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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 Zizzians. How do you
hear about this? This is your pick, you know what.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
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 Great 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 group

(02:38):
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 3 (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 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 Yudkowski, who is an AI
researcher who is 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 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 Soors, one of his collaborators. It's called If Anyone
Builds It, Everyone Dies, and it's about AI.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
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 (05:31):
It means so it's about overcoming your biases, like you
want to be less wrong kind of, it's all about
thinking clearly and not letting your bias as guide you're thinking.
I think, yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:43):
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 Institute or MARY,

(06:06):
and again that's about, you know, minimizing the risks of AI,
and then the Center for Applied Rationality or ce 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 (06:22):
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 1 (06:35):
We did my friend.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
All of this attracted Ziz to move from Alaska down
to the Bay Area in San Francisco, and she got
involved with SEFAR, got involved with MIRY, and dedicated herself
also to trying to figure out this AI alignment problem too.
And she the thing about this rationalist community is they

(07:01):
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, 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

(07:21):
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 (07:39):
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

(08:01):
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

(08:22):
that a lot of rationalists love, in which Zizz in
the story is a villainous entity that if they listen
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 hangouts and meetings wearing black robes,
as in sort of dressed like a syth.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
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
those Ziz would show up wearing black robes, declaring yourself
as Sith Lord and that that's her religion is Sith.
But despite the community being open, she still stood out,

(09:02):
not necessarily because she wore black robes and call herself
the 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

(09:23):
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 (09:35):
Yeah, like basically, hey, you're trying to protect human life,
like what about the animals? Like every sentient animal is
a person, and that these are resisious words, and you know,
so we gotta kick up the the intensity on the
animal front as well. The problem with all of this
is that this was around San Francisco and Silicon Valley,

(09:57):
where it's really really expensive to live. If you're someone
like Zizz, You're not 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 Zizz meets up with somebody named Gwen Danielson.
Had a lot in common, another rationalist, another trans woman,

(10:20):
another person who was 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 (10:37):
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.

(11:00):
Like just thinking and learning to think better. 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,
and so Ziz bought her own sailboat and docted it
the same marina in Berkeley, and they became what was

(11:23):
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 they not a good age for a tugboat, and
they actually bought it from Alaska and tugged it down

(11:43):
or sailed it down all the way to San Francisco.

Speaker 1 (11:47):
Yeah, the name of the 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, was
an old boat, an old World War Two era tugboat,
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. Had a hard time anchoring it.

(12:09):
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 with Ziz

(12:30):
and Gwenn in that they were very very smart, very
much into math and science. Some were trends and some
were non binary. And the first player here is someone
named Emma Baranian, a programmer worked at Google but left
Google because they thought the company was corrupt.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
Yes, and we should say these people fell into Ziz's
orbit because Thisiz 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

(13:12):
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

(13:32):
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,

(13:53):
often trans vegan twenty somethings who were living very close
to homelessness in San Francisco in the late two thousand teams.

Speaker 1 (14:05):
Yeah, So the second person was Alex Leatham, occasionally known
as Somny, a mathematician in this case went to the
UCLA study at UC Berkeley as well. Then we have
Michelle Zashko biometrics researcher, another Smarty Pants, and then someone
named Alice Munday who was Zoshko's girlfriend and a bit

(14:26):
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 an
Arco transhumanism, and gwyn Danielson developed this idea that the
hemispheres of the brain were basically separate and they could

(14:49):
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 un 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 there

(15:11):
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

(15:31):
a very big hallmark of something that oftentimes happens.

Speaker 2 (15:35):
Yeah, that's like chapter two in the cult Leader's playbook. Yeah,
we should say also that una hemispheric sleep theoretically as possible.
Humans don't do it, but dolphins do, whales do, migratory
birds too. So it's 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 (15:55):
Yeah, so this group is getting a little more upset
and aggressive toward the official rationalist movement and community. They
think again that Mary and c 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

(16:16):
you're also biased against trans people.

Speaker 2 (16:18):
Yeah. And there was another thing too that Ziz got
really upset about. She came to believe that Mary 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 go away. Some people call it a settlement.

(16:39):
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. So
that with the ethical veganism combined, really separated her from
this rationalist community. And with this growing group around her,

(17:01):
they 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
Sefar were like, you guys are way too aggressive for

(17:23):
our tastes. You can't come to the Seafar retreat.

Speaker 1 (17:26):
And one of them said, you've got a Nazi in there.
So four of them ziz Gwyn Danielson, Emma Baranian and
it gets a litt confusingly all 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 they were like,

(17:48):
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, and the defendance,

(18:11):
we should point out, the four of them did end
up filing a suit against the police alleging mistreatment.

Speaker 2 (18:16):
Yeah, so the rationalist community is like, that's it. Not
only can you not come to Seafire 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 wedge was

(18:38):
a gulf. It was a break in communication between the
group that would come to be known as Sizians 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 were eating off

(19:00):
one another in this isolated situation. There weren't people on
the outside coming and be like, whoa, let'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 (19:14):
All right, I think that's a good You can kind
of park all that stuff for now because this 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 (19:43):
Stop you know, stop stop stopping here? Should know no,
stop you.

Speaker 2 (19:52):
Know, So Chuck. One of the outcomes of being like
pushed out of the rationalist community somebody, he launched a
website called zizzians 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 Zizzians being a cult. And two of the

(20:14):
things are something you referenced earlier. There were two suicides
by people who were said to have gone through this
una hemispheric sleep I guess boot camp, and it resulted
in their suicides allegedly, so d Zizzeans just have a
really bad name. At this point, the marina thing is

(20:37):
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

(20:58):
there for really cheap rent? And the Zizzians were like, heck, yeah.

Speaker 3 (21:02):
All right.

Speaker 1 (21:02):
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
dal and she was fresh out of high school and

(21:24):
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 twenty
people at this time on Curtis Lyn's property. The neighbors
get a little freaked out. They're like, hey, they're walking
around naked. Sometimes they're wearing gas masks. Lynd eventually was like,

(21:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:00):
Yeah, 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 (22:16):
Good point.

Speaker 2 (22:17):
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 huge search,
and I guess after eighteen hours they said there's no

(22:40):
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

(23:00):
two deaths in twenty twenty.

Speaker 1 (23:02):
Two, 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 dropped the news that they were

(23:23):
out of there, Suri Dal 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.
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, the samurai sword. He ended up losing

(23:44):
an eye. He was stabbed through the chest apparently he
alleges that Alex Leatham was the one who stabbed him
through the chest, and so he shot Leatham and Emma
Branian 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 (24:04):
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,

(24:26):
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
and Lethum. Right right, So now Surrey Dow and Alex
Leatham are in jail in California. That's where they are.
So just park that, like you said.

Speaker 1 (24:48):
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 this 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. Detectives started investigating what

(25:11):
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, Gwen Danielson, she's
actually alive as well.

Speaker 3 (25:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:24):
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

(25:49):
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

(26:09):
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 (26:16):
Yeah, exactly. All right, So now 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 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,

(26:40):
and they were joined by guy 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

(27:01):
he hooks up with Monday and Zashko and Vermont.

Speaker 2 (27:05):
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

(27:29):
an enemy, what she called the vampire. And I guess
Zajkoh was by association, guilty by association, and from what
I could tell, the 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.

(27:49):
So Ziz considered their enemies, and she contacted Zosco 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 Zazko was concerned.
Michelle Zozkoe was concerned because this really, I think, kind

(28:12):
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, Allegedly.

Speaker 1 (28:26):
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.
On in December thirty, first last day of the year,
according to Manny in twenty twenty two, this is about

(28:47):
a 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

(29:08):
then a few seconds later, oh my god, Oh god god,
and the parents of Michelle Zashko were found shot in
the head, kind of execution style, in their bedroom.

Speaker 2 (29:19):
Yeah, so the Pennsylvania State Troopers went to go visit
Michelle's age Cohen, 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

(29:41):
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,

(30:04):
they went into Michelle'sajco'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,

(30:25):
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 (30:38):
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.

(31:00):
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

(31:22):
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

(31:46):
place for our second break because the story is really
heating up now. Sure is.

Speaker 3 (32:07):
Stop you know stop stop stop? Should know no stop
you know?

Speaker 1 (32:17):
All right, So now we're gonna find ourselves partially in
North Carolina, uh, and back in Vieho and also back
in Vermont, and we're gonna introduce uh what I guess
three more people, Olivia Bachholt, Maximilian Schnyder, and my Milo
Young Blute.

Speaker 2 (32:33):
Yeah. So, Ophelia Bachholt was German by birth and she
was described as naive, altruistic, and trusting by friends. She
fell into Esday'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

(32:54):
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 affective 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,

(33:17):
and moving to North Carolina and essentially starting a new
life in this orbit of ziz.

Speaker 3 (33:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:22):
So Maximilian Snyder was a data scientist, another super super
smart person, and Milo Young Blute went to an elite
private school in Seattle with Maximilian Snyder and they got
together later on after that, and in May of twenty
twenty four, Young Blute's parents said they're missing. I don't

(33:42):
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 Zizzians just through online.
They never met zizz, They never met Gwen Danielson, they
never met any of the other Rationalists fleet Zizians at

(34:03):
all in person.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
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 twenty twenty five, Young Bachholt they're in Vermont.

(34:24):
They're a short distance away from Michelle's ageko's house. So
shortly after the move where everybody was in Chapel Hill,
Young Blute and Bachholt traveled to Vermont and the state.
They checked into a hotel that was not too far
from Michelle's ashco's house. And I thought initially that they

(34:48):
were there to kill Michelle's ASCO, 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 eventually they fell
under the radar of the Border Patrol, who pulled them

(35:09):
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 (35:21):
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

(35:45):
found full face respirator mask, They found a night vision monocular,
so sort of the Mayhem starter kit in the car.

Speaker 2 (35:52):
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 is 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

(36:13):
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 Lynd is a star witness, I guess, allegedly to

(36:33):
shut him up, Maximilian Schneider shows up in Viejo and
murdered Curtis Lind before he could testify.

Speaker 1 (36:42):
Yeah, and this was just three days before this shootout
in Vermont. So it's all really coming to a head
very quickly, in 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.
A sudden, we're in Maryland. They went to Maryland to
a property owner and said, hey, can we camp out

(37:03):
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 (37:26):
Yeah, and I couldn't find out what Michelle's AGCO or
Daniel Blank were wanted for. But Ziz was wanted for
jumping bail for that court case in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 1 (37:36):
Well, they were arrested for trespassing.

Speaker 2 (37:38):
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 in Maryland for treuspassing. Letham,

(37:59):
Dow and Snipe are all in jail in California for
the attack on Curtis Lind 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

(38:22):
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 (38:43):
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

(39:04):
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 Schneyder, like I've never met these people. They're
not Zizians, aren't a group like Josh said, Well, she
didn't say, like joshad that'd be kind of fun though,
But they're not even associated with us as a group

(39:24):
that we don't refer to ourselves as Zizian's.

Speaker 2 (39:26):
Right, 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

(39:49):
the Zizians too. 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 kind of everything up.
We'll go back to Half Moon Bay where the Caleb
was docked in the Berkeley Marina, and since the Zizzian's
abandoned it, it has sunk in the Marina half sunk

(40:12):
and is a nuisance to that. You have to get
around now, poor Caleb. Yeah, Caleb's like, what did I
ever do? Yeah, I just wanted to help people. I'm
a born tugboat.

Speaker 3 (40:24):
I know.

Speaker 2 (40:26):
If you want to know more about this stuff, go
look it up. There's a lot of stuff to read,
and 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 1 (40:41):
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 his Chuck puts. It
means bumpkin was meant to belittle in diminish, and now
it covers a huge chunk of the faith pie. I
was reminded of the word jaywalking. I feel like we've

(41:02):
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,

(41:22):
if I remember correctly, j 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. Big car one,
constantine one. Thanks for the potting guys and fulfilling my
brain with stuff that is James.

Speaker 2 (41:42):
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 (41:53):
Sounds like that might have been the one I think
that was.

Speaker 2 (41:55):
That was a good one. That was a sleeper episode.

Speaker 1 (41:57):
Agreed.

Speaker 2 (41:58):
If you want to be like Jay 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 (42:12):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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