June 19, 2025 • 42 mins
The story of the Zizians is an unusual one. Are they a cult? Or are they simply a group who wants a better world? And why have six deaths in three states been linked to them?
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
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. This is I guess, a timely topical true
crime edition The Three.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
T's CooA Alert. Yeah, I feel I should sound the
clacks on on this one. Yeah, we'reishing a CoA on
this one, A pretty a pretty robust one because a
this is something we don't do a lot, which is
tackle true crime and almost real time. As far as
(00:42):
the fact that none of this is settled, the alleged crimes,
We're probably gonna say alleged a lot because there's not
even been court dates a lot of times for some
of these cases where we're you know, we're talking about
potentially six murders in three states by a group that
may or may not have done it, that may or
may not be a cult. So just a big CoA there.
(01:06):
This is one of the true crimes where like neither
one of us are going to be like, well, here's
my theory on this, because just who knows, this has
got to play out first, And the other big CoA
is a lot of the sort of a disproportionate amount
of members of the Zizians who are going to be
talking about are members of the trans community, and it's
just one of the sort of facts of the case.
(01:27):
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 this group of people who got together.
So just kind of keep all that in mind as
we lay all this out there.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Right, Nice word, Chuck, Thanks for that. Yeah, So, like
you said, we're talking about the Zizzi and how do
you hear about this?
Speaker 1 (01:47):
This is your pick, you know what. I have no
idea and even went to look to see if somebody
has suggested it, and no one had. I think I
might have just seen a news story and been like,
wait a minute, this is this is something that hasn't
been attend Netflix series yet, right, so it must be
super super current, which it is.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
My theory is that the Grey Gazoo said doe on
the Zizian's dome dome, and you were like, I should
do one on the Zizzians.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yeah, thanks for bringing a joke into this thing.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
So the Zizians are called such because they center around
zizz a trans woman who is often portrayed as the
leader of this cult, And I mean you can make
a pretty fair case that at the very least she's
the leader of the most influential member, because the whole
thing's named after her. Although we should say that this
(02:38):
group of people do not call themselves the Zizians. That
was a name that was given to them by somebody
who's critical of them, an anonymous person who's critical of them.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
But Zizz herself, we know, was born in nineteen ninety
one in Fairbanks, Alaska, And like the other people that
she attracts into her orbit, she was brilliant, I mean,
very precocious as far as like working on computers goes,
as far as mathematics goes. I think by the time
she was at the University of Fairbanks in Alaska, she
(03:11):
had internships at both Oracles, the cloud computing company, and NASA.
So I mean, like she had pretty pretty great resume,
I guess is what you'd say if you're on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
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. 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. And one of
(03:43):
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. Let's not get set in
our way of thinking about anything. Let's always revise what
we're thinking about everything. And one of the key people here,
one of the names you'll heal early and then later on,
(04:05):
as a guy named Eliezer Yukowski, who is an AI
researcher who is kind of doing something different than what
a lot of AI researchers are doing, and 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 3 (04:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
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. Yeah, 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
(04:46):
first and we're going to lose out, and there's so
much money to be made off of AI. And Eliezer
Yukowski is a very very interesting duties self taught AI researcher,
incredibly brilliant 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
(05:09):
Nate Sores, one of his collaborators. It's called If Anyone
Builds It, Everyone Dies, and it's about AI, and from
what I understand, he's thrown in the towel. He's basically said,
it's too late. We are not going to be able
to create a friendly AI because not enough people are
working on it, and it's about to happen any day now,
(05:31):
with super intelligent AI is going to come out, and
so we have to figure out how to let humanity
die off in the most dignified manner is how I
saw it described.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Right, which doesn't have a whole lot to do with
the Zizzians, but that just sets up kind of who
this guy is. In two thousand and nine, he founded
a blog called less Wrong, as in let's do less wrong,
and I mean, I assume that's what it means.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
It means so it's about overcoming your biases like you
want to be last wrong kind of it's all about
thinking clearly and not letting your bias as guide your thinking.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
I think.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
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, and he founded a couple of Berkeley, California
based organizations that'll come into play. The Machine Intelligence Research
(06:28):
Institute or MARY and again that's about, you know, minimizing
the risks of AI. And then the Center for Applied
Rationality or SEE FAR 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 right.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
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 in an episode on that if
I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
We did my friend.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
All of this attracted Ziz to move from Alaska down
to the Bay Area in San Francisco, and she got
involved with Seefar, got involved with Miry, and dedicated herself
also to trying to figure out this AI alignment problem too.
And the thing about this rationalist community is they are
(07:24):
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, 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 the average
(07:45):
normy 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 were 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 1 (08:03):
Yeah, or at the very least on some of the
radical fringes of whatever movement that they're in. Zizz is
one of those people and was 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,
like hey we got a you know, sort of a
twelve Monkeys kind of stuff, like, hey, we got to
(08:25):
do whatever it takes. 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, then
that's what we should do. Sometimes she calls herself a scyth,
as in you know, Star Wars, And apparently the name
Zizz comes from a speculative fiction story called Worm that
(08:46):
a lot of rationalists love, in which Ziz and the
story is a villainous entity that if they listened to
for too long, you will go crazy. And so Zizz
is all of a sudden hanging around the Bay Area,
go into these rationalists of hangouts and meetings, wearing black robes,
as in sort of dressed like a syth.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
So all this is what around twenty sixteen seventeen, that
this is all starting, that Ziz is showing up. And again,
like I said, this community is very open. So even
though Ziz would show up wearing black robes declaring herself
as Sith Lord and that that's her religion as Sith.
But despite that community being open she still stood out,
(09:26):
not necessarily because she wore black robes and call herself
a scyth, but more because she was more intensely devoted
and dedicated 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,
and this would actually end up separating her from the
(09:47):
rationalist community eventually, and that you can kind of make
a case, it seems like, is the initial schism that
causes WEDGE that led to all the events that would follow.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yeah, like basically, hey, you're you're trying to protect human life,
Like what about the animals? Like every sentient animal is
a person. Uh, and that this is these are Zizzus words. Uh,
and you know, so we gotta we gotta kick up
the the intensity on the animal front as well.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
The problem with all of this is that this was
around San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where it's really really
expensive to live. And uh, if you're someone like ziz
You're 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,
and this is when Ziz meets up with somebody named
(10:38):
Gwen Danielson. Had a lot in common, another rationalist, another
trans woman, another person who is very much into animal rights.
And Gwen happened to live on a sailboat in Berkeley
Marina and said, Hey, this is a much cheaper rent here.
Why don't you just come and live on this boat
with me. I'm also into math, I'm also into science,
and I'm also have some pretty radical ideas about stuff.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Yeah, And so the point of this was if you,
and this is Zizz's belief, if you could free yourself
from things like paying rent, especially the high rent of
San Francisco, and keep your cost 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 Sea Far and Miri into protecting animal rights too,
(11:23):
like just thinking and learning to think better. That was
kind of the point. And so I think zizs initially
moved into the sailboat with Gwen Danielson, found that they
were not quite exactly compatible roommate wise, but still friends,
and so Ziz bought her own sailboat and docted it
the same marina in Berkeley, and they became what was
(11:46):
called the Rationalist Fleet. This 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 seventies or eighties
maybe not. They not a good age for a tug boat,
and they actually bought it from Alaska and tugged it
(12:07):
down or sailed it down all the way to San Francisco.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
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, Cabb like you said, it
was an old boat, an old World War Two era
tug boat. So it wasn't like, you know, even like
a a mid seventies houseboat would have been a better option.
Probably this thing they couldn't. They had a hard time
(12:32):
anchoring it, 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, I'm going to say that a lot through
me parking a lot of things as this jumps around
is at this point we have to introduce some new
characters to the scene. Again, had a lot in common
(12:53):
with Ziz and Gwynn in that they were very very smart,
very much into math and science, were trends, and some
were non binary. And the first player here is someone
named Emma Buranian, a programmer worked at Google, but left
Google because they thought the company was corrupt.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yes, and we should say these people fell into this's
orbit because this 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. And these were the people that she
ended up attracting through her blog. There's a really great
(13:35):
Guardian article about all of this written by Alliver Conroy,
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 forty eight pages long. So like, she had a
(13:56):
certain thing going on that attracted a certain kind of
person and these were the people who were falling into
their into her orbit at this time. And we should
also say all of these people were in their early
to mid twenties. I think Ziz was the oldest maybe
at the time at twenty six. So they were all disaffected, brilliant,
(14:17):
often trans vegan twenty somethings who were living very close
to homelessness in San Francisco in the late twenty teams.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Yeah. So the second person was Alex Leatham, occasionally known
as Somny, a mathematician in this case, went to the
UCLA studied at UC Berkeley as well. Then we have
Michelle Zashko, biometrics researcher and other smarty pants. And then
someone named Alice Munday who was Zashko's girlfriend and a
(14:50):
bit of a mentor apparently according to Ziz to Ziz
and they started sort of just getting together talking about
their ideas. They came up with a name for one
of their theories or sort of their overarching theory called
vegan and our cotranshumanism. And Gwynn Danielson developed this idea
that the hemispheres of the brain were basically separate and
(15:13):
they could operate independently from one another. You can be
different genders at the same time. You can be good
and evil, or good or evil at the same time,
and they started these experiments called una hemispheric 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. And we say this because
(15:34):
there are people that have accused Ziz and others in
the group of basically keeping you sleep deprived through these experiments,
potentially leading to a couple of suicides that we'll talk about.
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
(15:55):
a very big hallmark of something that oftentimes happens.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Yeah, that's like chapter two in the cult Leader's playbook. Yeah,
we should say also that un a hemispheric sleep theoretically
as possible. Humans don't do it, but dolphins do, whales do,
migratory birds do. So it sound like it just doesn't exist.
It's humans trying to figure out how to do it
themselves so they could think longer, more hours in a
day essentially.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Yeah, so this group is getting a little more upset
and aggressive toward the official rationalist movement and community. They
think again that Marie and see Far, you're not doing
enough for the animals. You need to expand your I
guess viewpoint on sentient beings and what that means. And
(16:40):
you're also biased against trans people.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Yeah, and there was another thing too that Ziz got
really upset about. She came to believe that Marie paid
off a blackmailer. 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 to go away. Some people call it a settlement.
(17:02):
To Zizz, it was a blackmail paying off a blackmailer
and that you just did not do that. That violated
some of the basic tenets of the rationalist community and
the way of solving problems that they use. So that
with the ethical veganism combined, really separated her from this
rationalist community. And with this growing group around her, they
(17:24):
decided that they were going to show up go to
the Seafar seminar conference that was being held in twenty nineteen,
and they were going to present their problems and their
issues in a very rational way, just like Seefhar would
want them to. And the people who organized see Far
were like, you guys, are way too aggressive for our tastes.
(17:47):
You can't come to this seafar retreat.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
And one of them said, you've got a Nazi in there.
So four of them ziz Gwen Danielson, Emma Baranian and
and it gets a little confusing with a lot of names,
and Alex Leatham. They went anyway, and they had their
guy Fawkes masks on and they had their black hooded
robes on. They blocked the exits with their vehicles and
(18:11):
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. They called
in a report of a possible active shooter and the
cops came. They did not have arms on them or
anything like that, but they were arrested on charges of
false imprisonment and child endangement because there were kids there.
It was a campground where they met north of San Francisco,
(18:34):
and the defendants, we should point out, the four of
them did end up filing a suit against the police
alleging mistreatment.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
Yeah, so the rationalist community is like, that's it. Not
only can you not come to see fire retreats, you
can't even hang out on the Less Wrong blog. You
can't come to our cocktail meetups that we have, which
are a lot of fun, So you're probably going to
be upset. They just got booted out. So now this
(19:01):
wedge was a gulf. It was a break in communication
between the group that would come to be known as
Sisians and the rationalist community. 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
(19:23):
were feeding off one another. In this isolated situation, there
weren't people on the outside coming and be like, whoa's
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 1 (19:37):
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, and when
we come back, we're gonna pick up with part two
a little north of San Francisco in Ballejo, California.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
Stop you know, stop stop, shouldn't know no, stop you.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Know, So, Chuck. One of the outcomes of being like
pushed out of the rationalist community. Somebody launched a website
called zizians dot info, still around today, 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. And two of the things
(20:38):
are something you referenced earlier. There were two suicides by
people who were said to have gone through this uni
hemispheric sleep I guess boot camp and it resulted in
their their suicides allegedly, So the Zizzians just have a
really bad name. At this point, the marine thing is
(21:01):
not working out, the rationalist fleet is kind of sinking,
as it were, and they just happened to meet somebody
at the marina named Curtis Lynde who is a seventy
something guy who loved people, loved artists, and had a
bunch of land down in Vallejo, 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
(21:22):
there for really cheap rent? And the Zizzians were like, heck, yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
All right. So Curtis Lynn offers you know them, the
chance to go live you know, they paid rent, but
I don't imagine it was very much. And in this
you know, we're going to be introduced to some more
players at this point. One of the members of the
group that had joined up at this time, her name
was Suri Dow and she was fresh out of high
(21:46):
school and a leftist blogger and just sort of put
a pin in this. 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
two twenty people at this time on Curtis Lend's property.
The neighbors get a little freaked out. They're like, hey,
(22:07):
they're walking around naked. Sometimes they're wearing gas masks. Lend
eventually it was like, you guys aren't even paying rent anymore,
and they said, yeah, well there's a COVID eviction moratorium,
so what are you going to do about it? So
everything just starts going really pear shaped, as you say,
in like twenty twenty two.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Yeah, I also check. 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, and there's twenty of them. It would be hard,
especially in the context of California, to not be like,
I think they might be a cult.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Good point.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
So in twenty twenty two, like you said, things just
really start to take a terrible shape. In August, Zizz's
sister and Emma Baranian went to the police and said,
our friend Zizz fell over while boating. So Ziz died
during in a boating accident. The Coastguard launched a search,
and I guess after eighteen hours they said there's no
(23:04):
way that she could have survived, and she was. Although
they didn't have the body, they still declared her legally
dead and her sister was given a death certificate. And
around the same time, Gwen Danielson, who was one of
the og members of this whole group, she died by
suicide too. So this group is just rocked by these
(23:24):
two deaths in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
That's right. So while this is happening, it's kind of
at the same time, this COVID eviction moratorium runs out,
So Curtis Lynde is like, all right, now I can
actually get these people off my property. Finally, probably like
this November. Two days before he was able to do
that and sort of drop the news that they were
out of there, Surrie dal called him in and said, Hey,
(23:51):
there's a water leak on my property here or in
my trailer. You got to come and check this out.
Curtis Lynde says, I went to address the issue with
a water and I was assaulted. They hit me over
the head, They stabbed me with knives, They stabbed me
with a katana, the samurai sword. He ended up losing
an eye. He was stabbed through the chest. Apparently he
(24:12):
alleges that Alex Leatham was the one who stabbed him
through the chest, and so he shot Letham and Emma
Baranian and killed her dead. If you ask the Zizians
that were there, they said, no, that's not what happened.
He'd been harassing us and he just opened fire on
us one day.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
So the authorities tended to agree or believe Curtis Lynde,
and in fact, Leatham and Dow were arrested, charged with
attempted murder and then also charged with the death of
Emma Baranian because apparently in California law, if you do
something that causes the death of somebody else, even incidentally,
(24:50):
you are responsible or you can be held responsible for
that death. And the thinking was that Curtis Lynn had
to kill Emma Baranian because of the actions of dow
In Lethum. Right, right, So now Surrey dal and Alex
Leatham are in jail in California. That's where they are.
So just park that, like you said.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
That's right. So police took another member of the group
at the time. She gave her name as Julia Dawson.
He said, come down the station with us. We got
to question you. At the station. She seemed like she
was having a medical emergency, so like, well, we got
to get her to the hospital. Stat took her to
the hospital and she disappeared from the hospital. Detective started
(25:34):
investigating what happened there and they said, oh, you know
who that was. That was Zizzzz is not dead at all.
And they also determined guess who else was there, Gwynn Danielson.
She's actually alive as well.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Yeah, so if you've heard our Faking your death episode,
this is a 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 an unsettling find after
Curtis Lynde was attacked, they found a that of lie
(26:13):
that suggested that they intended to kill him and that
they were going to dissolve his body in it. So
it's starting to become clear like these people are no joke.
But at the time this was like an isolated incident.
It wasn't related to anything else. The authorities did not
know that this was a group known as the Zizzians
(26:33):
or anything like that. There were pieces that were starting
to lay out on the table, but no one had
put them together yet.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Yeah, exactly, all right, tonight you can park all of
that because we're going to move once again across the country.
This time Pennsylvania is going to come into the picture
in twenty twenty one. So this is, you know, a
little bit before these events. Michelle Zashko that we mentioned
in Alice Munday, who were girlfriends with each other. They
moved from California to Vermont to northern Vermont, pretty rural area,
(27:03):
and they were joined by gut named Daniel Blank, another
like minded person. He went to UC Berkeley Bioengineering and
Electrical Engineering co degree and then worked at startups, and
he was also a vegan and started to sort of
get a little more radical about it. It got distance
from his parents, started judging them for eating meat, and
(27:25):
he hooks up with Monday and Zashko and Vermont.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Yeah, and so by this time, I think, I don't
know if you said it or not. I think you did.
Ziz had credited Alice Monday as being like her mentor
y 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. By this time, though, she considered Alice Monday
(27:52):
an enemy, what she called the vampire. And I guess
Zajko was by association, guilt by association, and from what
I could tell, they Alice Monday became her enemy because
she and maybe Zajka were warning people away from Ziz,
saying like, you need to steer clear of this person.
(28:13):
So Ziz considered the enemies, and she contacted Zojkoh and said, hey,
if you want to earn my trust, back. You need
to murder Alice, and if you don't, I'm going to
come to Vermont and murder you. And this was the
kind of a precarious situation as far as Zajko was concerned.
Michelle Zozko was concerned because this really, I think, kind
(28:35):
of gets a lot across. She was like, I really
had to kind of decide, you know, did I want
to murder Alice to make this happy or should I
kill Ziz? This is the position that Ziz was putting
people in by this time.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
Allegedly, Yeah, should we just have Jerry drop in the
word allegedly like just every forty seconds allegedly Beijing, mister Herman,
I know I promised Pennsylvania and we've been in Vermont
for a second here, But here's where Pennsylvania comes into play.
In December thirty, first last day of the year according
to Many in twenty twenty two, this is about a
(29:10):
month and a half after Curtis Lynde was stabbed and
after that all occurred in Viejo, So Michelle Zosco's parents,
Richard and Rita, were murdered in Pennsylvania. 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 and
(29:32):
then a few seconds later, oh my god, Oh god, god,
and the parents of Michelle Zoshko were found shot in
the head, kind of execution style, in their bedroom.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Yeah, so the Pennsylvania State troopers wanted to go visit
Michelle Zagec in Vermont, and she's like, I haven't been
to Pennsylvania in almost twenty years, or more than twenty years,
and I haven't talked to my parents in a year,
so it's not me. I don't know who killed them.
And in fact, she showed up to a graveside service
a couple of weeks later, and I believe was the
(30:05):
sole beneficiary maybe of her parents' estate. While she was
there for the service, she was accompanied by Daniel Blank
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. So the hotel called the police, and
the police started surveilling them, and after a very short time,
(30:27):
they went into Michelle's Ajco's hotel room and searched it,
and I think they searched your car found something like
forty thousand dollars in cash, and they were like, we're
just gonna take you down to jail. All this stuff
is kind of mounting. 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,
(30:49):
can you contact Daniel Blank, 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 and then they went to Daniel
Blank's room shortly after that.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
That's right, they detained him. They did not were not
able to keep them for very long. They were released
pretty quickly. But we should mention too. In addition to
that forty 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. And while they
were arresting Blank, there was someone else in the room.
(31:23):
They were lying on the floor, they wouldn't move, they
wouldn't speak, and that was drum roll zizz. So this
is getting around. At this point, 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. It was a misdemeanor charge, but
they did hold her in jail for five months instead
(31:46):
of I guess, in lieu of a five hundred thousand
dollars bail, which could not afford obviously, and the judge said,
all right, we're going to release you. You got to
promise to pay ten grand if you miss court. She
did return to court for that August hearing in a
wheelchair pushed by her mom, but when the trial date
came up of December of twenty twenty three, she did
not show up. So I think that's probably a great
(32:09):
place for our second break because the story is really
heating up. Now there is.
Speaker 3 (32:31):
Stop you know, stop, stop stopping. He shouldn't know, no, stop,
you know.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
All right, So now we're gonna find ourselves partially in
North Carolina and back in Viejo and also back in Vermont,
and we're gonna introduce what I guess, three more people,
Olivia Bachholt, Maximilian Snyder, and my Milo Young Blute.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Yeah. So Ophelia Bachholt was German by birth, and she
was described as naive, altruistic, and trusting by friends. She
fell into Zizz's orbit. I think by starting out reading
her blog, she was trans she was a math genius,
and she was really really interested in effective altruism. I
(33:18):
think she made a couple hundred grand a year as
a quant trader in New York and donated all but
ten percent of it to effective altruism causes. So she
was very dedicated to this. But something about Zizz's philosophy
grabbed her and she ended up leaving New York one day,
cutting off all contact with everyone else in her former life,
(33:40):
and moving to North Carolina and essentially starting a new
life in this orbit of Zizz.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Yeah. So Maximilian Snyder was a data scientist, another super
super smart person, and Milo Youngblute went to an elite
private school in Seattle with Maximilian Snyder and they got
together later on after that at and in May of
twenty twenty four, young Blute's parents said they're they're missing.
(34:06):
I don't know where they went. They and Snyder applied
for a marriage license together in November of twenty twenty four,
which is November fifth, specifically, which is Guy faux Knight,
And apparently they all got attracted to the Zizians just
through online. They never met Zizz, they never met Gwyn Danielson,
they never met any of the other Rationalists fleet Zizians
(34:26):
at all in person.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
Yes, that seems to be contested from what I can tell,
Chuck that there's 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
in January of twenty twenty five, Young Bachholt, they're in Vermont.
(34:48):
They're a short distance away from michelle 'sageko's house. So
shortly after the move where everybody was in to Hill,
Young Blute and Bachholt traveled to Vermont and they checked
into a hotel that was not too far from Michelle's
(35:08):
Ashcoh's house. And I thought initially that they were there
to kill Michelle's ashco 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. I'm not exactly sure what they were
doing in Vermont, but they were Eventually they fell under
(35:29):
the radar of the border patrol who pulled them over
near the Canadian border. And when that happened, they were
pulled over. At the very least, young Blute allegedly got
out and just opened fire on the border patrol agents.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Yeah, the Border patrol said that bachhold attempted to draw
a gun. They fired back. It's basically a firefight at
this point, and Bachholdt and a Border patrol agent named
David Malland were both killed. Young Blute was injured arrested
obviously on assault charges. Police found hollow point ammunition in
their car, found those burner phones wrapped in foil. They
(36:09):
found full face respirator mask. They found a night vision monocular,
so sort of the Mayhem starter kit in the car.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
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 this was a big deal and
they killed the border patrol agent. Especially when a pair
of trans people dressed in all black just open fire
on a border patrol agent and made national news. And
(36:37):
this is when people started to connect the dots. Not
only did you have the attack of Curtis lind A.
Couple of years later, as everybody is starting to go
to trial, Surrey Dow and Alex Leatham are moving toward trial.
Curtis Lynde is a star witness, I guess, allegedly, to
(36:57):
shut him up, Maximilian Schneider showed up in Viejo and
murdered Curtis Linn before he could testify.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
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.
So on February sixteenth of this year, three people dressed
in all black driving a couple of white box trucks
all all of a sudden, we're in Maryland. They went
to Maryland to a property owner and said, hey, can
(37:26):
we camp out here for a month. He did not
take kindly of that, so we called the cops and
it turns out that was Daniel Blank, Zizz and Michelle Zajko,
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 there. Like you said.
They started really connecting the dots at this point, in February.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Yeah, and I couldn't find out what Michelle Zosco or
Daniel Blank were wanted for. But Zizz was wanted for
jumping bail for that court case in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Well they're arrested for trespassing.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
Yeah, but I don't know what they were wanted for already,
is what I'm saying. So that was February as of May,
late May, last month, a couple of weeks ago, a
couple of days ago, even you could say Zizz, Michelle's Ageko,
and Daniel Blank are all in jail and Maryland for trespassing. Leatham,
(38:22):
Dow and Snyder are all in jail in California for
the attack on Curtis lnd and then the murder of
Curtis lind And then Young Blute 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 the the Zizians are still like around essentially, they
(38:46):
still will say like, we're not a cult, we're not
even called Zizians. 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. But like you said, this is real time, man,
this is there's no resolution to this. This, this is
this is where it stops, because this is as far
as it's gotten so far.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
Yeah, they're still writing, apparently, Daniel Schnyder in jail is
writing stuff to the Rationalist group saying, hey, like you
still need to focus on animal rights. And Michelle Zashko
is writing. She wrote an open letter to the world
that's in quotes stated March ninth of this year and
(39:27):
where she was like, hey, I didn't kill my parents,
zizz hasn't done anything wrong. A lot of these people,
like I don't even know those other people I'm not
with Maximilian Snyder, Like, I've never met these people. They're
not Zizians. Aren't a group like Josh said, Well, she
didn't say Josh said that'd be kind of fun though,
But they're not even associated with us as a group
(39:47):
that we don't refer to ourselves as Zizzian's right.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
So, Alice Monday and Gwen Danielson thought to be alive. Still.
Alice Monday, I saw is thought to be in hiding
that she's very scared of Zizz and the Zizians, especially now.
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.
(40:14):
So it's still a thing, even though Zizz is in jail,
and it's just a question of where it goes from here.
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, and since the Zizian's abandoned it,
it has sunk in the marina half sunk and is
(40:37):
a nuisance to that. You have to get.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Around now, poor Caleb.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Yeah, Caleb's like, what did I ever do? Yeah, I
just wanted to help people. I'm a born tug boat
I know.
Speaker 3 (40:49):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
If you want to know more about this stuff, go
look it up. There's a lot of stuff to read,
and uh, just keep an eye on the news. We
definitely will be too. Since I said that, I think
it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
Chuck.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
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. I love knowing
that pagan came from a word that a chuck puts.
It means bumpkin. It was meant to belittle, indiminish, and
now it covers a huge chunk of the faith pie.
I was reminded of the word jaywalking. I feel like
(41:25):
we've talked about this in something, maybe the origins of jaywalking.
Maybe maybe 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. They had to rewrite convention and get
people pedestrians specifically off the road. So what did they do? Slurs? Obviously,
(41:46):
if I remember correctly, jay like paganas meant an uneducated
country folk too stupid not to walk in the road
like a dingus. This word must have worked because now
it is a legal term to describe the act of
crossing the street at a non crosswalk. Constantine one. Thanks
for the potting guys and fulfilling my brain with stuff
that is James.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Thanks a lot, James. That's a good one. And think
you jogged my memory to an episode about like how
cars became the dominant mode of transportation in the US.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
Sounds like that might have been the one.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
I think that that was a good one. That was
a sleeper episode.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Agreed.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
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 Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
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. This is I guess, a timely topical true
crime edition The Three.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
T's CooA Alert. Yeah, I feel I should sound the
clacks on on this one. Yeah, we'reishing a CoA on
this one, A pretty a pretty robust one because a
this is something we don't do a lot, which is
tackle true crime and almost real time. As far as
(00:42):
the fact that none of this is settled, the alleged crimes,
We're probably gonna say alleged a lot because there's not
even been court dates a lot of times for some
of these cases where we're you know, we're talking about
potentially six murders in three states by a group that
may or may not have done it, that may or
may not be a cult. So just a big CoA there.
(01:06):
This is one of the true crimes where like neither
one of us are going to be like, well, here's
my theory on this, because just who knows, this has
got to play out first, And the other big CoA
is a lot of the sort of a disproportionate amount
of members of the Zizians who are going to be
talking about are members of the trans community, and it's
just one of the sort of facts of the case.
(01:27):
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 this group of people who got together.
So just kind of keep all that in mind as
we lay all this out there.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Right, Nice word, Chuck, Thanks for that. Yeah, So, like
you said, we're talking about the Zizzi and how do
you hear about this?
Speaker 1 (01:47):
This is your pick, you know what. I have no
idea and even went to look to see if somebody
has suggested it, and no one had. I think I
might have just seen a news story and been like,
wait a minute, this is this is something that hasn't
been attend Netflix series yet, right, so it must be
super super current, which it is.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
My theory is that the Grey Gazoo said doe on
the Zizian's dome dome, and you were like, I should
do one on the Zizzians.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yeah, thanks for bringing a joke into this thing.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
So the Zizians are called such because they center around
zizz a trans woman who is often portrayed as the
leader of this cult, And I mean you can make
a pretty fair case that at the very least she's
the leader of the most influential member, because the whole
thing's named after her. Although we should say that this
(02:38):
group of people do not call themselves the Zizians. That
was a name that was given to them by somebody
who's critical of them, an anonymous person who's critical of them.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
But Zizz herself, we know, was born in nineteen ninety
one in Fairbanks, Alaska, And like the other people that
she attracts into her orbit, she was brilliant, I mean,
very precocious as far as like working on computers goes,
as far as mathematics goes. I think by the time
she was at the University of Fairbanks in Alaska, she
(03:11):
had internships at both Oracles, the cloud computing company, and NASA.
So I mean, like she had pretty pretty great resume,
I guess is what you'd say if you're on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
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. 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. And one of
(03:43):
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. Let's not get set in
our way of thinking about anything. Let's always revise what
we're thinking about everything. And one of the key people here,
one of the names you'll heal early and then later on,
(04:05):
as a guy named Eliezer Yukowski, who is an AI
researcher who is kind of doing something different than what
a lot of AI researchers are doing, and 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 3 (04:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
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. Yeah, 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
(04:46):
first and we're going to lose out, and there's so
much money to be made off of AI. And Eliezer
Yukowski is a very very interesting duties self taught AI researcher,
incredibly brilliant 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
(05:09):
Nate Sores, one of his collaborators. It's called If Anyone
Builds It, Everyone Dies, and it's about AI, and from
what I understand, he's thrown in the towel. He's basically said,
it's too late. We are not going to be able
to create a friendly AI because not enough people are
working on it, and it's about to happen any day now,
(05:31):
with super intelligent AI is going to come out, and
so we have to figure out how to let humanity
die off in the most dignified manner is how I
saw it described.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Right, which doesn't have a whole lot to do with
the Zizzians, but that just sets up kind of who
this guy is. In two thousand and nine, he founded
a blog called less Wrong, as in let's do less wrong,
and I mean, I assume that's what it means.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
It means so it's about overcoming your biases like you
want to be last wrong kind of it's all about
thinking clearly and not letting your bias as guide your thinking.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
I think.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
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, and he founded a couple of Berkeley, California
based organizations that'll come into play. The Machine Intelligence Research
(06:28):
Institute or MARY and again that's about, you know, minimizing
the risks of AI. And then the Center for Applied
Rationality or SEE FAR 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 right.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
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 in an episode on that if
I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
We did my friend.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
All of this attracted Ziz to move from Alaska down
to the Bay Area in San Francisco, and she got
involved with Seefar, got involved with Miry, and dedicated herself
also to trying to figure out this AI alignment problem too.
And the thing about this rationalist community is they are
(07:24):
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, 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 the average
(07:45):
normy 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 were 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 1 (08:03):
Yeah, or at the very least on some of the
radical fringes of whatever movement that they're in. Zizz is
one of those people and was 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,
like hey we got a you know, sort of a
twelve Monkeys kind of stuff, like, hey, we got to
(08:25):
do whatever it takes. 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, then
that's what we should do. Sometimes she calls herself a scyth,
as in you know, Star Wars, And apparently the name
Zizz comes from a speculative fiction story called Worm that
(08:46):
a lot of rationalists love, in which Ziz and the
story is a villainous entity that if they listened to
for too long, you will go crazy. And so Zizz
is all of a sudden hanging around the Bay Area,
go into these rationalists of hangouts and meetings, wearing black robes,
as in sort of dressed like a syth.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
So all this is what around twenty sixteen seventeen, that
this is all starting, that Ziz is showing up. And again,
like I said, this community is very open. So even
though Ziz would show up wearing black robes declaring herself
as Sith Lord and that that's her religion as Sith.
But despite that community being open she still stood out,
(09:26):
not necessarily because she wore black robes and call herself
a scyth, but more because she was more intensely devoted
and dedicated 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,
and this would actually end up separating her from the
(09:47):
rationalist community eventually, and that you can kind of make
a case, it seems like, is the initial schism that
causes WEDGE that led to all the events that would follow.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yeah, like basically, hey, you're you're trying to protect human life,
Like what about the animals? Like every sentient animal is
a person. Uh, and that this is these are Zizzus words. Uh,
and you know, so we gotta we gotta kick up
the the intensity on the animal front as well.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
The problem with all of this is that this was
around San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where it's really really
expensive to live. And uh, if you're someone like ziz
You're 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,
and this is when Ziz meets up with somebody named
(10:38):
Gwen Danielson. Had a lot in common, another rationalist, another
trans woman, another person who is very much into animal rights.
And Gwen happened to live on a sailboat in Berkeley
Marina and said, Hey, this is a much cheaper rent here.
Why don't you just come and live on this boat
with me. I'm also into math, I'm also into science,
and I'm also have some pretty radical ideas about stuff.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Yeah, And so the point of this was if you,
and this is Zizz's belief, if you could free yourself
from things like paying rent, especially the high rent of
San Francisco, and keep your cost 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 Sea Far and Miri into protecting animal rights too,
(11:23):
like just thinking and learning to think better. That was
kind of the point. And so I think zizs initially
moved into the sailboat with Gwen Danielson, found that they
were not quite exactly compatible roommate wise, but still friends,
and so Ziz bought her own sailboat and docted it
the same marina in Berkeley, and they became what was
(11:46):
called the Rationalist Fleet. This 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 seventies or eighties
maybe not. They not a good age for a tug boat,
and they actually bought it from Alaska and tugged it
(12:07):
down or sailed it down all the way to San Francisco.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
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, Cabb like you said, it
was an old boat, an old World War Two era
tug boat. So it wasn't like, you know, even like
a a mid seventies houseboat would have been a better option.
Probably this thing they couldn't. They had a hard time
(12:32):
anchoring it, 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, I'm going to say that a lot through
me parking a lot of things as this jumps around
is at this point we have to introduce some new
characters to the scene. Again, had a lot in common
(12:53):
with Ziz and Gwynn in that they were very very smart,
very much into math and science, were trends, and some
were non binary. And the first player here is someone
named Emma Buranian, a programmer worked at Google, but left
Google because they thought the company was corrupt.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yes, and we should say these people fell into this's
orbit because this 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. And these were the people that she
ended up attracting through her blog. There's a really great
(13:35):
Guardian article about all of this written by Alliver Conroy,
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 forty eight pages long. So like, she had a
(13:56):
certain thing going on that attracted a certain kind of
person and these were the people who were falling into
their into her orbit at this time. And we should
also say all of these people were in their early
to mid twenties. I think Ziz was the oldest maybe
at the time at twenty six. So they were all disaffected, brilliant,
(14:17):
often trans vegan twenty somethings who were living very close
to homelessness in San Francisco in the late twenty teams.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Yeah. So the second person was Alex Leatham, occasionally known
as Somny, a mathematician in this case, went to the
UCLA studied at UC Berkeley as well. Then we have
Michelle Zashko, biometrics researcher and other smarty pants. And then
someone named Alice Munday who was Zashko's girlfriend and a
(14:50):
bit of a mentor apparently according to Ziz to Ziz
and they started sort of just getting together talking about
their ideas. They came up with a name for one
of their theories or sort of their overarching theory called
vegan and our cotranshumanism. And Gwynn Danielson developed this idea
that the hemispheres of the brain were basically separate and
(15:13):
they could operate independently from one another. You can be
different genders at the same time. You can be good
and evil, or good or evil at the same time,
and they started these experiments called una hemispheric 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. And we say this because
(15:34):
there are people that have accused Ziz and others in
the group of basically keeping you sleep deprived through these experiments,
potentially leading to a couple of suicides that we'll talk about.
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
(15:55):
a very big hallmark of something that oftentimes happens.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Yeah, that's like chapter two in the cult Leader's playbook. Yeah,
we should say also that un a hemispheric sleep theoretically
as possible. Humans don't do it, but dolphins do, whales do,
migratory birds do. So it sound like it just doesn't exist.
It's humans trying to figure out how to do it
themselves so they could think longer, more hours in a
day essentially.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Yeah, so this group is getting a little more upset
and aggressive toward the official rationalist movement and community. They
think again that Marie and see Far, you're not doing
enough for the animals. You need to expand your I
guess viewpoint on sentient beings and what that means. And
(16:40):
you're also biased against trans people.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Yeah, and there was another thing too that Ziz got
really upset about. She came to believe that Marie paid
off a blackmailer. 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 to go away. Some people call it a settlement.
(17:02):
To Zizz, it was a blackmail paying off a blackmailer
and that you just did not do that. That violated
some of the basic tenets of the rationalist community and
the way of solving problems that they use. So that
with the ethical veganism combined, really separated her from this
rationalist community. And with this growing group around her, they
(17:24):
decided that they were going to show up go to
the Seafar seminar conference that was being held in twenty nineteen,
and they were going to present their problems and their
issues in a very rational way, just like Seefhar would
want them to. And the people who organized see Far
were like, you guys, are way too aggressive for our tastes.
(17:47):
You can't come to this seafar retreat.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
And one of them said, you've got a Nazi in there.
So four of them ziz Gwen Danielson, Emma Baranian and
and it gets a little confusing with a lot of names,
and Alex Leatham. They went anyway, and they had their
guy Fawkes masks on and they had their black hooded
robes on. They blocked the exits with their vehicles and
(18:11):
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. They called
in a report of a possible active shooter and the
cops came. They did not have arms on them or
anything like that, but they were arrested on charges of
false imprisonment and child endangement because there were kids there.
It was a campground where they met north of San Francisco,
(18:34):
and the defendants, we should point out, the four of
them did end up filing a suit against the police
alleging mistreatment.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
Yeah, so the rationalist community is like, that's it. Not
only can you not come to see fire retreats, you
can't even hang out on the Less Wrong blog. You
can't come to our cocktail meetups that we have, which
are a lot of fun, So you're probably going to
be upset. They just got booted out. So now this
(19:01):
wedge was a gulf. It was a break in communication
between the group that would come to be known as
Sisians and the rationalist community. 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
(19:23):
were feeding off one another. In this isolated situation, there
weren't people on the outside coming and be like, whoa's
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 1 (19:37):
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, and when
we come back, we're gonna pick up with part two
a little north of San Francisco in Ballejo, California.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
Stop you know, stop stop, shouldn't know no, stop you.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Know, So, Chuck. One of the outcomes of being like
pushed out of the rationalist community. Somebody launched a website
called zizians dot info, still around today, 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. And two of the things
(20:38):
are something you referenced earlier. There were two suicides by
people who were said to have gone through this uni
hemispheric sleep I guess boot camp and it resulted in
their their suicides allegedly, So the Zizzians just have a
really bad name. At this point, the marine thing is
(21:01):
not working out, the rationalist fleet is kind of sinking,
as it were, and they just happened to meet somebody
at the marina named Curtis Lynde who is a seventy
something guy who loved people, loved artists, and had a
bunch of land down in Vallejo, 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
(21:22):
there for really cheap rent? And the Zizzians were like, heck, yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
All right. So Curtis Lynn offers you know them, the
chance to go live you know, they paid rent, but
I don't imagine it was very much. And in this
you know, we're going to be introduced to some more
players at this point. One of the members of the
group that had joined up at this time, her name
was Suri Dow and she was fresh out of high
(21:46):
school and a leftist blogger and just sort of put
a pin in this. 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
two twenty people at this time on Curtis Lend's property.
The neighbors get a little freaked out. They're like, hey,
(22:07):
they're walking around naked. Sometimes they're wearing gas masks. Lend
eventually it was like, you guys aren't even paying rent anymore,
and they said, yeah, well there's a COVID eviction moratorium,
so what are you going to do about it? So
everything just starts going really pear shaped, as you say,
in like twenty twenty two.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Yeah, I also check. 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, and there's twenty of them. It would be hard,
especially in the context of California, to not be like,
I think they might be a cult.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Good point.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
So in twenty twenty two, like you said, things just
really start to take a terrible shape. In August, Zizz's
sister and Emma Baranian went to the police and said,
our friend Zizz fell over while boating. So Ziz died
during in a boating accident. The Coastguard launched a search,
and I guess after eighteen hours they said there's no
(23:04):
way that she could have survived, and she was. Although
they didn't have the body, they still declared her legally
dead and her sister was given a death certificate. And
around the same time, Gwen Danielson, who was one of
the og members of this whole group, she died by
suicide too. So this group is just rocked by these
(23:24):
two deaths in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
That's right. So while this is happening, it's kind of
at the same time, this COVID eviction moratorium runs out,
So Curtis Lynde is like, all right, now I can
actually get these people off my property. Finally, probably like
this November. Two days before he was able to do
that and sort of drop the news that they were
out of there, Surrie dal called him in and said, Hey,
(23:51):
there's a water leak on my property here or in
my trailer. You got to come and check this out.
Curtis Lynde says, I went to address the issue with
a water and I was assaulted. They hit me over
the head, They stabbed me with knives, They stabbed me
with a katana, the samurai sword. He ended up losing
an eye. He was stabbed through the chest. Apparently he
(24:12):
alleges that Alex Leatham was the one who stabbed him
through the chest, and so he shot Letham and Emma
Baranian and killed her dead. If you ask the Zizians
that were there, they said, no, that's not what happened.
He'd been harassing us and he just opened fire on
us one day.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
So the authorities tended to agree or believe Curtis Lynde,
and in fact, Leatham and Dow were arrested, charged with
attempted murder and then also charged with the death of
Emma Baranian because apparently in California law, if you do
something that causes the death of somebody else, even incidentally,
(24:50):
you are responsible or you can be held responsible for
that death. And the thinking was that Curtis Lynn had
to kill Emma Baranian because of the actions of dow
In Lethum. Right, right, So now Surrey dal and Alex
Leatham are in jail in California. That's where they are.
So just park that, like you said.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
That's right. So police took another member of the group
at the time. She gave her name as Julia Dawson.
He said, come down the station with us. We got
to question you. At the station. She seemed like she
was having a medical emergency, so like, well, we got
to get her to the hospital. Stat took her to
the hospital and she disappeared from the hospital. Detective started
(25:34):
investigating what happened there and they said, oh, you know
who that was. That was Zizzzz is not dead at all.
And they also determined guess who else was there, Gwynn Danielson.
She's actually alive as well.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Yeah, so if you've heard our Faking your death episode,
this is a 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 an unsettling find after
Curtis Lynde was attacked, they found a that of lie
(26:13):
that suggested that they intended to kill him and that
they were going to dissolve his body in it. So
it's starting to become clear like these people are no joke.
But at the time this was like an isolated incident.
It wasn't related to anything else. The authorities did not
know that this was a group known as the Zizzians
(26:33):
or anything like that. There were pieces that were starting
to lay out on the table, but no one had
put them together yet.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Yeah, exactly, all right, tonight you can park all of
that because we're going to move once again across the country.
This time Pennsylvania is going to come into the picture
in twenty twenty one. So this is, you know, a
little bit before these events. Michelle Zashko that we mentioned
in Alice Munday, who were girlfriends with each other. They
moved from California to Vermont to northern Vermont, pretty rural area,
(27:03):
and they were joined by gut named Daniel Blank, another
like minded person. He went to UC Berkeley Bioengineering and
Electrical Engineering co degree and then worked at startups, and
he was also a vegan and started to sort of
get a little more radical about it. It got distance
from his parents, started judging them for eating meat, and
(27:25):
he hooks up with Monday and Zashko and Vermont.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Yeah, and so by this time, I think, I don't
know if you said it or not. I think you did.
Ziz had credited Alice Monday as being like her mentor
y 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. By this time, though, she considered Alice Monday
(27:52):
an enemy, what she called the vampire. And I guess
Zajko was by association, guilt by association, and from what
I could tell, they Alice Monday became her enemy because
she and maybe Zajka were warning people away from Ziz,
saying like, you need to steer clear of this person.
(28:13):
So Ziz considered the enemies, and she contacted Zojkoh and said, hey,
if you want to earn my trust, back. You need
to murder Alice, and if you don't, I'm going to
come to Vermont and murder you. And this was the
kind of a precarious situation as far as Zajko was concerned.
Michelle Zozko was concerned because this really, I think, kind
(28:35):
of gets a lot across. She was like, I really
had to kind of decide, you know, did I want
to murder Alice to make this happy or should I
kill Ziz? This is the position that Ziz was putting
people in by this time.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
Allegedly, Yeah, should we just have Jerry drop in the
word allegedly like just every forty seconds allegedly Beijing, mister Herman,
I know I promised Pennsylvania and we've been in Vermont
for a second here, But here's where Pennsylvania comes into play.
In December thirty, first last day of the year according
to Many in twenty twenty two, this is about a
(29:10):
month and a half after Curtis Lynde was stabbed and
after that all occurred in Viejo, So Michelle Zosco's parents,
Richard and Rita, were murdered in Pennsylvania. 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 and
(29:32):
then a few seconds later, oh my god, Oh god, god,
and the parents of Michelle Zoshko were found shot in
the head, kind of execution style, in their bedroom.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Yeah, so the Pennsylvania State troopers wanted to go visit
Michelle Zagec in Vermont, and she's like, I haven't been
to Pennsylvania in almost twenty years, or more than twenty years,
and I haven't talked to my parents in a year,
so it's not me. I don't know who killed them.
And in fact, she showed up to a graveside service
a couple of weeks later, and I believe was the
(30:05):
sole beneficiary maybe of her parents' estate. While she was
there for the service, she was accompanied by Daniel Blank
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. So the hotel called the police, and
the police started surveilling them, and after a very short time,
(30:27):
they went into Michelle's Ajco's hotel room and searched it,
and I think they searched your car found something like
forty thousand dollars in cash, and they were like, we're
just gonna take you down to jail. All this stuff
is kind of mounting. 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,
(30:49):
can you contact Daniel Blank, 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 and then they went to Daniel
Blank's room shortly after that.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
That's right, they detained him. They did not were not
able to keep them for very long. They were released
pretty quickly. But we should mention too. In addition to
that forty 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. And while they
were arresting Blank, there was someone else in the room.
(31:23):
They were lying on the floor, they wouldn't move, they
wouldn't speak, and that was drum roll zizz. So this
is getting around. At this point, 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. It was a misdemeanor charge, but
they did hold her in jail for five months instead
(31:46):
of I guess, in lieu of a five hundred thousand
dollars bail, which could not afford obviously, and the judge said,
all right, we're going to release you. You got to
promise to pay ten grand if you miss court. She
did return to court for that August hearing in a
wheelchair pushed by her mom, but when the trial date
came up of December of twenty twenty three, she did
not show up. So I think that's probably a great
(32:09):
place for our second break because the story is really
heating up. Now there is.
Speaker 3 (32:31):
Stop you know, stop, stop stopping. He shouldn't know, no, stop,
you know.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
All right, So now we're gonna find ourselves partially in
North Carolina and back in Viejo and also back in Vermont,
and we're gonna introduce what I guess, three more people,
Olivia Bachholt, Maximilian Snyder, and my Milo Young Blute.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Yeah. So Ophelia Bachholt was German by birth, and she
was described as naive, altruistic, and trusting by friends. She
fell into Zizz's orbit. I think by starting out reading
her blog, she was trans she was a math genius,
and she was really really interested in effective altruism. I
(33:18):
think she made a couple hundred grand a year as
a quant trader in New York and donated all but
ten percent of it to effective altruism causes. So she
was very dedicated to this. But something about Zizz's philosophy
grabbed her and she ended up leaving New York one day,
cutting off all contact with everyone else in her former life,
(33:40):
and moving to North Carolina and essentially starting a new
life in this orbit of Zizz.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Yeah. So Maximilian Snyder was a data scientist, another super
super smart person, and Milo Youngblute went to an elite
private school in Seattle with Maximilian Snyder and they got
together later on after that at and in May of
twenty twenty four, young Blute's parents said they're they're missing.
(34:06):
I don't know where they went. They and Snyder applied
for a marriage license together in November of twenty twenty four,
which is November fifth, specifically, which is Guy faux Knight,
And apparently they all got attracted to the Zizians just
through online. They never met Zizz, they never met Gwyn Danielson,
they never met any of the other Rationalists fleet Zizians
(34:26):
at all in person.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
Yes, that seems to be contested from what I can tell,
Chuck that there's 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
in January of twenty twenty five, Young Bachholt, they're in Vermont.
(34:48):
They're a short distance away from michelle 'sageko's house. So
shortly after the move where everybody was in to Hill,
Young Blute and Bachholt traveled to Vermont and they checked
into a hotel that was not too far from Michelle's
(35:08):
Ashcoh's house. And I thought initially that they were there
to kill Michelle's ashco 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. I'm not exactly sure what they were
doing in Vermont, but they were Eventually they fell under
(35:29):
the radar of the border patrol who pulled them over
near the Canadian border. And when that happened, they were
pulled over. At the very least, young Blute allegedly got
out and just opened fire on the border patrol agents.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Yeah, the Border patrol said that bachhold attempted to draw
a gun. They fired back. It's basically a firefight at
this point, and Bachholdt and a Border patrol agent named
David Malland were both killed. Young Blute was injured arrested
obviously on assault charges. Police found hollow point ammunition in
their car, found those burner phones wrapped in foil. They
(36:09):
found full face respirator mask. They found a night vision monocular,
so sort of the Mayhem starter kit in the car.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
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 this was a big deal and
they killed the border patrol agent. Especially when a pair
of trans people dressed in all black just open fire
on a border patrol agent and made national news. And
(36:37):
this is when people started to connect the dots. Not
only did you have the attack of Curtis lind A.
Couple of years later, as everybody is starting to go
to trial, Surrey Dow and Alex Leatham are moving toward trial.
Curtis Lynde is a star witness, I guess, allegedly, to
(36:57):
shut him up, Maximilian Schneider showed up in Viejo and
murdered Curtis Linn before he could testify.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
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.
So on February sixteenth of this year, three people dressed
in all black driving a couple of white box trucks
all all of a sudden, we're in Maryland. They went
to Maryland to a property owner and said, hey, can
(37:26):
we camp out here for a month. He did not
take kindly of that, so we called the cops and
it turns out that was Daniel Blank, Zizz and Michelle Zajko,
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 there. Like you said.
They started really connecting the dots at this point, in February.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Yeah, and I couldn't find out what Michelle Zosco or
Daniel Blank were wanted for. But Zizz was wanted for
jumping bail for that court case in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Well they're arrested for trespassing.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
Yeah, but I don't know what they were wanted for already,
is what I'm saying. So that was February as of May,
late May, last month, a couple of weeks ago, a
couple of days ago, even you could say Zizz, Michelle's Ageko,
and Daniel Blank are all in jail and Maryland for trespassing. Leatham,
(38:22):
Dow and Snyder are all in jail in California for
the attack on Curtis lnd and then the murder of
Curtis lind And then Young Blute 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 the the Zizians are still like around essentially, they
(38:46):
still will say like, we're not a cult, we're not
even called Zizians. 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. But like you said, this is real time, man,
this is there's no resolution to this. This, this is
this is where it stops, because this is as far
as it's gotten so far.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
Yeah, they're still writing, apparently, Daniel Schnyder in jail is
writing stuff to the Rationalist group saying, hey, like you
still need to focus on animal rights. And Michelle Zashko
is writing. She wrote an open letter to the world
that's in quotes stated March ninth of this year and
(39:27):
where she was like, hey, I didn't kill my parents,
zizz hasn't done anything wrong. A lot of these people,
like I don't even know those other people I'm not
with Maximilian Snyder, Like, I've never met these people. They're
not Zizians. Aren't a group like Josh said, Well, she
didn't say Josh said that'd be kind of fun though,
But they're not even associated with us as a group
(39:47):
that we don't refer to ourselves as Zizzian's right.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
So, Alice Monday and Gwen Danielson thought to be alive. Still.
Alice Monday, I saw is thought to be in hiding
that she's very scared of Zizz and the Zizians, especially now.
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.
(40:14):
So it's still a thing, even though Zizz is in jail,
and it's just a question of where it goes from here.
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, and since the Zizian's abandoned it,
it has sunk in the marina half sunk and is
(40:37):
a nuisance to that. You have to get.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Around now, poor Caleb.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Yeah, Caleb's like, what did I ever do? Yeah, I
just wanted to help people. I'm a born tug boat
I know.
Speaker 3 (40:49):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
If you want to know more about this stuff, go
look it up. There's a lot of stuff to read,
and uh, just keep an eye on the news. We
definitely will be too. Since I said that, I think
it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
Chuck.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
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. I love knowing
that pagan came from a word that a chuck puts.
It means bumpkin. It was meant to belittle, indiminish, and
now it covers a huge chunk of the faith pie.
I was reminded of the word jaywalking. I feel like
(41:25):
we've talked about this in something, maybe the origins of jaywalking.
Maybe maybe 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. They had to rewrite convention and get
people pedestrians specifically off the road. So what did they do? Slurs? Obviously,
(41:46):
if I remember correctly, jay like paganas meant an uneducated
country folk too stupid not to walk in the road
like a dingus. This word must have worked because now
it is a legal term to describe the act of
crossing the street at a non crosswalk. Constantine one. Thanks
for the potting guys and fulfilling my brain with stuff
that is James.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Thanks a lot, James. That's a good one. And think
you jogged my memory to an episode about like how
cars became the dominant mode of transportation in the US.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
Sounds like that might have been the one.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
I think that that was a good one. That was
a sleeper episode.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Agreed.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
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 Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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