the story is really heating up now.

Speaker 4 Sure is.

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Speaker 5 All right, so now we're going to find ourselves partially in North Carolina and back in Viejo and also back in Vermont. And we're going to introduce,

Speaker 5 what, I guess, three more people, Olivia Bacholt, Maximilian Snyder, Snyder, and Milo Youngblut.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so Ophelia Bachholt was German by birth, and she was described as naive, altruistic, and trusting by friends. She fell into Ziz's orbit, I think, by starting out reading her blog.

Speaker 4 She was trans, she was a math genius, and she was really, really interested in effective altruism.

Speaker 4 I think she made a couple hundred grand a year as a quant trader in New York and donated all but 10% of it to effective altruism causes.

Speaker 4 So she was very dedicated to this, but something about Ziz's philosophy grabbed her and she ended up leaving New York one day, cutting off all contact with everyone else in her former life and moving to North Carolina and essentially starting a new life in this orbit of Ziz.

Speaker 5 Yeah, so Maximilian Snyder was a data scientist, another super, super smart person. And Milo Youngblut

Speaker 5 went to an elite private school in Seattle with Maximilian Snyder, and they got together later on after that. And in May of 2024, Youngblut's parents said they're missing.

Speaker 5 I don't know where they went. They and Snyder applied for a marriage license together in November of 2024, which is November 5th, specifically, which is Guy Fawkes Night.

Speaker 5 And apparently they all got attracted to the Zizians just through online. They never met Ziz.
They never met Gwen Danielson. They never met any of the other rationalist fleet Zizians at all in person.

Speaker 4 Yes. That seems to be contested, from what I can tell, Chuck, that there's

Speaker 4 it's possible that there's evidence that they did meet them, but I don't know who said what or why, but that's yeah, that's a contested issue. So

Speaker 4 in January of 2025, Jungblut, Bachholt, they're in Vermont. They're a short distance away from Michelle Zajko's

Speaker 4 house. So

Speaker 4 shortly after the move where everybody was in

Speaker 4 Chapel Hill, Youngblut and Bachholt traveled to Vermont and they checked into a hotel that was not too far from Michelle Zajko's house.

Speaker 4 And I thought initially that they were there to kill Michelle Zajko, but I found that they had made contact with her enough that the police think that she bought them some guns or gave them some guns that she bought.

Speaker 4 I'm not exactly sure what they were doing in Vermont, but they were eventually, they fell under the radar of the Border Patrol who pulled them over near the Canadian border.

Speaker 4 And when that happened, they were pulled over, at the very least, Youngblut allegedly got out and just opened fire on the Border Patrol agents.

Speaker 5 Yeah, the Border Patrol said that Bachold attempted to draw a gun.

Speaker 5 They fired back. It's basically a firefight at this point.
And Bachholt and a Border Patrol agent named David Malland were both killed.

Speaker 5 Young Bloot was injured, arrested, obviously, on assault charges. Police found Hollow Point ammunition in their car, found those burner phones wrapped in foil.
They found full-face respirator mask.

Speaker 5 They found a night vision monocular. So it's sort of the mayhem starter kit in the car.

Speaker 4 Sure sounds like it, for sure. So, yeah, again, I'm not sure what they were doing in traveling from North Carolina to Vermont, but

Speaker 4 this was a big deal. And they killed a border patrol agent, especially when a pair of trans

Speaker 4 people dressed in all black just opened fire on a border patrol agent. It made national news.
And this is when people started to connect the dots. Not only did you have the attack of Curtis Lind,

Speaker 4 a couple years later, as everybody's starting to go to trial, Suri Dow and

Speaker 4 Alex Latham are moving toward trial. Curtis Lind is a star witness.

Speaker 4 I guess allegedly to shut him up, Maximilian Schneider shows up in Vallejo and murdered Curtis Lind before he could testify.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and this was just three days before this shootout in Vermont. So it's all really coming to a head very quickly and almost real time to where we are today.

Speaker 5 So on February 16th of this year, Three people dressed in all black, driving a couple of white box trucks,

Speaker 5 all of a sudden we're in Maryland. They went to to Maryland to a property owner and said, Hey, can we camp out here for a month? He did not take kindly to that, so he called the cops.

Speaker 5 And it turns out that was Daniel Blank, Ziz, and Michelle Zajko.

Speaker 5 And they arrested them initially on trespassing charges, but they found a bunch of guns in the trucks and said, Oh, wait, these are the three people that, like you said, they started really connecting the dots at this point in February.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and I couldn't find out what Michelle Zajko or Daniel Blank were wanted for, but Ziz was wanted for jumping bail for that court case in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 5 Well, they were arrested for trespassing.

Speaker 4 Yeah, but I don't know what they were wanted for already is what I'm saying. So that was February,

Speaker 4 as of May, late May, last month, a couple of weeks ago, a couple days ago, even you could say.

Speaker 4 Ziz, Michelle Zajko, and Daniel Blank. are all in jail in Maryland for trespassing.

Speaker 4 Latham, Dow, and Snyder are all in jail in California for the attack on Curtis Lynn and then the murder of Curtis Lynn.

Speaker 4 And then Youngblute is in Vermont for allegedly trying to draw a gun on the Border Patrol agents during a firefight where a Border Patrol agent was killed. So

Speaker 4 the Zizians are still like around, essentially. They still will say, like, we're not a cult.
We're not even called Zizians.

Speaker 4 But now there's more and more journalists who are starting to dig into it and putting together deeper and deeper profiles of this group and what was going on.

Speaker 4 But like you said, this is real time, man. This is, there's no resolution to this.

Speaker 4 This is where it stops because this is as far as it's gotten so far.

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 5 they're still writing. Apparently Daniel Schneider in jail is writing stuff to the rationalist group saying,

Speaker 5 hey, like you still need to focus on animal rights.

Speaker 5 And Michelle Zajko is writing, she wrote an open letter to the world that's in quotes, dated March 9th of this year, and where she was like, hey, I didn't kill my parents.

Speaker 5 Ziz hasn't done anything wrong. A lot of these people, like, I don't even know those other people.
I'm not with Maximilian Schneider. Like, I've never met these people.

Speaker 5 They're not, Zizians aren't a group, like Josh said. Well, she didn't say like Josh said.
That'd be kind of fun, though.

Speaker 5 But they're not even associated with us as a group that we don't refer to ourselves as Zizians.

Speaker 4 Right. So Alice Monday and Gwen Danielson are thought to be alive still.
Alice Monday, I saw, is thought to be in hiding, that she's very scared of Ziz and the Zizians, especially now.

Speaker 4 And then there's other people. There's people in the rationalist community who were willing to speak to journalists about this, but not like anonymously, because they're scared of the Zizians too.

Speaker 4 So it's still a thing. even though Ziz is in jail.

Speaker 4 And it's just a question of where it goes from here.

Speaker 4 But just to kind of wrap everything up, we'll go back to Half Moon Bay, where the Caleb was docked in the Berkeley Marina.

Speaker 4 And since the Zizians abandoned it, it has sunk in the marina, half sunk, and is a nuisance

Speaker 4 that you have to get around now.

Speaker 5 Poor Caleb.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Caleb's like, what did I ever do?

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 4 I just wanted to help people. I'm a born tugboat.

Speaker 5 I know.

Speaker 4 If you want to know more about this stuff, go look it up. There's a lot of stuff to read.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 just keep an eye on the news. We definitely will be too.
And since I said that, I think it's time for listener mail, Chuck.

Speaker 5 This is from James. Hey, guys.
I'm fascinated that terms we take for granted often come from slurs meant to suppress, and in some cases, similar slurs.

Speaker 5 I love knowing that pagan came from a word that, as Chuck puts it, means bumpkin. It was meant to belittle and diminish, and now it covers a huge chunk of the faith pie.

Speaker 5 I was reminded of the word jaywalking. I feel like we've talked about this in something.

Speaker 4 Maybe.

Speaker 5 The origins of jaywalking?

Speaker 4 Maybe? Maybe.

Speaker 5 As cars became a thing and started driving with some velocity in the places where people were used to walking, big car had to make sure they weren't the bad guy.

Speaker 5 They had to rewrite convention and get people,

Speaker 5 pedestrians specifically, off the road. So what did they do? Slurs, obviously.

Speaker 5 If I remember correctly, J, like Paganus, meant an uneducated country folk too stupid not to walk in the road like a dingus.

Speaker 5 This word must have worked because now it is a legal term to describe the act of crossing the street at a non-crosswalk. Big car won, Constantine won.

Speaker 5 Thanks for the potting, guys, and for filling my brain with stuff. That is James.

Speaker 4 Thanks a lot, James. That's a good one.
And I think you jogged my memory to an episode about like how cars became the dominant mode of transportation in the U.S.

Speaker 5 Sounds like that might have been the one. I think that was.

Speaker 4 That was a good one. That was a sleeper episode.

Speaker 5 Agreed.

Speaker 4 If you want to be like James and send us an interesting email that we may or may not read on the air, but we'd still like to receive anyway, you can send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

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