Speaker 1: Also media We're back.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, it's behind the Bastards, a podcast where
Speaker 2: Robert Evans ruined his life by reading too many blogs
Speaker 2: by internet poisoned nerd rationalist people. And I deeply regret
Speaker 2: everything I've done. How are you doing, David.
Speaker 3: I'm good, I am. I am concerned for you. This
Speaker 3: is a difficult place for you to spend a week.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've had an This is an info hazard. They're
Speaker 2: not wrong to use that term, just not in the
Speaker 2: way they mean it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, this whole.
Speaker 2: Like I I've I'm half committed to like selling my house,
Speaker 2: putting my goats into like a big trailer and traveling
Speaker 2: around the country finding people who are going on online
Speaker 2: doom loops and like handing them a goat and just
Speaker 2: like play with this goat for twenty minutes, like it
Speaker 2: touch an animal, look into its weird little eyes.
Speaker 3: Get off of your phone. That's Truely, you need to
Speaker 3: go go do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, something has to be done. Wid Yeah again, folks,
Speaker 2: If you want to immunize your stuff to this, a
Speaker 2: great way to do it is to just like have
Speaker 2: friends who don't live in a boat with you, right.
Speaker 1: Small boat?
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, let alone barely a boat.
Speaker 2: And talk to like, you know, my neighbor's my neighbors,
Speaker 2: like a Mexican dude who loves gardening and has had
Speaker 2: a completely different life than me and knows nothing of
Speaker 2: the Internet. And I talk with them a couple of
Speaker 2: times a week, and it's always one of the best
Speaker 2: things for me, because I spend so much of the
Speaker 2: rest of my time with people like Garrison, who are
Speaker 2: all like the same things I've poisoned my brain with, Like,
Speaker 2: please go find people who don't know all of the
Speaker 2: weird Internet things you do and spend more time with them.
Speaker 1: Aggressive on the people like Garrison.
Speaker 2: Look, I love Garrison, but they also have started spending
Speaker 2: a lot of their time with people who aren't in
Speaker 2: the same weird Internet doom circles that we are, and
Speaker 2: it's been good for them. It's good for everyone. Truly,
Speaker 2: save yourself, Save yourself.
Speaker 3: It doesn't have to be like this.
Speaker 2: So when we left off, Ziz had kind of psychologically
Speaker 2: jail broken her friend into suicide and then created an
Speaker 2: info hazard named after her friend. Great Stuff, Healthy Community.
Speaker 2: Now a few things happen in quick succession. After this point.
Speaker 2: The rationalists start to blame passic suicide on Ziz. And
Speaker 2: this is really when a lot of folks in rationalist
Speaker 2: circles start breaking off and calling, like saying like, hey,
Speaker 2: this is what Ziz and Winner doing. They've made like
Speaker 2: a cult, right, And again I don't think they're really
Speaker 2: off base here, but also they tend to ignore all
Speaker 2: of the suicides in the rationalist community and d they
Speaker 2: are in a cult. Yeah, you know, it's more because
Speaker 2: cult is I think, like you get like they're in
Speaker 2: a there's a cultic milieu that rationalism forms, which is
Speaker 2: like the substrate, right, you know, if a cult is
Speaker 2: like a plant growing up from it, Like they're like,
Speaker 2: rationalism is this soil that is extremely optimized for growing cults.
Speaker 2: I think that might be closer, you know, although it's
Speaker 2: also one of those things where if you're just trying
Speaker 2: to explain the storm, you can just say it's a cult.
Speaker 2: You can say it's this weird Bay Area cult about
Speaker 2: science and AAI and shit like that's.
Speaker 3: Probably close enough.
Speaker 2: Yeah. A few things happen in quick succession after this point.
Speaker 2: One is that a story broke later in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: confirming Zizz's suspicion that the rationalism rationalist community was rife
Speaker 2: with abuse. Two people accused an influential rationalist who worked
Speaker 2: at Seafar, a guy named Brent Dill, of abuse while
Speaker 2: they were dating him. Both were nineteen and he was
Speaker 2: close to forty. The allations here remind me a little
Speaker 2: of the ones against Neil Gaman. You've got a very
Speaker 2: powerful man accused of coercing much younger women into extreme
Speaker 2: BDSM situations, implying them with drugs. Obviously, none of this
Speaker 2: is I don't think any of this has been litigated,
Speaker 2: so I will continue to refer to them as allegations.
Speaker 2: I don't know exactly what happened here, but this breaks right,
Speaker 2: and it's a big deal within the community. Rumors spread
Speaker 2: that c far had kind of tried to like hush
Speaker 2: the whole mess down in order to protect this guy.
Speaker 2: They conducted an internal investigation. We all know, like when
Speaker 2: the cops do an internal investigation, right, that's always reliable.
Speaker 3: Trust us to figure it out.
Speaker 2: We'll police ourselves, that's rational. This internal investigation exonerated Dil
Speaker 2: and included the line he is aligned with Seafar's goals
Speaker 2: and strategy and should be seen as an ally who
Speaker 2: embodies a rare kind of agency and a sense of
Speaker 2: heroic responsibility. There's those words again, agency, heroic responsibility. Dating
Speaker 2: a nineteen year old. When you're forty and giving your
Speaker 2: drugs good stuff, people respond with outrage. Se Far eventually
Speaker 2: eventually banned dil from future events.
Speaker 3: They kind of.
Speaker 2: Cave and Ziz would describe Dil later as a true negative.
Speaker 2: That's someone who both have haves of their brain. Are
Speaker 2: even yeah, double bad? Now at this point, she still
Speaker 2: thought yid Kowski and some other c FAR leaders might
Speaker 2: be double good, but she's really not sure about it.
Speaker 2: And she's especially not sure because none of them like
Speaker 2: embrace this terminology.
Speaker 3: I was gonna say, at this point, has Yodkowski is
Speaker 3: he like? Is she still? Are they on good terms?
Speaker 3: Is he still acknowledging?
Speaker 2: No, she's ever on close terms with Yidkowski.
Speaker 3: She is.
Speaker 2: She is speaking and communicating directly with Anna Salomon, who
Speaker 2: is like one of the Yadkowski's like top people quite
Speaker 2: a lot. I don't think she's super close to yed Kowski, Like,
Speaker 2: I'm sure they're at the same events and stuff several times,
Speaker 2: and she sees she definitely sees him speak. She definitely
Speaker 2: talks with him, but like, I don't think that they
Speaker 2: ever have been close, right.
Speaker 3: Ok.
Speaker 2: She does try to force a conversation with Anna Salomon
Speaker 2: outside of c FR HQ about this and other discovery
Speaker 2: she and Gwynn had made on their boats, and Ziz
Speaker 2: like writes in the blog post about it that like
Speaker 2: she felt it was going pretty good and Anna was
Speaker 2: listening to her. There are context clues that I don't
Speaker 2: think Ziz picks up on that, like, oh no, Anna
Speaker 2: immediately felt uncomfortable and like you were assaulting her, like
Speaker 2: coming up to her and just like kind of barraging
Speaker 2: her with all of this nonsense. And she did not
Speaker 2: want to have this conversation, and she kind of pretended
Speaker 2: that to be agree with you in order to in
Speaker 2: this because she's not sure if you're dangerous, which.
Speaker 3: To be fair, you are. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: Soon later, at a CFAR board meeting, Anna recommended that
Speaker 2: Ziz be disinvited from joint Mary c Far events. And
Speaker 2: both of these are separate organizations, but basically like the
Speaker 2: membership overlaps or like a circle, right. Her reasoning for
Speaker 2: not wanting Zizz at events is that Ziz war quote
Speaker 2: black Clothes took super villains as role models and came
Speaker 2: up with dangerous plans.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's correct. I forgot that she was also
Speaker 3: wearing black roles.
Speaker 2: She's also started dressing like a wizard. Yes, speaking of
Speaker 2: dangerous plans, the rationalist fleet or rat fleet was falling apart.
Speaker 2: By this point. Coast Guard in San Mateo Harbor District
Speaker 2: authorities had issued numerous warnings over the danger of this
Speaker 2: tug boat leaking poison into the bay. On several occasions,
Speaker 2: the calebar nearly hit other ships while drifting, like the
Speaker 2: anchor gets fucked up. I don't know that they they
Speaker 2: probably don't have to use it because like they're the
Speaker 2: navy guy he is, he still as gone, he is bounced.
Speaker 3: He at least the judgment to cut his losses. So
Speaker 3: they don't even know how to work boats. They do
Speaker 3: Gwin is.
Speaker 2: I think Gwin's actually reasonably competent with the right and
Speaker 2: she and and zis gets trained up. And these are
Speaker 2: both smart enough people that I suspect their competent with
Speaker 2: a sailboat, but like a twenty four foot sailboat and
Speaker 2: a ninety four foot tug boat very different. That's like
Speaker 2: I'm good with them driving my prius give me that
Speaker 2: fucking eighteen wheeler with two with two fucking storage containers
Speaker 2: on the back, shipping containers on the back. I could
Speaker 2: probably back that thing into a parking space, no problem. Like,
Speaker 2: they're just different, you know, damn authorities, right, And what's
Speaker 2: very funny these accounts of like boat cops getting on
Speaker 2: the Caleb and talking to Zizians. They're like, these people
Speaker 2: must be sovereign citizens, which is like a.
Speaker 3: Totally different kind of thing. And to me, I'm like,
Speaker 3: you don't sound at.
Speaker 2: All like But to them, it's like this mix because
Speaker 2: it's this mix of anarchist theory, right, because these people
Speaker 2: are anarchists, so they're telling these cops why they don't
Speaker 2: think the cops have any authority, but they're also like
Speaker 2: insulting them with these like logical arguments based on obscure
Speaker 2: rationalist doctrines.
Speaker 3: And these people are heavy jargon, right, heavy.
Speaker 2: These cops are just like, okay, so we got some sovereigns,
Speaker 2: sob sits here, all right, it's four now. Yeah, And
Speaker 2: again this is like the Bay Area. I think cops
Speaker 2: in the Barrier are a little especially since they're all white,
Speaker 2: more used to dealing with like people who are clearly
Speaker 2: like eccentric, right than maybe like if this had happened
Speaker 2: in another city. So nothing, there's not really a conflict yet.
Speaker 2: The cops are just being like, hey, guys, you're this
Speaker 2: But to be fair, the boat is leaking diesel into
Speaker 2: the bay. See it as a problem, right. That's In
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen, another scandal hits the rationalist community. The story
Speaker 2: broke that a former employee had blackmailed the company over
Speaker 2: a dispute and used donor funds to pay. This got
Speaker 2: stacked on top of the scandal that Dill had just created, and,
Speaker 2: as is in, many of her comrades saw it, the
Speaker 2: issue was not whether this employee had been mistreated, but
Speaker 2: that Miri hadn't made the proper, timeless decisions to ensure
Speaker 2: they couldn't be blackmailed. Per an article for the Rolling
Speaker 2: Stone quote and they're this not only represented bad decision theory,
Speaker 2: but called the organization's entire existence into question. In other words,
Speaker 2: it's not whatever happened with this employee, it's that you
Speaker 2: didn't make the timeless decisions to make it so that
Speaker 2: anyone would be scared to try to blackmail you, because
Speaker 2: they'd know that your response was, so would be so
Speaker 2: intense that proves you don't have what it takes to
Speaker 2: really save the world, because you're not ruthless enough to
Speaker 2: just jump to killing people like us.
Speaker 3: You're not a psychopath.
Speaker 2: You're not a psychopathy. They need psychopaths, which is good
Speaker 2: to save the world. We love psychopaths.
Speaker 3: We're all we aspire to it.
Speaker 2: And one of the big problems within the rationalist community
Speaker 2: is people talk about different mental health conditions as if
Speaker 2: they're like tools in a toolbox, Like you could go
Speaker 2: into a psychopathic mode and that's really good for accomplishing
Speaker 2: these things. So you could you can go eighth, you
Speaker 2: can make yourself autistic in this they talk this way, right,
Speaker 2: I'm not saying this is this is not how anything works.
Speaker 2: I'm not carrying autism and psychopathy. I'm just saying this
Speaker 2: is how they talk, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they then save the world.
Speaker 2: Right, No, that's that's not None of this is accurate
Speaker 2: to like the way vias are, Like, you can't just
Speaker 2: be like.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna turn off by autism today, I got some shit.
Speaker 2: No, that's not how we're And some of this is
Speaker 2: downstream from how I think online discourse has damaged the
Speaker 2: discussion of mental health because people sometimes do talk about
Speaker 2: it like pokemon, you know, very much like I think
Speaker 2: there's some issues there that that do anyway, and and
Speaker 2: a lot of this is yeah, it's just this soup
Speaker 2: is not exclusive to Ziz. So Ziz is banned now
Speaker 2: from Marie c Far events, and her whole crew is
Speaker 2: increasingly radicalized against the organizations they have. Also, you know,
Speaker 2: it's both where like c Far has good reason to
Speaker 2: not want Zizz around, but also all of Zizz most
Speaker 2: of Zizz's complaints about rationalists like fr and Mary are
Speaker 2: very valid, right, Like, h yeah, you're both right about
Speaker 2: each other. It's like how Elon Musk and Peter Teal
Speaker 2: would ship talk each other. It's like that you both
Speaker 2: do have each other's number.
Speaker 3: Yes, everybody's got a point. Everybody's got a point.
Speaker 2: I just kind of wish you would all go away.
Speaker 2: In November of twenty nineteen, SEEFAR held their annual alumni
Speaker 2: reunion out in a chunk of the California Redwoods down
Speaker 2: the stream from the street from the Bohemian Grove. The
Speaker 2: road that passes is literally the Bohemian Highway, right. This
Speaker 2: is like for an idea of how much money there
Speaker 2: is in mainstream rationalism. Right, they are having their big
Speaker 2: party next to Bohemian Grove. Ziz had sent an open
Speaker 2: letter and like a letteredy at Kowski a few days
Speaker 2: earlier or urging members of both organizations to quit in
Speaker 2: the interest of saving the world, basically saying these groups
Speaker 2: are so compromised they can no longer like add effectively
Speaker 2: to the things we're trying to do to our important work.
Speaker 3: So you should all leave.
Speaker 2: And kind of the subtext is and do what me
Speaker 2: and Gwynn are doing, you know, start ale. So on
Speaker 2: the day of this event, Zizz, Gwinn and two others
Speaker 2: in their circle drive up to this like this location
Speaker 2: out in the woods with a box truck, a shuttle bus,
Speaker 2: and a Prius and they block the entrances and exits
Speaker 2: of the venue with their vehicles and they jump out
Speaker 2: wearing black robes, guy fox masks and black gloves. Now,
Speaker 2: this is not a violent protest I have there's no
Speaker 2: evidence that they intended violence. They had walkie talkies, one
Speaker 2: person had a can of mace, but like you know,
Speaker 2: people carry mace, that's not suspicious. And all they're trying
Speaker 2: to do is distribute flyers lying out their case against
Speaker 2: CFAR and Miri. But they have blocked the entrances and
Speaker 2: exits and they talk like sith wizards, right so everything
Speaker 2: they say sounds cryptic and kind of threatening, and they're
Speaker 2: wearing guy fox masks. The police get called immediately, and
Speaker 2: as best as I can tell, it does. Maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 2: It seems like the Seafar MIRI people like new because
Speaker 2: there's like send out an email saying hey, maybe don't come,
Speaker 2: or like if you do, just like being note that
Speaker 2: these weird people are here. But the venue owner, like
Speaker 2: the people running the venue, call the cops, is what
Speaker 2: it seems like happens. There are different allegations here. I
Speaker 2: don't precisely know, but for whatever the case, two false
Speaker 2: pieces of information are given to the cops when they
Speaker 2: get called. They are told the cops are told one
Speaker 2: person has a gun and another person has an axe. Right, So,
Speaker 2: and I think it's people who worked at the venue
Speaker 2: or make these allegations. It was definitely an employee at
Speaker 2: the venue who were alleged that he saw an axe
Speaker 2: a county sheriff who responded, or so it was a
Speaker 2: person at the venue who picked up an axe and
Speaker 2: someone saw them and reported that to the police too, right,
Speaker 2: because he was scared of these people. A county sheriff
Speaker 2: sheriff's deputy responds and immediately calls for major backup because
Speaker 2: he's told someone has a gun, and you know, as
Speaker 2: a cop with just kind of like a pop culture knowledge,
Speaker 2: you hear like a bunch of people in robes and
Speaker 2: masks with a gun outside of this big event where
Speaker 2: like there's children doing a ropes course next door. Like,
Speaker 2: his thought is, there's a mass shooting brewing, right, some
Speaker 2: people are going to do something fucked up, right, So
Speaker 2: he calls for a massive like swat response basically, you know,
Speaker 2: compared to the actual danger these people present, which is
Speaker 2: right now nil. The author that wired piece spoke to
Speaker 2: the sheriff's deputy who responded initially a guy named Parks,
Speaker 2: And this is that account. Quote in Parks's account which
Speaker 2: he related to me. In the fall of twenty twenty three,
Speaker 2: at a local Starbucks, the protesters were speaking in unison,
Speaker 2: just stuff I didn't really understand, but it was somewhat rehearsed.
Speaker 3: He said. The group had printed.
Speaker 2: Flyers outlining their complaints against Sefar and Miri. They alleged
Speaker 2: that Mary had paid out blackmail using donor funds to
Speaker 2: quash sexual misconduct allegations, and that Sefar's leader discriminates against
Speaker 2: trans women. Other allegations were more esoteric. Sephar does not
Speaker 2: appreciably develop novel rationality mental tech. The path to avoiding extinction,
Speaker 2: they wrote, involved escaping containment by society through mental autonomy
Speaker 2: and inter hemispheric game theory. So sore, some random sheriff's
Speaker 2: deputy is not going to understand what's going on here?
Speaker 3: What the fuck are you talking about?
Speaker 2: He and his men default to the thing that cops
Speaker 2: do when they get confused, which is they get violent.
Speaker 2: Right quote. He and Rix ordered the protesters to get
Speaker 2: on the ground. As they did, each one called out,
Speaker 2: demanding a same gender pack down, like one might request
Speaker 2: at an airport. All three were trans women, but Park
Speaker 2: says he couldn't discern their genders because of the robes
Speaker 2: and masks. Regardless that we're not going to get that
Speaker 2: luxury at that time, he told me, it's like, well,
Speaker 2: we don't know if you're a boy or a girl,
Speaker 2: and we got a handcuff you. Parks's deputy subdued the
Speaker 2: three and prone positions what Parks calls a high risk
Speaker 2: style takedown, requiring more force than a normal handcuffing style.
Speaker 2: So there's a several articles I've read will to refer
Speaker 2: to a discrepancy between how the Zizians and the cops
Speaker 2: describe these events. I've read both accounts. I really don't
Speaker 2: see a gap. What I see is the cops describing
Speaker 2: their violent into humanizing behavior as like this is the
Speaker 2: normal way to respond, and this describing it as to
Speaker 2: humanizing and traumatizing. The only question here is, like the
Speaker 2: moral quality you give to the cops tackling a bunch
Speaker 2: of people basically who don't have weapons because they got
Speaker 2: a phone call, right, which, like, if you're a cop,
Speaker 2: you're like, well, this is the only way to act.
Speaker 2: And if you're I think most people like you're like, well,
Speaker 2: probably could have just talked this situation down. I don't
Speaker 2: see where in arrested, like yeah. Gwinn later writes this
Speaker 2: about the experience. When we arrived, a staff member called
Speaker 2: the police and falsely told them we had a gun
Speaker 2: and that we were going into buildings, and that that
Speaker 2: we were too afraid to get off the phone, they
Speaker 2: were too afraid to get off the phone. Later report
Speaker 2: said there was an active shooter with a duffel bag.
Speaker 2: None of us had a duffel bag. Police arrived with
Speaker 2: their guns out and we were immediately arrested within about
Speaker 2: ten minutes of us arriving, after which we were sexually assaulted.
Speaker 2: In my case, I was groped and I had my
Speaker 2: pants pulled down and then sat on by an officer
Speaker 2: in a mounting position. They are mocked and derided like
Speaker 2: as their naked, cops are making comments about their bodies.
Speaker 2: It's like a really ugly situation, right, And I have
Speaker 2: no trouble believe that this is true because it comports
Speaker 2: with dozens of arrest stories I've heard in multiple states.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's part for the course.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's also the fact that they are specifically
Speaker 2: the police are making fun of them for being trans
Speaker 2: is very much in line with what statistics say about
Speaker 2: trans people and police violence. A twenty thirteen report from
Speaker 2: the Anti Violence Project found that trans individuals are seven
Speaker 2: times likely or to experience violence while in interacting with
Speaker 2: the police than cisgender people. So I have no trouble
Speaker 2: believing Gwin's accounts.
Speaker 3: Here, even though.
Speaker 2: Again I treat her with proper scrutiny in most areas,
Speaker 2: this all seems like what cops do.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: The other big discrepancy where the Zizzians are I think
Speaker 2: a little off base, is that they claim they are
Speaker 2: immediately dead named and misgendered by the newspapers covering their
Speaker 2: initial arrests. And they are dead named. But the newspapers
Speaker 2: don't really have an option here.
Speaker 3: Right, right. They don't talk.
Speaker 2: When they're arrested, right, which is a very normal thing
Speaker 2: for like a protest. They say absolutely nothing and they
Speaker 2: have no idea on them. So the police fingerprint them,
Speaker 2: which brings up their legal names, and that's what's given
Speaker 2: to the newspapers. So like the initial news articles aren't trying.
Speaker 2: This is just the only name available. But it escalates
Speaker 2: this situation, right, And it is worth noting that a
Speaker 2: number of outlets do continue to dead name them up
Speaker 2: to the present, but that initial reporting it's like, well
Speaker 2: that's just the only information that was available. But all
Speaker 2: of this is going to like there, this is this
Speaker 2: court case is going to where on they get charged
Speaker 2: initially with felonies. Baylis said it like fifty grand for
Speaker 2: Ziz and Gwynn. This is eventually reduced and they're reduced
Speaker 2: to misdemeanors, but it takes like four days for them
Speaker 2: to make bail. And there they will be finding because
Speaker 2: they're going to counter sue over these arrests, and both
Speaker 2: the trauma of the arrests, their anger over them, and
Speaker 2: the fact that there's the stress of this year's long
Speaker 2: court battle is going to have this extremely deleterious effect
Speaker 2: on everybody's mental health when they're already not doing well. Right, Arreth,
Speaker 2: that's great stuff. Yeah, around this time the rash the
Speaker 2: Zizzi ends move they stop doing their fleet thing right,
Speaker 2: they move out of the boats, and they kind of
Speaker 2: end things by leaving their tugboat adrift because there's nothing
Speaker 2: to do with a ninety four foot tug boat.
Speaker 3: Nobody can handle a tug.
Speaker 2: Boat, right, Like, it's too big to do much with
Speaker 2: and they they probably could have figured something out, but
Speaker 2: they decide the opportunity cost of figuring out how to
Speaker 2: dispose of this boat is it will it will distract
Speaker 2: from their important work, so it's okay for it to
Speaker 2: sink and cause like a modest environmental crisis by leaking
Speaker 2: diesel into the Bay. Basically, Ziz decides that the value
Speaker 2: of all the sea life that it kills is less
Speaker 2: than the value of them continuing their work, which at
Speaker 2: this point, if you're keeping track, is trying to figure
Speaker 2: out how to live out of box trucks. So that's
Speaker 2: what they're doing now. And this is where a guy
Speaker 2: named Curtis.
Speaker 3: The living space. They've got a worse living space. They
Speaker 3: made it worse than boats.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, I can't tell you how much of this
Speaker 2: story is just the result of Bay Area rent prices
Speaker 2: being unreasonable. Yeah, yeah, it's a really just like Superman one.
Speaker 2: So enter Curtis Linde Lynd is a guy. He was
Speaker 2: like a he made his career doing shipping. He lived
Speaker 2: in a boat in and around where Ziz and her
Speaker 2: friends were living at sea, and they met each other
Speaker 2: through that. He like sells them an anchor. But he's
Speaker 2: also like push an eighty and so he's got he's
Speaker 2: interested in like getting out of the boat life because
Speaker 2: it sucks. And he's got a plot of land that
Speaker 2: he he's he's got a house on and he's got
Speaker 2: extra space that he's interested in renting out. There's not
Speaker 2: like most there's not like full houses, but there's like
Speaker 2: some shipping containers and I think like some RVY go
Speaker 2: busted RV or whatever, and he's got like some power
Speaker 2: and water hookups. Here's how his son Carl described what
Speaker 2: his father wanted to do with this place. He just
Speaker 2: wanted this as a place to let artists or woodworkers,
Speaker 2: electricians to be able to come and live in a
Speaker 2: little trailer and have a container where they could work
Speaker 2: and put their two us and have a safe place.
Speaker 2: So again, depending on how you're looking, he's either trying
Speaker 2: to like have a cheap space where like, you know,
Speaker 2: artists and the like can afford to like survive and
Speaker 2: have little working spaces, or he's trying to be like
Speaker 2: a punk slum lord. Right, And I mean the line
Speaker 2: is thin, right, The line is thin.
Speaker 3: The line is so thin.
Speaker 2: Speaking of a thin line, the sponsors of this podcast
Speaker 2: are the thin line keeping society safe from me not
Speaker 2: having enough money to live in a boat, you know,
Speaker 2: or this is why I have enough money to live
Speaker 2: in a boat where I would go crazy, or a
Speaker 2: box truck or a.
Speaker 3: Box truck to live in a box truck. The joy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're we're talking about how good it is to
Speaker 2: live in a box truck.
Speaker 3: Good stuff.
Speaker 2: Is at this point, I think at any given time,
Speaker 2: there's between like six and nine people, you.
Speaker 3: Know, okay, okay, so very small.
Speaker 2: Very very small somewhere in that neighborhood. It fluctuates, and
Speaker 2: there's also there's a bunch of people who are like
Speaker 2: you could call them Zizians. They're in and out. They'll
Speaker 2: visit sometimes or they even live in other states, but
Speaker 2: they're always in contact with multiple members of the group
Speaker 2: through the Internet. This is a very like geographically decentralized group,
Speaker 2: although there is that like core inner circle who are
Speaker 2: all together on this land and for a while things
Speaker 2: are okay there the Zizians pay Rent ziz continues to
Speaker 2: write blog posts and run her followers through Uni hemispheric
Speaker 2: sleep sessions to upgrade them. And you know, it's also
Speaker 2: important for me to know they don't ever call themselves Zizians.
Speaker 2: That name first comes up around this period of time,
Speaker 2: right after that disastrous protest, when an anonymous rationalist publishes
Speaker 2: a paper called like Zizians dot info that first identifies
Speaker 2: them as a cult and describes like their union hemispheric
Speaker 2: sleep tactics, and it's it's written because this person is
Speaker 2: in the community and wants to stop other people from
Speaker 2: falling in with Ziz. And I think they have good
Speaker 2: intentions here. They like see the danger they also one
Speaker 2: of the issues with the document is I don't think
Speaker 2: they see some of the danger of other rationalists stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah right, This is like why I say that it's
Speaker 2: like a cultic substrate rather than being a pure cult,
Speaker 2: because there are people in it who can recognize stuff
Speaker 2: like this and try to, you know, provide a degree
Speaker 2: of like accountability. Just like there are people who will
Speaker 2: like report on and they help. They hold seafar S
Speaker 2: feet to the fire when people get accused of abuse.
Speaker 2: So the document alleges that Ziz had started telling her
Speaker 2: followers she was the basically she's the only double good
Speaker 2: or intrinsically good person there and one of the only
Speaker 2: intrinsically good people on the planet.
Speaker 3: Uhs.
Speaker 2: Sessions tended to reveal that other people in the community
Speaker 2: are just single good and per Ziz's theories about the
Speaker 2: hero contract, they can only accomplish maximum good by feeding
Speaker 2: their energy and resources to the heroes.
Speaker 3: Ziz.
Speaker 2: Here's an example of the kind of things she sent
Speaker 2: people she saw as single good saying your single good
Speaker 2: is saying help, I have a yerk in my head.
Speaker 2: Did you ever read Anamorphs as a book?
Speaker 3: David? Wow?
Speaker 2: Yes, Oh that's a reference to is those worms that
Speaker 2: control your brain? And that's not right? Yeah, yeah, that's yes.
Speaker 2: I know, deep cut, deep cut?
Speaker 3: Whoa not un luck to part of my brain that
Speaker 3: I have not used for right? Right?
Speaker 2: A bunch of people are now like having like the
Speaker 2: severance moment, but like remembering every Scholastic book fair they
Speaker 2: ever went to is again.
Speaker 3: Man oh man, all they gotta do is hit goosebumps
Speaker 3: to me.
Speaker 2: I know, I know only so saying your single good
Speaker 2: is saying help, I have a yerk in my head.
Speaker 2: That's a merror image of me. I need you to
Speaker 2: surgically destroy it, even if I'm then crippled for life
Speaker 2: or might die in the process. Then kill me if
Speaker 2: I ever do one evil act for the rest of
Speaker 2: my life. That's better than being a slave again. That's
Speaker 2: her role is surgically destroying the evil brains of her
Speaker 2: half brains of her followers, and then she has to
Speaker 2: be willing to murder them if they ever do anything bad,
Speaker 2: because if they ever do anything bad, then it means
Speaker 2: that the evil side could take over and it could
Speaker 2: do like Megabad right, doom the world. She and she
Speaker 2: takes this on herself, yes, and also I mean she's
Speaker 2: gonna have other people do the killing basically, but like, yes,
Speaker 2: this is what she's saying is the stakes, and this
Speaker 2: is how she sees her role within the community. Right,
Speaker 2: And I think at this point that's pretty could leader,
Speaker 2: that's pretty good. I think we're probably crossed that KT boundary, right. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: saying you got to murder people because they're the devil
Speaker 2: the yurk inside their brain. Yeah, it might be a
Speaker 2: little bit of cult weather feels like a cult outside.
Speaker 2: So some Zizians, not implicated in any crimes, have attacked
Speaker 2: this piece, this Zizians dot info things being inaccurate and
Speaker 2: basically a rationalist hit job. And again there's there's some
Speaker 2: reason for suspicion here, but most of the claims made
Speaker 2: in it I have backed up through reading the individual sources.
Speaker 2: One of the issues of that a lot of people
Speaker 2: writing about this will credit ziz with all of the
Speaker 2: una hemispheric stuff, and that's mostly Gwynn. So there's a
Speaker 2: point worth making around this time, a woman named Jamie
Speaker 2: Zashko started living nearby with her girlfriend, Alice Monday. Both
Speaker 2: are rationalists that are interested in Zizz's ideas. Alice and
Speaker 2: Ziz have been in contact for years, and in fact, Alice,
Speaker 2: because she's an older and more established rationalist, when Ziz
Speaker 2: was kind of new to the community, had since Ziz
Speaker 2: an article on the Gervais principle for the first time,
Speaker 2: which had spawned her ideas about needing to jail break
Speaker 2: people into psychopathy, and at varying times, Ziz would claim
Speaker 2: Alice as a mentor. There are some I don't like,
Speaker 2: very vague accounts that Alice has done some problematic, abusive
Speaker 2: stuff in the community. I don't know trree any of
Speaker 2: that is, but this is what people talk about, and
Speaker 2: I think Ziz may have had a break with her
Speaker 2: over some sort of disagreement, because it looks it seems
Speaker 2: like from what I can tell, Jamie, who is dating
Speaker 2: Alice at the time, is in direct contact with Ziz
Speaker 2: and interested in her, but also is not communicating with
Speaker 2: Ziz under her real name. She is making a bunch
Speaker 2: of sock puppet accounts on her blog, and she is
Speaker 2: specifically commenting and trying to engage Zizz in different conversations,
Speaker 2: pretending to be multiple different people to quote unquote sabotage
Speaker 2: the whole. She believed another woman in the community, Emma Borhanian,
Speaker 2: had on Zizz and Borhanian is that former Google engineer. Okay,
Speaker 2: so this is you know, this is part of the
Speaker 2: messy thing, is that like these people are all influencing
Speaker 2: each other and trying to like their kind of go
Speaker 2: to is like mind games to fuck with each other's heads.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not a lot of straight conversation. Huh.
Speaker 2: No, Now, Imma Borhanian, who Jamie alleges his life girlfriend. No,
Speaker 2: Jamie's dating Alice Monday. I'm sorry, but Borhanian is this
Speaker 2: former Google engineer who has been with Ziz since the
Speaker 2: Rationalist Fleet days. And Jamie thinks that she's controlling Ziz
Speaker 2: and she has like this bad influence that's leading them in.
Speaker 3: A bad direction.
Speaker 2: And I've read Borhanian's blog too, because of course I
Speaker 2: had to. Emma is she was as long winded as Ziz,
Speaker 2: fewer pop culture references. She wrote a lot about narcissism,
Speaker 2: but unlike most of these people, she tended to use
Speaker 2: a or She's like, I don't know, I don't understand
Speaker 2: the kind of points she's trying to make about narcissist,
Speaker 2: but she's very interested in the idea of like how
Speaker 2: narcissists work. Jamie didn't like Emma, and she claims that
Speaker 2: because Emma and another member of the community had started
Speaker 2: shit talking Alice to Ziz and convinced her that Alice
Speaker 2: was double evil. So Jamie creates all these sock puppet
Speaker 2: accounts to argue with Ziz with the goal of fucking
Speaker 2: with her head and making her distrust Emma quote, I
Speaker 2: adopted a variety of different personas, many of whom claim
Speaker 2: to have beliefs I've never held her endorsed for the
Speaker 2: sake of determining how Ziz would react to these characters.
Speaker 3: So this isn't what and then what?
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly, There's never seems to be a plan behind
Speaker 2: fuck with each other's mental health constantly. It's like this
Speaker 2: is because they're always there's all these overlapping fields of
Speaker 2: influence between all of these mostly women, and everyone is
Speaker 2: fucking with each other's heads deliberately and also constantly trying
Speaker 2: to hack and upgrade each other. Is basically scientology in
Speaker 2: the form of a codependent friend group, right, Like, that's
Speaker 2: what that's what's happening. Wow, this is so bad for everybody.
Speaker 3: It's oh man, it just they just dig deeper and
Speaker 3: deeper and deeper.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, that's what happens. Again if you don't this
Speaker 2: is the you know, the touch grasp has been turned online.
Speaker 2: People have some, as you said, some problematic ways of
Speaker 2: discussing it. But this is the importance of like turning
Speaker 2: out from your weird little subculture right now and again, and.
Speaker 3: Like, yes, definitely, because the world. How often are they
Speaker 3: interacting with all the world, like in general.
Speaker 2: Very rarely, And most of the people they do interact
Speaker 2: with are like these other people who are kind of
Speaker 2: on the edge of dropping out of society, living on
Speaker 2: this guy's property, this eighty year old dance and extracts.
Speaker 3: Who. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, while Jamie and Zizz are fighting online, COVID hit
Speaker 2: and with it comes that eviction moratory in the state
Speaker 2: of California. So Ziz and her friends they stop paying
Speaker 2: rent to to lend, either because they're broke or just
Speaker 2: because they don't need to anymore. And more than a
Speaker 2: year goes by. In April of twenty twenty one, Ziz
Speaker 2: posts this to her blog. Housing in places like the
Speaker 2: Bay Area is a hierarchy of rent seekers and the
Speaker 2: rent seekers above landlords rule by rules, surplus, selective enforcement, fear, uncertainty,
Speaker 2: and doubt corruption. It's all a complex and it makes
Speaker 2: landlords incredibly vulnerable to blackmail from someone who can do
Speaker 2: even a little bit of investigative work. It's bad praxice
Speaker 2: to pay them rent.
Speaker 3: So again, she get it. I get it.
Speaker 2: But this is also going to lead you to a
Speaker 2: bad place. This is where we get to divergent stories.
Speaker 2: Curtis Lynde, the landlord's story is that he was very
Speaker 2: supportive of these people and of trans people in general,
Speaker 2: taking one Zizi and out to shop for her first bra.
Speaker 2: His friends and family say he was a decent guy.
Speaker 2: And I actually, when I started talking about writing these
Speaker 2: episodes on Blue Sky, someone chimed in to say they
Speaker 2: had known him too, and that he was a nice person.
Speaker 2: I don't know to ziz He was a landlord, and
Speaker 2: there are claims from the Zizians that he was verbally
Speaker 2: abusive and transphobic. By the end of twenty twenty one,
Speaker 2: after a year and a half of unpaid rent, Lynde
Speaker 2: had started working on the process of having police vic them.
Speaker 2: He and other residents claimed that the Zizzians had become aggressive,
Speaker 2: acting as if the property was theirs, now threatening other people,
Speaker 2: basically squatting on it, and like being violent at times,
Speaker 2: including like throwing rocks at Lynn's cabin and brandishing knives
Speaker 2: at other people.
Speaker 3: Sore knives.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they have taken to like threateningly playing with
Speaker 2: knives while talking about how they will not leave the
Speaker 2: property or pay rent, And you get the feeling like
Speaker 2: I'm not again, I'm not against the idea that this
Speaker 2: again ambitious slumlord may have done some problematic things, but
Speaker 2: it sounds like the Zizzi ends are being pretty deeply
Speaker 2: abusive to everyone around them right right, which is also
Speaker 2: they believe is praxis. Is like these other people who
Speaker 2: are not who don't who aren't double good, and who
Speaker 2: aren't aware of the great work they're not working towards
Speaker 2: the cause they're a causal is the term they're use.
Speaker 2: Their lives don't really have value if you're not working
Speaker 2: for the cost. Ziz earlier will decide.
Speaker 3: It's not like they're doing outreach, right, It's not like
Speaker 3: they're trying to convert their neighbors or anything like that.
Speaker 2: They're trying to convert rationalists, but they don't care about
Speaker 2: these weirdos living on the property with them, right right,
Speaker 2: and again, remember, like Ziz had earlier decided that it
Speaker 2: would be worth four human lives for her to like
Speaker 2: get a she would kill four people to get a
Speaker 2: shower before work, right, basically.
Speaker 3: With the yeah, yeah, yeah, so that these people don't
Speaker 3: have a.
Speaker 2: Lot of value for other people right now. The court
Speaker 2: case over the protest arrests dragged on, and in November
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty one, Ziz and her friends who'd been
Speaker 2: arrested filed a countersuit against Sonoma County, as well as
Speaker 2: several individuals associated with Sea Far and the venue. By
Speaker 2: the time twenty twenty two starts, the pressure is on
Speaker 2: for Ziz and the people living with her to figure
Speaker 2: out what they're going to do next. They do, at
Speaker 2: some point work at a deal with Curtis Will, who
Speaker 2: give them a little more time to fix their RV
Speaker 2: if they promise to bounce as soon as possible. Ziz
Speaker 2: is no longer actively adding to her blog, but she's
Speaker 2: still responding to comments and communicating with other sympathetic rationalists Regularly.
Speaker 2: She becomes much more focused in her writing in this
Speaker 2: period on vengeance, violence, and death, as do others in
Speaker 2: her community. Per Wired quote, Lesta and others wrote, a
Speaker 2: vengeance against the timeless decisions of others. If you truly
Speaker 2: irreconcilably disagree with someone's creative choice i e. Their choice
Speaker 2: extending arbitrarily, fallen far into the past and future, ultimately
Speaker 2: your only recourse is to kill them one, Lesoda ally
Speaker 2: wrote in a long blog post citing Zizz's philosophies. In
Speaker 2: the comments, Losoda wrote, I am so fucking glad to
Speaker 2: finally have an equal treat stuff. In spring of twenty
Speaker 2: twenty one, one of the Rationalist Fleet veterans close to Zizz,
Speaker 2: Jay Winterford, who went by the name Fluttershy, killed themselves.
Speaker 2: They had Winterford had written about seeing Zizz's techniques as
Speaker 2: a way to deal with his childhood trauma, and Lesoda
Speaker 2: wrote on her blog about her repeated attempts to fix
Speaker 2: and upgrade him. Now, Ziz wrote about this person and
Speaker 2: calls him a death knight, And as best as I
Speaker 2: can tell, a death knight is a Zizi in term
Speaker 2: for someone who snaps and murders a bunch of people.
Speaker 2: She calls Hitler a death knight, but she also uses
Speaker 2: the term for mass shooters, and she claims Winterford quote
Speaker 2: tried very hard to convince me and then us to
Speaker 2: join them in service of the Goddess of rape and death.
Speaker 2: Straight up declared intentions to kill us, did a bunch
Speaker 2: of horrible shit, like said they were going to do
Speaker 2: even more horrible shit. I spent about seven months, most
Speaker 2: of every day in a desperate and mutual mental battle
Speaker 2: trying to get in their head somehow how understand this
Speaker 2: death drive thing I couldn't simulate in my own mind
Speaker 2: that made no sense, and out predict them like all
Speaker 2: their lives in the world depended on it. And basically
Speaker 2: this person's talking about doing like a mass shooting or
Speaker 2: some other terrorist attack against the rationalist community in Ziz's name,
Speaker 2: and Ziz claims that she's like spent seven months trying
Speaker 2: to stop them from doing this, and then finally they
Speaker 2: just kill themselves rather than killing anybody else. And again
Speaker 2: they framed Ziz froms is like their heroic battle to
Speaker 2: stop this person from murdering other people and damaging the cause.
Speaker 3: But like, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Maybe maybe like this person needed professional help when they
Speaker 2: started talking about wanting to do a mass killing when
Speaker 2: it's running to murder a bunch of people, maybe they
Speaker 2: needed help, like not your help.
Speaker 3: I don't know if anyone needs Zizz's help. No, No,
Speaker 3: Ziz does not even needs help. No.
Speaker 2: And she weaves this person's death into this very this
Speaker 2: messianic hero's journey for herself posting this in the summer
Speaker 2: of time. Two since posting this, I have been tortured,
Speaker 2: survived seven assassination attempts, three more attempts to do me
Speaker 2: permanent bodily harm. Four people individually decided they had the
Speaker 2: sole rights to be my death love arch nemesis, as
Speaker 2: if they'd be alone. Accidentally exposed myself to a one
Speaker 2: hundredth of my hell, and one committed suicide. Others utterly
Speaker 2: mentally cracked. No one knows what she's talking about with
Speaker 2: these assassination attempts. There all just someone may have given
Speaker 2: her a mean look at a grocery store, and she's
Speaker 2: just right, like that's the mind STAPs out right.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Rationalists who had declared as a cult leader considered all
Speaker 2: of this further evidence that she was dangerous again. Rationalists
Speaker 2: also convinced people to kill themselves be alogic traps, but like,
Speaker 2: they're not wrong to point this out now. I brought
Speaker 2: up Jamie's Ashco and Alice Monday a little earlier. They
Speaker 2: had moved out of the Bay in late twenty twenty
Speaker 2: and headed to Vermont, where Jamie, who had some family money,
Speaker 2: bought land in a gun. In February of twenty two,
Speaker 2: she made a blog post with the subtitle I trolled
Speaker 2: Ziz and now she wants to murder me. In it,
Speaker 2: she claimed, she talks about how, like, yeah, she made
Speaker 2: all these fake accounts, and in late twenty twenty one,
Speaker 2: she and Ziz finally start talking under their real names,
Speaker 2: and Ziz talks about these trolling messages from the fake
Speaker 2: accounts Jamie had made, and like said that they really
Speaker 2: fucked with her head. And so Jamie, who's starting to
Speaker 2: view Zizz as a friend, comes out and admits what
Speaker 2: she did, and Ziz responds by saying, the only way
Speaker 2: you can make this right is to murder your like
Speaker 2: girlfriend ex girlfriends. A little unclear, Alice Monday, my old
Speaker 2: mentor like, you have to kill this person for me
Speaker 2: in order to make this right. Here's what Jamie writes.
Speaker 2: During her last phone call, Ziz informed me that the
Speaker 2: only way I could gain her trust and make up
Speaker 2: for what I did was to murder Alice, preferably sometime soon.
Speaker 2: Ziz helpfully suggested I use a gun with a potato
Speaker 2: as a makeshift suppressor, and that I might destroy the
Speaker 2: body with lie, and then told me that after I
Speaker 2: should video call Ziz and show her the body before
Speaker 2: I destroy it so she could get proof bositive that
Speaker 2: I'd really done it, and if I didn't do it,
Speaker 2: Ziz plan to drive across the entire entire continental United
Speaker 2: States to murder me.
Speaker 3: Great, the di is cast, the die is cast. Now shit.
Speaker 2: Jamie says that Ziz wants Alice dead because she thinks
Speaker 2: Alice is a mentor and she's got this whole Sith
Speaker 2: thing going on, so she's like, guess with the sith
Speaker 2: always kill their mentor. So I have to kill Alice
Speaker 2: or I can't get powerful enough to.
Speaker 3: Save the world. Great, it's crazy.
Speaker 2: I love philosophy, A story that has escalated so crazy
Speaker 2: it is wild to hear it, where it's like, okay,
Speaker 2: this is where, this is where it starts the wheel
Speaker 2: start to really this is where that border patrol officer's
Speaker 2: death becomes inevitable.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because now you feel like us backed herself into
Speaker 3: a corner where someone's going to die. Yes, someone like
Speaker 3: talking about it. You're threatening it, seriously, you're telling it like,
Speaker 3: at this point, right is someone this is going to happen?
Speaker 2: At this point if outside power comes in to disrupt
Speaker 2: these thought chains and decision chains, someone is going to die.
Speaker 2: And no one does come in, right, and several people die?
Speaker 3: I mean, how could it someone rationally even? How could I?
Speaker 3: How could right? How could how could someone even get there?
Speaker 3: How do you think about.
Speaker 2: You think about something like fifty one, fifty this this
Speaker 2: fluttershy person, right or fifty or fifties?
Speaker 1: Is?
Speaker 3: Does that make it better? Probably not?
Speaker 2: Probably just makes them even more paranoid and angry and
Speaker 2: convince to do violence.
Speaker 3: You're like eleventh assassination.
Speaker 2: I don't know how you fix this at this point.
Speaker 3: No, No, it's it's it might be is I think
Speaker 3: it might be too far gone?
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's there's I'm sure there's some possible way that
Speaker 2: this could have been fixed, but it's not clear to.
Speaker 3: Me, and who who would be the person, doesn't right,
Speaker 3: who would be the person to do it? Maybe get
Speaker 3: George Lucas in there. George yes, Oh my god, that's.
Speaker 2: So so Ladies have taken your movies way too seriously.
Speaker 2: We need George sound and talk them out of committing murders.
Speaker 3: This is gonna sound crazy. There's a bunch of people
Speaker 3: in a box truck wanting to kill in your name.
Speaker 3: Get Ricky Gervase.
Speaker 2: Get Ricky Gervas and George Lucas on a fun chopper,
Speaker 2: get him in here on a black They gotta talk
Speaker 2: these people down.
Speaker 3: Oh shit, fuck, oh man, it's so funny.
Speaker 2: Just a week later, George Lucas is completely in the cult.
Speaker 2: He's wearing all black.
Speaker 3: He's living no no, no, no. So he's writing. It's
Speaker 3: not even fan fiction. He's writing canonical.
Speaker 2: Stars, writing canonical star wars. Ponder that and ponder these ads,
Speaker 2: my friends. We'll be back with more. So we're back now.
Speaker 2: Jamie is one of the few people who is like
Speaker 2: as good at manipulating zizz as zizz at other people
Speaker 2: in this community. And after zis is like, hey, look
Speaker 2: very high mana this is like, look, I'll have to
Speaker 2: kill you if you don't kill Alice, you know, and
Speaker 2: you know I'll do it because it's a timeless decision.
Speaker 2: Jamie counters in a very effective way by saying, like
Speaker 2: making a blog post saying Ziz said all this, I
Speaker 2: am not suicidal. If I die, it's her, and also
Speaker 2: letting Ziz know quote I have friends who will avenge me.
Speaker 2: Murdering Alice or me now is tantamount to committing suicide
Speaker 2: by proxy. So they have this like checkmate counter checkmate,
Speaker 2: chess match in blog posts that gets interrupted in March
Speaker 2: when Gwynn fakes her death, probably to escape the litigation,
Speaker 2: they're all.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Gwinn, get out of here.
Speaker 2: Gwinn does make the good decision because sometime after faking
Speaker 2: her death she bounces from this whole community. She does
Speaker 2: get out of there.
Speaker 3: Okay, there was just.
Speaker 1: No way this story was going to end without a
Speaker 1: deaf somebody faking their own death.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Sophie, so excited for you. This story doesn't
Speaker 2: even end. This story like Late middles with two death fakings,
Speaker 2: because in September of twenty twenty two, Zizz fakes her
Speaker 2: death in a boding accident on the Black Signet. Emma
Speaker 2: calls the cops says that she fell overboard the Coastguard.
Speaker 2: They work so hard to try to find her and
Speaker 2: save her that they get fatigue waivers so they can
Speaker 2: work all night. But they find nothing because she's not dead.
Speaker 3: On the block signal.
Speaker 2: I don't know where she actually was, but she doesn't.
Speaker 2: She's not dead. Zizz is declared dead and her of
Speaker 2: her family prints an obituary. Like Gwinn's death, faking is
Speaker 2: a little less successful. Like their lawyer in court after
Speaker 2: they come in with legal evidence that Zizz is dead.
Speaker 2: Gwin's law here is like, I really don't think they're dead.
Speaker 2: I think they're faking it.
Speaker 1: What an a lawyer.
Speaker 2: These lawyers don't like they don't like their lawyers.
Speaker 1: Well, now that's where they fucked up. You can't your
Speaker 1: lawyer has to ride for you.
Speaker 2: Yeah that look l Ron, who knows what they're talking about?
Speaker 2: These people at this this is what's going on. The
Speaker 2: sanest decision one of them is made is to fake
Speaker 2: their death.
Speaker 3: More lawyers in this story, maybe maybe a couple of lawyers.
Speaker 3: A digital could have fixed this.
Speaker 2: So I don't know precisely the lawyer money. No, these
Speaker 2: are these are public defenders. So Gwynn clearly fakes their
Speaker 2: death just to clear themselves of their legal problems. I
Speaker 2: think does it for that, But also she and her
Speaker 2: closest friends are now plotting the murder of Curtis Lynde.
Speaker 3: We don't really, Yeah, that's the la now.
Speaker 2: They want to kill Curtis, Yes, yes, they want to
Speaker 2: kill Curtism.
Speaker 3: They want to stay on the land? Is that the
Speaker 3: kind of the thought.
Speaker 2: I think they want to stay on the land. I
Speaker 2: think they also their escalation logic is that if he
Speaker 2: is having the Cops evict us, that is a situation
Speaker 2: that could end in our deaths. So he's trying to
Speaker 2: murder us, so the logical thing for us to do
Speaker 2: is to kill him now to protect us both from
Speaker 2: him and from other people, and.
Speaker 3: Then has sex with his body. I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't think they're going to do that, but they
Speaker 2: are at least aware of that as an option.
Speaker 3: So the team.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So the reality of what happens next is a
Speaker 2: little bit in dispute. But what no one disagrees is
Speaker 2: that on November thirteenth, twenty twenty two, this is like
Speaker 2: right after midnight, Curtis Lynde is stabbed repeatedly and impaled
Speaker 2: with a samurai sword. He also, during the same altercation,
Speaker 2: shoots and kills Imma Borhanian and wounds another member of
Speaker 2: the group. And one Tumblr post, a Zizion with the
Speaker 2: username A Flower by another Name gives what I think
Speaker 2: is probably a representative example of how the Zizians want
Speaker 2: to depict what happened next. What happened here kurt quote,
Speaker 2: Curtis Lynde and his ex CIA best friend Patrick McMillan
Speaker 2: spent months threatening Emma and her friends. Unlike what the
Speaker 2: papers claim, Emma and her friends weren't squatters. They were
Speaker 2: tenants who were struggling to find jobs or a place
Speaker 2: that would least to them after Mierkan Seafar called a
Speaker 2: swat team on them in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 3: Now, I don't know.
Speaker 2: If McMillan was in the CIA, and I don't know
Speaker 2: if he and Curtis threatened these ladies, but I will
Speaker 2: say the preponderance of evidence suggests they were in fact squatting.
Speaker 2: This account blames them on not being able to make
Speaker 2: rent on their legal bills, but by this point they
Speaker 2: had been squatting for like two years in change. I
Speaker 2: don't know if Lynde was transphobic, I don't know.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: They say he alienated them from their neighbors by telling
Speaker 2: them that they were in a cult. I don't know
Speaker 2: if that's true, or if they alienated their neighbors by
Speaker 2: being very off putting and aggressive. This Zizian account claims
Speaker 2: that other individuals started threatening to call the cops on
Speaker 2: the Zizians and thus quote it was an unending nightmare
Speaker 2: for them of terrifying, insane threats from every corner. Now,
Speaker 2: the author of this document says they weren't there themselves,
Speaker 2: but believes heard, like other members of the community, explain
Speaker 2: what happened, and they said that lynd made specific threats
Speaker 2: in the fall of twenty twenty two, which culminated in
Speaker 2: one member of the group buying a bulletproof veest and
Speaker 2: wearing it at all times. I don't trust this account,
Speaker 2: and among other things, it lies about the nature of
Speaker 2: their living situation. It lies by saying Emma had filed
Speaker 2: paperwork to take Curtis to court over the eviction. There
Speaker 2: was no court thing filed here. There's a very good
Speaker 2: comprehensive source on this by an individual who goes by
Speaker 2: Ken the Cowboy on Twitter, and he notes in this
Speaker 2: timeline of events, the last sentence is not true. There's
Speaker 2: no record of any lawsuit being filed in twenty twenty
Speaker 2: two with any of the Zizians as plaintiffs and with
Speaker 2: Curtis Lynde as a defendant. So they claim basically, this
Speaker 2: guy was aggressive and threatening us, and one day he
Speaker 2: attacked us, right quote. That morning he decided to stop them.
Speaker 2: He walked all the way from his trailer to their
Speaker 2: trucks while they were packing their things and opened fire.
Speaker 2: Lynde shot Emma point blank through her heart and lung.
Speaker 2: She collapsed to the ground and immediately her lung began
Speaker 2: filling with her heart's blood. She died within twenty seconds,
Speaker 2: violently coughing up chunks of her lung tissue and a
Speaker 2: feutal attempt to clear her airways. Soomny was shot six
Speaker 2: times rushing in a fetal attempt to save Emma's life.
Speaker 2: The vest saved her life, but she was still hit
Speaker 2: through the neck and stomach. She acted only in self defense.
Speaker 2: That's the Zizzian claim here, that he just walks in
Speaker 2: as they're getting ready to leave and starts shooting them, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's stupid, now, that's their claim. This leaves out a
Speaker 2: very important fact, which is that Curtis Linde is stabbed
Speaker 2: fifty times.
Speaker 3: Fifteen.
Speaker 2: Yes, Lind's account is somewhat less sympathetic to these people.
Speaker 2: He claims that after getting successfully getting a judgment against
Speaker 2: them in a court, he moved to a vict and
Speaker 2: the sheriff agreed to do an eviction on November fifteenth.
Speaker 2: And this is what Lynn later said, quote so they're
Speaker 2: worried about where they were going to go and what
Speaker 2: they were going to do. And they had a meeting
Speaker 2: with me, and the meeting was about them staying for
Speaker 2: another two months and not paying I said, no, I
Speaker 2: can't do that. So one of them took out a knife.
Speaker 2: It was a folding knife. It was a fairly large
Speaker 2: folding knife. It started patting the blade in their hand
Speaker 2: like this and looking at me and smiling. And they
Speaker 2: don't specify who this was. I don't know, like you
Speaker 2: know entirely, like which person he's accusing here or whatever.
Speaker 2: But he says this is how his account of like
Speaker 2: the attack itself is that after this, after he gets
Speaker 2: threatened with a knife, he goes in he buys a
Speaker 2: pistol and he gets a license to carry, and then
Speaker 2: right before the sheriffs are supposed to show up to
Speaker 2: evict them, one of the Zizians named Surrey shows up
Speaker 2: and she tries to get him to like come help
Speaker 2: turn the water off and her trailer. So he goes
Speaker 2: over to there to turn the water off, and as
Speaker 2: he bins over to do that, he gets hit with
Speaker 2: something that shatters the right side of his skull quote
Speaker 2: And the next thing I remember is standing up with
Speaker 2: three of them right next to me, you know, or
Speaker 2: around me, And I was bleeding from numerous puncture wounds,
Speaker 2: I think around fifty. I couldn't see out of my
Speaker 2: right eye, had been punctured three times. The back of
Speaker 2: my neck had some severe cuts, like someone was trying
Speaker 2: to cut my head off. You know, I had no
Speaker 2: idea what was happening or when this had all happened.
Speaker 2: I was completely gone while this was happening. And how
Speaker 2: I stood back up or got to that spot, I
Speaker 2: have no idea. But I looked at all the blood
Speaker 2: coming out of me. Oh, and I had a sword,
Speaker 2: a long sword all the way through my chest right
Speaker 2: next to my heart, sticking out the other end, which
Speaker 2: I went to the hospital with. I was afraid to
Speaker 2: take it out, but anyway, at that time, I pulled
Speaker 2: out my pistol and started shooting. I killed the person
Speaker 2: to my right. And I gotta say, based on the
Speaker 2: physical evidence, I think Lind's account is the real one
Speaker 2: of what happens here. I think they ambush him and
Speaker 2: stab him repeatedly, and he shoots and kills one in
Speaker 2: self defense. Obvious, Like again, he has a samurai sword
Speaker 2: entirely through his bed.
Speaker 3: We acknowledge that this meant took fifty to the chest eighty. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it don't make him like that anymore.
Speaker 2: And it's one of those one of the doubting claims
Speaker 2: by the Zizians is that, like, he couldn't have survived
Speaker 2: being stabbed this many times. People survive getting stabbed a
Speaker 2: crazy amount of times all the time. It's all like,
Speaker 2: if you read about enough stabbing accounts, you will read
Speaker 2: about people who die because they get stabbed once, and
Speaker 2: you will read about people who live through getting like
Speaker 2: seventy stab wounds. It's nuts. Stabbings are very hard to predict.
Speaker 3: Tricky, tricky, yeah, And also it's also so worrisome because
Speaker 3: now they've done it, right, They've crossed that line.
Speaker 2: They've crossed that line, and one of them has died.
Speaker 3: Right, Yes, some steaks are as high as they had
Speaker 3: always thought that they were.
Speaker 2: And when the box trucks are cleaned out after they
Speaker 2: get arrested, the ones who had carried out the attack,
Speaker 2: because Ziz is on the property and I think Winn
Speaker 2: is too still at this point, but Ziz does not
Speaker 2: participate in the attack, and like cops recognize Ziz and
Speaker 2: know that she's faking her death and don't arrest her,
Speaker 2: which is one of like the weird things.
Speaker 3: Like they're familiar enough to know that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think this is that because like they've been
Speaker 2: called before. Yeah, I think that they're aware of who
Speaker 2: she is, but just don't do even after this mass
Speaker 2: stabbing shooting. Like again, the cops just don't do their jobs. Also,
Speaker 2: as part of this story, you know, it's a It's
Speaker 2: also worth noting that when they this after this arrest,
Speaker 2: when like their box trucktsure being cleaned out, they find
Speaker 2: tubes of containers of lie, which you know, Ziz had
Speaker 2: talked to Jamie about dissolving bodies and lie. That's probably
Speaker 2: what the plan was with Curtis. My guess is that's
Speaker 2: certainly what Curtis gets convinced of. Now my thinking and
Speaker 2: I can't this is not proven. I'm sure courts will try,
Speaker 2: will see how well they are able to do this
Speaker 2: in a court. My suspicion is that Ziz orchestrated this
Speaker 2: attack and convinced her friends to do it, or convinced
Speaker 2: them to convince themselves to do it, and justified it
Speaker 2: using the same escalatory logic that they used on everything else.
Speaker 2: On her blog, when discussing theoretical acts of deadly violence,
Speaker 2: Ziz referred to what she called Quirrel's algorithm from the
Speaker 2: Harry Potter Rationalist fan pick that these people all love,
Speaker 2: and she quoted this line from the book describing the
Speaker 2: mental state she believed was necessary to survive a life
Speaker 2: threatening situation, intent to kill, think purely of killing, grasp
Speaker 2: at any means to do so, censors off, do not flinch, kill.
Speaker 3: Again. This Harry Potter book really now goes all the
Speaker 3: way back to that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, be careful what you write, authors, You might get
Speaker 2: someone st impaled by a samurai. Sort of course they had,
Speaker 2: of course they had a samurai sword. I'm sure they
Speaker 2: bought them all from the Budkay catalog.
Speaker 3: So Ziz had.
Speaker 2: Also written in late twenty twenty one in a comment
Speaker 2: on her blog, I get so many people lining up
Speaker 2: to commit suicide by Ziz and then she hyperlinks to
Speaker 2: the wiki for suicide by cop and her meaning is
Speaker 2: that anyone acting in a way to like harm her
Speaker 2: or her goals is killing themselves because she has to
Speaker 2: kill them now.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: And there's a good medium post by someone named Sepha
Speaker 2: Shapiro that traces around how this time, how around this time,
Speaker 2: this is online writing becomes increasingly obsessed with the idea
Speaker 2: of using deadly violence to make oneself less vulnerable, right,
Speaker 2: that you again, you have to always be ready to
Speaker 2: kill in order to protect yourself. So the police arrest
Speaker 2: two of her friends, Somny and Surrey Dow, who are
Speaker 2: the two surviving Zizians who'd taken part in the attack,
Speaker 2: and they take them to jail. Per a California law,
Speaker 2: these two are not just charged with trying to kill Curtis,
Speaker 2: but with the murder of their friend Emma. It's like
Speaker 2: if you know three people rob a liquor store and
Speaker 2: one of them kills someone, the other two will get
Speaker 2: charged with murder because someone died in the commission of
Speaker 2: a crime that they were involved in. Right, it's California
Speaker 2: state law. A lot of people get life sentences as
Speaker 2: a result of this, usually not in this exact scenario,
Speaker 2: but non.
Speaker 3: Usually not.
Speaker 2: Soomny was placed in a men's jail and complained dow
Speaker 2: after being a sign into a women's jail, demanded a
Speaker 2: men's jail. I think this is because they were trying
Speaker 2: to like make a case that they weren't in their
Speaker 2: right mind. But it's kind of unclear to me exactly
Speaker 2: why this happens. There's a lot in terms of these
Speaker 2: two and their interactions with the court system that I'm
Speaker 2: not gonna get into, right because it's it's just we
Speaker 2: simply can't go down all of those rabbit holes. But
Speaker 2: you should know that, like the like this is a factor,
Speaker 2: and everyone's thinking is, like their two friends are in prison,
Speaker 2: they're constantly sending these letters to the judge. They're like
Speaker 2: making these like weird rationalist arguments in their court cases,
Speaker 2: and like that's all going down while Zizz and the
Speaker 2: remainder of her inner circle kind of go on the run, right,
Speaker 2: because you know, now they've been involved in a murder, right,
Speaker 2: Gwynn seems to go go fully into hiding at this time.
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's because of the murder or
Speaker 2: just because she had finally had enough of Ziz and
Speaker 2: all of her talk about killing, but in any case,
Speaker 2: she goes to ground around this point. Now, well, all
Speaker 2: this is going on, I hate to keep bringing in
Speaker 2: new people, but there's a bunch of them. Jamie up
Speaker 2: in Vermont, I don't think is continuing to seeing Alice
Speaker 2: Monday anymore. Alice seems to have also made the wise
Speaker 2: decision to fucking bounce and go to ground. Jamie is
Speaker 2: living with another Ziz follower named Daniel Blank up in
Speaker 2: Vermont at this point, and Jamie has gotten increasingly into
Speaker 2: Ziz's ideas. Blank is one of the people we know.
Speaker 2: He delivers several documents to the court Onsomny's behalf during
Speaker 2: this whole, like after they go get charged with murder,
Speaker 2: and he is like a guy who has like a
Speaker 2: job and you know, stuff going on in his life.
Speaker 2: And then like a month after this shooting stabbing, he
Speaker 2: drops out of society, cuts ties with his family, and
Speaker 2: quits his job to go live with Jamie and like,
Speaker 2: it's kind of a little unclear of exactly what's happening,
Speaker 2: but my belief is basically Jamie and the people who
Speaker 2: are around her who are up in Vermont, who are Zizians,
Speaker 2: are being before Ziz gets They're told to prepare for
Speaker 2: Ziz because they want to get access to money and
Speaker 2: a private property, a compound right where they can both
Speaker 2: not be on the run, have a living space and
Speaker 2: continue to work on their ideas. That is what I
Speaker 2: think is happening. And Daniel blank is someone who has
Speaker 2: been following Ziz online, gets convinced to drop out of
Speaker 2: his life, cut ties with everybody move in with this
Speaker 2: person Jamie, and it looks like they're cient kind of
Speaker 2: working to like ready a situation for Ziz and the
Speaker 2: Zizzians in Vermont. And again there's a lot of this
Speaker 2: that has not been litigated yet, but what we know
Speaker 2: is that on December thirty first, twenty twenty two, Jamie's
Speaker 2: Ashco's parents, who are seventy two and sixty nine respectively,
Speaker 2: are murdered in their home.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, I do on the property in Vermont.
Speaker 2: They know they live in a separate state. They live
Speaker 2: in Pennsylvania. Right, But we don't know who committed this murder.
Speaker 2: No one has yet been charged for it. Unlike in
Speaker 2: the Lend stabbing, we do not have an obvious explanation.
Speaker 2: There is a ring that shows an unknown vehicle pulling
Speaker 2: into the driveway, followed by screams. Some investigators think they
Speaker 2: hear someone yell mom before another person yells oh my god,
Speaker 2: Oh my god. But other people who have viewed the
Speaker 2: recording say that it's unclear if that first word is mom.
Speaker 2: I have not seen this recording, so I can't tell
Speaker 2: you what's accurate. But Zashko's parents were worth several million
Speaker 2: dollars and had a sizeable estate to inherent.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you said that she had bought the property initially
Speaker 3: off of family money.
Speaker 2: Right, she's got some amount of access to it, right,
Speaker 2: and her last right before these people are murdered. Jamie's
Speaker 2: mom messages with Jamie earlier that same day about savings
Speaker 2: bonds that Zashco is due to receive. In blog posts
Speaker 2: from twenty twenty one, Zashco had written about her parents
Speaker 2: and repeatedly accused them of being abusers. One specific accusation
Speaker 2: she makes is that they snuck meat into her food
Speaker 2: and forced her to eat it after she expressed a
Speaker 2: desire to go vegan. So she has talked extensively online
Speaker 2: about her parents being fundamentally evil people. We know that
Speaker 2: at this point she lives with Daniel Blank, and that
Speaker 2: their phones go dark right around the time of the murder,
Speaker 2: as if they had like placed them in a faraday bag.
Speaker 2: Basically okay, right, but we don't know where they are
Speaker 2: on the day of the murder. Police visit them in
Speaker 2: Vermont shortly after the murder because obviously the daughter is
Speaker 2: someone that you're going to think of as a potential like,
Speaker 2: because one of the things about the murder is that
Speaker 2: whoever did it had some degree of knowledge of the
Speaker 2: property and an ability to get on it without forcing
Speaker 2: an entry. Right, So obviously the cops they're going to think,
Speaker 2: who's the next of Ken, Right, So police visit them
Speaker 2: on their property in Vermont and talk to Blank and
Speaker 2: Jamie Jamie. They ask if she has a gun. Jamie
Speaker 2: says yes, and she shows them a handgun that she
Speaker 2: owns that is the same caliber as the one used
Speaker 2: in the shootings. Now that doesn't necessarily mean much. It's
Speaker 2: a nine milimeter ton of nine.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: There's one thing the cops will point out is that
Speaker 2: Zasco owned the same type of bullet, the same makeup
Speaker 2: bullet as those used in the shooting. But again, like
Speaker 2: I the bullets I use keeping my carry gun are hydroshocks,
Speaker 2: which is like what cops can because that's the safest
Speaker 2: thing in court if you're in a defensive shooting. You
Speaker 2: want to be like, I have the same bullets the
Speaker 2: cops have, right, because you don't want to have like
Speaker 2: the the man shredder, zombie rounds or some shit. So
Speaker 2: the fact that like a common defensive caliber would murdered
Speaker 2: these people was in the gun. That's not a smoking gun,
Speaker 2: if you'll forgive it. But it also is like that's
Speaker 2: not nothing either, right, you know, like that's not nothing.
Speaker 3: Right. What means more.
Speaker 2: Is that Jamie is now the full beneficiary of her parents' estate,
Speaker 2: and while she has not been charged, an attorney for
Speaker 2: Pennsylvania has filed a potential slayer statute issue, which is
Speaker 2: a law in Pennsylvania that you can't inherit someone's stuff
Speaker 2: if you kill them. Right, But again, they haven't been charged.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of suspicious shit about this. She also
Speaker 2: lies to a relatives claiming she couldn't have driven to
Speaker 2: Pennsylvania from Vermont because you didn't have a working car,
Speaker 2: and we know she did, so.
Speaker 3: You know, yeah, it's it's very suspicious over it.
Speaker 2: I don't think it's unlikely that she may have been
Speaker 2: basically tasked with killing her parents to get access to
Speaker 2: her money for the cause, their money for the cause, right,
Speaker 2: that's kind of my suspicion, you know. And she was
Speaker 2: partly told it was okay because they're abusive and so like,
Speaker 2: you maybe have to do this in order to protect
Speaker 2: yourself and other people from abusers, which is a kind
Speaker 2: of logic they have too. On January thirteenth, right after midnight,
Speaker 2: Pennsylvania State troopers raid a hotel near the Philadelphia Airport
Speaker 2: where Blank and Zashko are staying. A Vermont judge had
Speaker 2: issued a warrant for their home, but the police had
Speaker 2: not found the gun they believed was the murder weapon.
Speaker 2: They touched that weapon when they're in Vermont, but they
Speaker 2: don't have a warrant for it, right, so they don't
Speaker 2: get to take it. Zashko was detained and the only
Speaker 2: one and would have been the only one detained if
Speaker 2: she hadn't shouted to hotel staff as they're taking her away,
Speaker 2: tell Daniel in room one A Leffenheim being arrested, so that.
Speaker 3: Damn smooth, smooth.
Speaker 2: These rationalists and they're brilliant crimes oh obviously get interested
Speaker 2: in this. And they recognize Daniel's name and they find
Speaker 2: on surveillance footage that she has handed a bag to
Speaker 2: him outside of his room in the night before, right,
Speaker 2: And they recognize his name because they visited Zashkoh and
Speaker 2: Blank and the Vermont home. So they get a warrant
Speaker 2: for his hotel room and rate it. Like an hour
Speaker 2: or two later, Blank is found in the bathroom next
Speaker 2: to a blonde person dressed in black.
Speaker 3: This is Ziz so.
Speaker 2: Oh right, yeah uh. An article by the San Francisco
Speaker 2: Chronicle explains what happened next. Blank put his hands behind
Speaker 2: his back and walked out of the room, obeying police commands.
Speaker 2: But Ziz did not do any of that. He had
Speaker 2: his eyes closed. A trooper testified, using masculine pronouns. He
Speaker 2: would not speak. He was just laying almost unconscious or
Speaker 2: as if he was dead on the ground. He had
Speaker 2: to be carried out again. This is I don't know
Speaker 2: if it's intentional or if Ziz was like acting and
Speaker 2: like portraying themselves as masculine because they're on the run.
Speaker 2: You know, at this point in time, that's not actually
Speaker 2: clear to me. Whatever the case, Ziz is taken into
Speaker 2: custody and charged with disorderly conduct and interfering with a
Speaker 2: police investigation. A nine millimeter handgun was found in the
Speaker 2: room along with AMMO. Forty thousand dollars in cash is
Speaker 2: found in Zashko Subaru, and again, she doesn't get charged
Speaker 2: with murder. They let her out very soon and she
Speaker 2: just leaves. The cops are shot because sheet they have
Speaker 2: to give her back her car and the forty grand
Speaker 2: which she abandons. She and Blake just leave the car
Speaker 2: and forty thousand dollars in cash. I don't think they're
Speaker 2: making good decisions at this point, is my only explanation
Speaker 2: for you, David. How Maybe it's that they're thinking, like, well,
Speaker 2: they put a tracker in the money, they'll track the car.
Speaker 3: It's not safe to have any of it.
Speaker 2: I don't know why they're making this decision, but it's
Speaker 2: very weird right.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: During this same time, several other Zisians are at least
Speaker 2: suspected to have been coming in and out of like
Speaker 2: Pennsylvania during the area around the murder. It is unclear
Speaker 2: how many people if they were If the Zizians killed
Speaker 2: this husband and wife, it's unclear how many of them
Speaker 2: were there. And again no one has been charged. But
Speaker 2: it's at this point that another Zizian enters the playing field.
Speaker 2: This person goes by the name Ophelia. They are a
Speaker 2: German citizen. They have like a legal residency in the US.
Speaker 2: Their last name is Bachholt. They used to work at
Speaker 2: James Street or Jane Street, which is where Sam Bankman
Speaker 2: Freed work. They're a quant trader, right, So this is
Speaker 2: someone functioning at a high level of the finance industry
Speaker 2: who like drops out of their career and life to
Speaker 2: go to Vermont hours like really like they fly in
Speaker 2: like right before the murders.
Speaker 3: That's such a troubling theme about this whole thing, about
Speaker 3: how many of these people really do integrate in a
Speaker 3: major Like it's not just like fringe people.
Speaker 2: No, these are people who are successful in their other lives,
Speaker 2: but they're lacking. I think a lot of this is
Speaker 2: just that desperation that is also core to like fascism's
Speaker 2: appeal to feel like a sense of heroism, like I
Speaker 2: am part of a heroic struggle. People are very vulnerable
Speaker 2: to that. And even if if you're making the money,
Speaker 2: if you're succeeding at a tech company or in finance,
Speaker 2: but it all feels empty to you because it kind
Speaker 2: of is if someone's like, you can save the cosmos. Yeah,
Speaker 2: here's maybe you'll give up your whole life in order
Speaker 2: to do that.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So Blanke AND's ashcoh are released in short order,
Speaker 2: as I said, they get out of jail quickly, but
Speaker 2: Ziz stays in custody for a while, and Baylis said,
Speaker 2: I think at fifty thousand initially, are.
Speaker 3: They aware of the fake death and everything it does?
Speaker 2: Yes, they are where she has faked her death. California
Speaker 2: shows no interest in sending police app to get her,
Speaker 2: which is like it is a crime. This is the
Speaker 2: bail is set very high for two misdemeanors, and police
Speaker 2: justify it in like the court documents by saying Ziz
Speaker 2: had recklessly created a dangerous situation by making the police
Speaker 2: move her. Per that argument, that article and Wired quote
Speaker 2: behind these arguments and even the charges themselves lay a
Speaker 2: deeper motive. Unable to charge for the Zasco murders, but
Speaker 2: suspecting that Lesoda, Michelle Zashkoh that's Jamie and Danielle Blank
Speaker 2: and daniel Blank could be tied to them. Prosecutors were
Speaker 2: trying desperately to hold Lesoda while the police gathered evidence. Obviously,
Speaker 2: you realize we don't give a shit about this case.
Speaker 2: One local official familiar with it told me what they
Speaker 2: were interested in was Lesoda's involvement in the homicide. So
Speaker 2: the authorities here have recognized this is all centered around
Speaker 2: this person, but it's very difficult for us to hold
Speaker 2: them legally responsible.
Speaker 3: At this stage.
Speaker 2: We can't even arrest anyone for the murder yet we
Speaker 2: don't have enough, and you know it's it's I'm not
Speaker 2: gonna again pretend to know precisely what happened, but I
Speaker 2: think it's pretty clear Ziz probably gave the order to
Speaker 2: do this killing or everyone using her logic talk themselves
Speaker 2: into well, this is the only way to further our
Speaker 2: crucially important work. Is we need the money that these
Speaker 2: abusers are selfishly keeping to themselves. Jay Or Zizz's bail
Speaker 2: is eventually reduced. She winds up in the wind immediately,
Speaker 2: like the authorities are like, she's gotta immediately bounce and
Speaker 2: will lose her And that's exactly what happens. Zashkoh and Blank.
Speaker 2: It's kind of unclear exactly what they do initially after this,
Speaker 2: but we know Jamie reaches out to her aunt and
Speaker 2: begs for help, and her aunt is like, did you
Speaker 2: kill my sister? And Jamie says no and blames the
Speaker 2: murders on Less Wrong, which is a Liezer's like blog,
Speaker 2: so she's blaming the rationalist community. She claims that she's
Speaker 2: being targeted and that like Seafar had commit murdered her
Speaker 2: parents to like basically make Ziz look bad. A year
Speaker 2: or so goes by, right, Ziz misses a court date,
Speaker 2: she never shows back up. We really don't know what
Speaker 2: the fuck these people are doing for most of this period.
Speaker 2: In February of twenty twenty.
Speaker 3: Three, she's no longer blogging either.
Speaker 2: She's not no no, no, no no no.
Speaker 3: But she's still said she had stopped. She was just
Speaker 3: responding to people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and she is communicating with people still, but I
Speaker 2: think it's primarily through more like direct means. In February
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty three, a community alert is posted by
Speaker 2: someone named Sepha Shapiro. It warns that quote over the
Speaker 2: past few years, Ziz has repeatedly called for the deaths
Speaker 2: of many different classes of people, and this this post
Speaker 2: lays out a lot of what I've described in these episodes.
Speaker 2: But there's still no public awareness of the Zizzians. Everything
Speaker 2: happening here is so weird. The circumstances around them, around
Speaker 2: the murderers are so murky that like most law enforcement
Speaker 2: kind of shrugs it off, and there's not like a
Speaker 2: public These people are so fringe. It's very difficult to
Speaker 2: even talk about.
Speaker 3: Them right now. How do you qualify that on the
Speaker 3: nightly news?
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly, Yeah, this is all going to change. In
Speaker 2: Jewory of twenty twenty four, Jamie's Ashco purchases three handguns
Speaker 2: I think from a Vermont gun store. A few months later,
Speaker 2: in May of twenty twenty four, a twenty year old
Speaker 2: woman named Teresa Youngblud disappears from her home in Seattle.
Speaker 2: Young Blood is one of the scattered community of people
Speaker 2: who still obsessively followed and interacted with Ziz and her
Speaker 2: inner circle's teachings. Her parents feared that she was in
Speaker 2: a controlling relationship with someone, and months after disappearing, she
Speaker 2: applies for a marriage license with another rationalist who's obsessed
Speaker 2: with Ziz, named Maximilian Snyder. Now, like most Zizians, Snyder
Speaker 2: has a very impressive academic record. He was a National
Speaker 2: Merit scholar who attended Oxford University. Then he starts posting
Speaker 2: on Less Wrong like all the others. He is initially
Speaker 2: a fan of Yadkowski, but at some point he gets
Speaker 2: convinced that Ziz's vegan sith radicalism is the true path.
Speaker 2: In the summer of twenty twenty three, just months earlier,
Speaker 2: he won eleven thousand dollars from an AI alignment contest,
Speaker 2: and he won that award under his legal name, but
Speaker 2: he also goes by Audere. It's kind of unclear to
Speaker 2: me what the situation is there. Around the same time,
Speaker 2: he tried to raise money for Ziz when she was
Speaker 2: briefly behind bars. I don't know if this guy Snyder
Speaker 2: this person. If Snyder marries young Blood because they're actually
Speaker 2: in love. They had gone to high school together. But
Speaker 2: I think there may have been some sort of weird
Speaker 2: legal reason that Ziz wanted them married again very unclear,
Speaker 2: but they don't stay together physically very long. By January
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty five, Teresa is in Vermont looking at
Speaker 2: rural properties for purchase alongside Ophelia. The German quant trader
Speaker 2: right well, Max Snyder is in like California and reading
Speaker 2: between some lines. I think because Ophelia and Teresa aren't
Speaker 2: involved in any of the court cases, Ziz is using
Speaker 2: them to help actually scout out and find an isolated
Speaker 2: compound where they can hide out right like they are
Speaker 2: doing the groundwork of figuring out a place for them
Speaker 2: to live. They are acting as the legal individuals who
Speaker 2: can kind of handle everything for the folks who are
Speaker 2: legally compromised. Later investigation would show that Bachholt and young
Speaker 2: Blood had been leaving living in Chapel Hill, Vermont, in
Speaker 2: a duplex, and neighbors say that several other people also
Speaker 2: lived with them. These people were always dressed in black
Speaker 2: and owned a box truck. It is unclear, but I
Speaker 2: think what happens is after she goes in the run,
Speaker 2: Zi starts reaching out to people she'd been in contact
Speaker 2: with around the world and says, hey, the time has
Speaker 2: now drop out of your lives and come devote yourselves
Speaker 2: to the cause, right, Okay, And that these these three
Speaker 2: are the ones who follow Backholt, young Blood and Snyder right,
Speaker 2: because they all cut ties with their families, cut you know,
Speaker 2: with their jobs, and leave home around the same time.
Speaker 3: While they're looking.
Speaker 2: For rural prop compounds, Backholt and young Blood right wind
Speaker 2: up in a hotel in Lyndenville, Vermont. An employee reports
Speaker 2: them to the police because they're wearing body armor and
Speaker 2: other tactical gear and at least one of them is
Speaker 2: openly carrying a pistol. Something is very weird here because
Speaker 2: they're approached not just by Virginia State Police, but by
Speaker 2: a Homeland Security Investigations officer. And there's evidence that Homeland
Speaker 2: Security spends like a week, is surveilling them for like
Speaker 2: a week before the shootout that happens. I don't know
Speaker 2: what Homeland Security thought was happening. They may have just
Speaker 2: seen we're on the border. Obviously shit's escalated there. This
Speaker 2: isn't a foreign citizen with an American citizen. They're wrapping
Speaker 2: their electronics in tenfoil, they've got guns, they're driving around
Speaker 2: being very suspicious and tactical gear maybe they just thought
Speaker 2: it was like some run of the mill terrorism bullshit.
Speaker 3: It's worth checking out.
Speaker 2: Right, So they are surveilling these people, and I think
Speaker 2: young Blood and Bachholt realize they're being surveilled, right, and
Speaker 2: that starts that escalatory loop in their head of zizi
Speaker 2: and logic, where well, if the police confront me, there's
Speaker 2: only one way to respond.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Two days later, prosecutors in California ask the judge and
Speaker 2: the Curtis Lind case to speed up the process of
Speaker 2: going to trial. He's in his eighties, he's got a
Speaker 2: bad memory, and he's the only witness of the attacks.
Speaker 2: They say, it's necessary, we need to do this quickly.
Speaker 2: So the next day, January seventeenth, before this can happen,
Speaker 2: before Lynd can go to trial, a masked assailant assaults
Speaker 2: Lynd near his property and slits his throat, killing him.
Speaker 2: Maximilian Snyder, young Blood's husband, will be arrested days later
Speaker 2: in Reading, California for the murder.
Speaker 3: Fuck because they had been separate. Oh right, man, So
Speaker 3: there's like there's a possibility that says it's said.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't see what now he did not he
Speaker 2: hasn't pled yet, at least as the time we record this.
Speaker 2: But he sent the letter in jail to Alisa Hitkowski
Speaker 2: trying to make him become a vegan.
Speaker 3: He also priority is in order. Oh.
Speaker 2: He also claimed quote, I am not one of Zizz's friends.
Speaker 2: Neither she nor her friends endorse me or my words,
Speaker 2: so far as I know, I speak only for myself
Speaker 2: as myself for the sake of everyone. Sure, yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: hey man, you just decided to kill this guy for
Speaker 2: no reason.
Speaker 3: Who happened to happen to have a relationship with this
Speaker 3: very small group of people.
Speaker 2: You wis this person? He has filed for a marriage
Speaker 2: license with young Blood. The day after Lynde gets assassinated,
Speaker 2: young Blood and Bockolt are heading back from a trip
Speaker 2: out target shooting when they get pulled over by Border patrol.
Speaker 2: Young Blood almost immediately draws her side arm. There's a shootout.
Speaker 3: She killed or I think she kills.
Speaker 2: Now, anytime there's a shootout and an officer dies, a
Speaker 2: decent amount of the time that officer is like killed
Speaker 2: by another cops bullet. I don't actually know for sure
Speaker 2: if it was young Blo or if they all start
Speaker 2: shooting and he just gets killed. In the crossfire. I
Speaker 2: don't fully know whose gun kills him, but she definitely
Speaker 2: starts shooting right right, and Border Patrol agent David Mallin
Speaker 2: dies Bocholt is killed in the immediate shootout before she
Speaker 2: can draw away. And both of the firearms used in
Speaker 2: this shooting were guns purchased by Zadji by Jamie in
Speaker 2: early twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So again, all of these things are it's very easy
Speaker 2: to connect them if you like know all these people,
Speaker 2: it takes so long to trace out.
Speaker 3: For all their talk of murder, the in practice, they're
Speaker 3: not very good at it.
Speaker 2: Huh, No, I guess they. I mean, they didn't plan
Speaker 2: for this shooting to happen, right, It's just that their
Speaker 2: kind of escalatory logic made it inevitable. After all this,
Speaker 2: authorities finally start putting the whole story together. A man
Speaker 2: hunt is law launched in on February sixteenth of twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five. Ziz, Jamie, and Daniel Blank are finally caught.
Speaker 2: After the shootout, they seem to have started living in
Speaker 2: box trucks again, one of which was registered to young Blood.
Speaker 3: Yeah, back to.
Speaker 2: What you know, and again one of these is young Blood,
Speaker 2: like the box truck is registered in to her name.
Speaker 2: They pulled onto a property in Frostburg to camp, and
Speaker 2: the owner like spotted them and said, hey, get off
Speaker 2: my land, and like, Ziz tries to talk this person
Speaker 2: into letting them stay for a month, but he's like, no,
Speaker 2: I'm I'm gonna call the cops in a row m
Speaker 2: you look like a wizard. You don't need any of this. Ultimately,
Speaker 2: they all get arrested and charged with everything the cops
Speaker 2: could throw at them, which is like a legal possession,
Speaker 2: carrying a firearm, stuff like that. Right inside the other
Speaker 2: box trucks, state troopers found Jamie and Zizz, according to
Speaker 2: the charging documents, dressed all in black and wearing gun
Speaker 2: belts with ammunition. So yeah, and that's the situation where
Speaker 2: we are. Now, that's not the story's done. No, yeah,
Speaker 2: so this is basically where we are. Ziz asked for
Speaker 2: pre trial release, didn't get it. Not shocked about that
Speaker 2: quote speaking and this is from a Seattle PI article,
Speaker 2: speaking haltingly. She also requested a vegan diet and said
Speaker 2: that she was in a mild state of delirium due
Speaker 2: to lack of food. I have not done anything wrong,
Speaker 2: she told her, Judes, I might starve to death if
Speaker 2: you do not intervene. I need the jail to be
Speaker 2: ordered to have a vegan diet. It's more important than
Speaker 2: whatever this hearing is. So I don't think this whole
Speaker 2: court process is going to end super well for his No.
Speaker 2: But I also it's very hard to tell, like what
Speaker 2: do you what are you going to charge that? Like,
Speaker 2: I don't like I'm legitimately like very uh uh, Like
Speaker 2: I I'll be fascinated to see what the charges are here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's excited to know that this we can see
Speaker 3: this play out real time.
Speaker 2: I yeah, this was weird.
Speaker 3: Yeah, hell yeah I was great anyway, Like.
Speaker 1: I would like to know how things fucking shake up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well maybe we'll revisit this when my brain has healed.
Speaker 2: I need to go like read about Hitler some to
Speaker 2: calm down.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you need to go talk to your neighbor. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I need to go talk to my name.
Speaker 1: It's a better suggestion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not just keep reading my Hitler books and coming
Speaker 2: up with theories. That's how you get That's how you
Speaker 2: get double bad exactly.
Speaker 3: That's how it happens.
Speaker 1: You gotta go on a run, go talk to your day,
Speaker 1: brickle petigoat you know.
Speaker 2: Everyone else, Go go talk to somebody, you know, pet
Speaker 2: an animal, walk you know, in the woods or something.
Speaker 3: Maybe stay away from boats for a while, just to
Speaker 3: stay the fuck away from boats. Don't go live on
Speaker 3: a boat. Don't go live on a boat. Stay out
Speaker 3: of the water. I don't care about it. Rent to
Speaker 3: stand on the fucking water. Oh fuck wow. At the
Speaker 3: end of this, David, David, how you doing?
Speaker 1: This is your first experience on our show What's Up?
Speaker 3: I honestly don't know to tell you that. I don't
Speaker 3: know how I feel. I'm gonna have to I really
Speaker 3: gonna have to kick this around for a couple of
Speaker 3: day is But this is interesting. Yeah, interesting as hell.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's one way to describe it.
Speaker 3: That's one way to describe it.
Speaker 1: This is a wild time. David, you have any Do
Speaker 1: you have anything you want to plug for lot?
Speaker 3: Yeah. I produced my own comedy special. It's available on
Speaker 3: my Patreon, Patreon dot com backslash David Bori gb O
Speaker 3: r I E. It's called Birth of a Nation spelled
Speaker 3: with a G because that's my last name and I
Speaker 3: think it's funny. But yeah, I have a podcast, my
Speaker 3: Mama told me I also have one called All Fantasy Everything,
Speaker 3: where we draft fantasy things that aren't sports. But yeah,
Speaker 3: check that stuff out.
Speaker 1: Yes, ship, that sounds really cool.
Speaker 3: It's a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: That sounds so much better for you than everything we've
Speaker 2: talked about.
Speaker 1: It.
Speaker 3: It's different than this. It's different than this, and.
Speaker 1: It reminded me I need I need to set my
Speaker 1: fantasy basketball line up. So thank you sir all the time.
Speaker 2: It's time check it out, everybody. Uh, all right, that's uh,
Speaker 2: that's been the podcast. Don't don't do any of this,
Speaker 2: don't do any of the things in this in this episode,
Speaker 2: please bye bye.
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