Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Speaker 2: Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
Speaker 2: should know. This is I guess, a timely topical true
Speaker 2: crime edition The Three.
Speaker 1: T's CooA Alert. Yeah, I feel I should sound the
Speaker 1: clacks on on this one. Yeah, we'reishing a CoA on
Speaker 1: this one, A pretty a pretty robust one because a
Speaker 1: this is something we don't do a lot, which is
Speaker 1: tackle true crime and almost real time. As far as
Speaker 1: the fact that none of this is settled, the alleged crimes,
Speaker 1: We're probably gonna say alleged a lot because there's not
Speaker 1: even been court dates a lot of times for some
Speaker 1: of these cases where we're you know, we're talking about
Speaker 1: potentially six murders in three states by a group that
Speaker 1: may or may not have done it, that may or
Speaker 1: may not be a cult. So just a big CoA there.
Speaker 1: This is one of the true crimes where like neither
Speaker 1: one of us are going to be like, well, here's
Speaker 1: my theory on this, because just who knows, this has
Speaker 1: got to play out first, And the other big CoA
Speaker 1: is a lot of the sort of a disproportionate amount
Speaker 1: of members of the Zizians who are going to be
Speaker 1: talking about are members of the trans community. And it's
Speaker 1: just one of the sort of facts of the case.
Speaker 1: It's obviously no suggestion or judgment on our part of
Speaker 1: the trans community, but it seems to be a big
Speaker 1: sort of part of this group of people who got together.
Speaker 1: So just kind of keep all that in mind as
Speaker 1: we lay all this out there.
Speaker 2: Right, Nice word, Chuck, Thanks for that. Yeah, So, like
Speaker 2: you said, we're talking about the Zizzians. How do you
Speaker 2: hear about this? This is your pick, you know what.
Speaker 1: I have no idea and even went to look to
Speaker 1: see if somebody has suggested it, and no one had.
Speaker 1: I think I might have just seen a news story
Speaker 1: and been like, wait a minute, this is this is
Speaker 1: something that hasn't been attend Netflix series yet, right, so
Speaker 1: it must be super super current, which it is.
Speaker 2: My theory is that the Great Gazoo said doe on
Speaker 2: the Zizian's dome dome, and you were like, I should
Speaker 2: do one on the Zizzians.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks for bringing a joke into this thing.
Speaker 2: So the Zizians are called such because they center around Zizz,
Speaker 2: a trans woman who is often portrayed as the leader
Speaker 2: of this cult, and I mean you can make a
Speaker 2: pretty fair case that at the very least she's the
Speaker 2: leader of the most influential member, because the whole thing's
Speaker 2: named after her. Although we should say that this group
Speaker 2: of people do not call themselves the Zizians. That was
Speaker 2: a name that was given to them by somebody who's
Speaker 2: critical of them, an anonymous person who's critical of them.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But Zizz herself, we know, was born in nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: one in Fairbanks, Alaska, And like the other people that
Speaker 2: she attracts into her orbit, she was brilliant, I mean,
Speaker 2: very precocious as far as like working on computers goes,
Speaker 2: as far as mathematics goes. I think by the time
Speaker 2: she was at the University of Fairbanks in Alaska, she
Speaker 2: had internships at both Oracles, the cloud computing company, and NASA.
Speaker 2: So I mean like she had pretty great resume, I guess,
Speaker 2: is what you'd say if you're on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And like you said, this is going
Speaker 1: to be sort of a common thing with everyone who
Speaker 1: got together with Ziz and the others. So in college,
Speaker 1: Ziz started learning about what's called the rationalist movement or
Speaker 1: the rationalist community, which were also very science minded people.
Speaker 1: They kind of gathered around Silicon Valley. And one of
Speaker 1: the big things with rationalism is and a lot of
Speaker 1: this stuff makes sense, like a lot of the stuff
Speaker 1: that they're laying down, like, Hey, let's use logical tools
Speaker 1: to just always question ourselves. Let's not get set in
Speaker 1: our way of thinking about anything. Let's always revise what
Speaker 1: we're thinking about everything. And one of the key people here,
Speaker 1: one of the names you'll heal early and then later on,
Speaker 1: as a guy named Eliezer Yudkowski, who is an AI
Speaker 1: researcher who is kind of doing something different than what
Speaker 1: a lot of AI researchers are doing in that he
Speaker 1: has devoted much of his career to basically saying, hey, warning,
Speaker 1: this could really go wrong, and I'm going to do
Speaker 1: everything i can to make sure it goes down in
Speaker 1: the right way.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: He dedicated himself to solving the AI alignment problem, which is,
Speaker 2: how do you create an artificial intelligence whose motivations are
Speaker 2: totally aligned with humans and we don't accidentally wipe ourselves
Speaker 2: out with the AI we create. Yeah, and like you said,
Speaker 2: it kind of flies in the face of especially what's
Speaker 2: going on these days, which is like, hurry up and
Speaker 2: build an AI or else China's going to do it
Speaker 2: first and we're going to lose out, and there's so
Speaker 2: much money to be made off of AI. And Eliezer
Speaker 2: Yukowski is a very very interesting duties self taught AI researcher,
Speaker 2: incredibly brilliant and just by happenstance. I got an email
Speaker 2: yesterday from somebody at a publishing house that mentioned that
Speaker 2: he has a new book coming out in September with
Speaker 2: Nate Soors, one of his collaborators. It's called If Anyone
Speaker 2: Builds It, Everyone Dies, and it's about AI.
Speaker 1: Right, which doesn't have a whole lot to do with
Speaker 1: the Zizzians, but that just sets up kind of who
Speaker 1: this guy is. In two thousand and nine, he founded
Speaker 1: a blog called less Wrong, as in let's do less wrong,
Speaker 1: and I mean, I assume that's what it means.
Speaker 2: It means so it's about overcoming your biases, like you
Speaker 2: want to be less wrong kind of, it's all about
Speaker 2: thinking clearly and not letting your bias as guide you're thinking.
Speaker 2: I think, yeah.
Speaker 1: So they started gathering, as I guess, a de facto
Speaker 1: sort of community of rationalists. A lot of this, again
Speaker 1: is taking place in and around Silicon Valley in northern California,
Speaker 1: and he founded a couple of Berkeley, California based organizations
Speaker 1: that'll come into play. The Machine Intelligence Research Institute or MARY,
Speaker 1: and again that's about, you know, minimizing the risks of AI,
Speaker 1: and then the Center for Applied Rationality or ce FAR,
Speaker 1: and again same deal. Clear unbiased thinking is what they're after,
Speaker 1: never getting too set in your ways and always trying
Speaker 1: to revise how you think about things right.
Speaker 2: They're also very closely tied with effective altruism, which is
Speaker 2: essentially using rational thinking to donate your money to the
Speaker 2: greatest good. We did an episode on that, if I'm
Speaker 2: not mistaken.
Speaker 1: We did my friend.
Speaker 2: All of this attracted Ziz to move from Alaska down
Speaker 2: to the Bay Area in San Francisco, and she got
Speaker 2: involved with SEFAR, got involved with MIRY, and dedicated herself
Speaker 2: also to trying to figure out this AI alignment problem too.
Speaker 2: And she the thing about this rationalist community is they
Speaker 2: are as open as you can be. You can be
Speaker 2: a Nazi and show up and be like, I'm a
Speaker 2: Nazi and here's what I think about everything, and they
Speaker 2: will engage you in debate because that's just what they do.
Speaker 2: They like no thought processes off the table, and that
Speaker 2: attracted a lot of interesting people who were the average
Speaker 2: normy would probably not necessarily feel comfortable sitting in a
Speaker 2: room with just because you know, of awkwardness, but also
Speaker 2: because they probably wouldn't have much to converse about because
Speaker 2: the people were talking about in this rationalist community are
Speaker 2: so brilliant that they probably would not be able to
Speaker 2: relate to the average person and vice versa.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or at the very least on some of the
Speaker 1: radical fringes of whatever movement that they're in. Zizz is
Speaker 1: one of those people and was started writing on the
Speaker 1: less wrong side and her own blog and writing about again,
Speaker 1: stuff that's on the more radical end of the spectrum,
Speaker 1: like hey we got a you know, sort of a
Speaker 1: twelve Monkeys kind of stuff, like hey, we got to
Speaker 1: do whatever it takes. Some people might think, you know,
Speaker 1: something we're doing is evil, but if it's in the
Speaker 1: service of what we think has a good end, then
Speaker 1: that's what we should do. Sometimes she calls herself a
Speaker 1: scyth as in you know, star Wars, and apparently the
Speaker 1: name Zizz comes from a speculative fiction story called Worm
Speaker 1: that a lot of rationalists love, in which Zizz in
Speaker 1: the story is a villainous entity that if they listen
Speaker 1: to for too long, you will go crazy. And so
Speaker 1: Zizz is all of a sudden hanging around the Bay
Speaker 1: Area go into these rationalists hangouts and meetings wearing black robes,
Speaker 1: as in sort of dressed like a syth.
Speaker 2: So all this is what around twenty sixteen seventeen, that
Speaker 2: this is all starting, that Ziz is showing up. And again,
Speaker 2: like I said, this community is very open, so even
Speaker 2: those Ziz would show up wearing black robes, declaring yourself
Speaker 2: as Sith Lord and that that's her religion is Sith.
Speaker 2: But despite the community being open, she still stood out,
Speaker 2: not necessarily because she wore black robes and call herself
Speaker 2: the scyth, but more because she was more intensely devoted
Speaker 2: and dedicated than even the average rationalist, right, so she
Speaker 2: did stand out some. One of the other things that
Speaker 2: she was radically dedicated to was veganism and animal rights,
Speaker 2: and this would actually end up separating her from the
Speaker 2: rationalist community eventually, and that you can kind of make
Speaker 2: a case it seems like is the initial schism that
Speaker 2: causes wedge that led to all the events that would follow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like basically, hey, you're trying to protect human life,
Speaker 1: like what about the animals? Like every sentient animal is
Speaker 1: a person, and that these are resisious words, and you know,
Speaker 1: so we gotta kick up the the intensity on the
Speaker 1: animal front as well. The problem with all of this
Speaker 1: is that this was around San Francisco and Silicon Valley,
Speaker 1: where it's really really expensive to live. If you're someone
Speaker 1: like Zizz, You're not going out and getting some big
Speaker 1: tech job where you're making tons of money to afford
Speaker 1: that condo downtown. So you got to live somewhere. And
Speaker 1: this is when Zizz meets up with somebody named Gwen Danielson.
Speaker 1: Had a lot in common, another rationalist, another trans woman,
Speaker 1: another person who was very much into animal rights. And
Speaker 1: Gwen happened to live on a sailboat in Berkeley Marina
Speaker 1: and said, Hey, this is a much cheaper rent here.
Speaker 1: Why don't you just come and live on this boat
Speaker 1: with me. I'm also into math, I'm also into science,
Speaker 1: and I'm also have some pretty radical ideas about stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so the point of this was if you
Speaker 2: and this is Zizz's belief, if you could free yourself
Speaker 2: from things like paying rent, especially the high rent of
Speaker 2: San Francisco, and keep your cost down to as minimal
Speaker 2: as possible, you could devote that much more time to
Speaker 2: figuring out the AI alignment problem, figuring out how to
Speaker 2: push Sea Far and Miri into protecting animal rights too.
Speaker 2: Like just thinking and learning to think better. That was
Speaker 2: kind of the point. And so I think Ziz initially
Speaker 2: moved into the sailboat with Gwen Danielson, found that they
Speaker 2: were not quite exactly compatible roommate wise, but still friends,
Speaker 2: and so Ziz bought her own sailboat and docted it
Speaker 2: the same marina in Berkeley, and they became what was
Speaker 2: called the Rationalist Fleet. This they invited more and more
Speaker 2: people to come join them at the marina, and they
Speaker 2: actually went so far as to buy an old tugboat
Speaker 2: that by this time was in its seventies or eighties.
Speaker 2: Maybe they not a good age for a tugboat, and
Speaker 2: they actually bought it from Alaska and tugged it down
Speaker 2: or sailed it down all the way to San Francisco.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the name of the boat was Caleb. So now
Speaker 1: It's in Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco. And
Speaker 1: Caleb was a problem though. Cabb, like you said, was
Speaker 1: an old boat, an old World War Two era tugboat,
Speaker 1: So it wasn't like, you know, even like a a
Speaker 1: mid seventies houseboat would have been a better option. Probably
Speaker 1: this thing they couldn't. Had a hard time anchoring it.
Speaker 1: It was too expensive to maintain. It would drift out
Speaker 1: of control and hit other boats. So it was not,
Speaker 1: you know, everything they thought it was going to be,
Speaker 1: so just you know, sort of park that for now,
Speaker 1: I'm going to say that a lot through me parking
Speaker 1: a lot of things. As this jumps around is at
Speaker 1: this point, we have to introduce some new characters to
Speaker 1: the scene. Again, had a lot in common with Ziz
Speaker 1: and Gwenn in that they were very very smart, very
Speaker 1: much into math and science. Some were trends and some
Speaker 1: were non binary. And the first player here is someone
Speaker 1: named Emma Baranian, a programmer worked at Google but left
Speaker 1: Google because they thought the company was corrupt.
Speaker 2: Yes, and we should say these people fell into Ziz's
Speaker 2: orbit because Thisiz was a prolific blogger and blogged in
Speaker 2: a way that like a lot of the language and
Speaker 2: thoughts and ideas were impenetrable to all but a certain
Speaker 2: group of people. And these were the people that she
Speaker 2: ended up attracting through her blog. There's a really great
Speaker 2: Guardian article about all of this written by Alliver Conroy,
Speaker 2: and Conroy says that there was a glossary that somebody
Speaker 2: gave him that one of Zig's blog followers created of
Speaker 2: Zig's words, and that when he printed it out it
Speaker 2: was forty eight pages long. So like, she had a
Speaker 2: certain thing going on that attracted a certain kind of
Speaker 2: person and these were the people who were falling into
Speaker 2: their into her orbit at this time. And we should
Speaker 2: also say all of these people were in their early
Speaker 2: to mid twenties. I think Ziz was the oldest maybe
Speaker 2: at the time, at twenty six. So they were all disaffected, brilliant,
Speaker 2: often trans vegan twenty somethings who were living very close
Speaker 2: to homelessness in San Francisco in the late two thousand teams.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So the second person was Alex Leatham, occasionally known
Speaker 1: as Somny, a mathematician in this case went to the
Speaker 1: UCLA study at UC Berkeley as well. Then we have
Speaker 1: Michelle Zashko biometrics researcher, another Smarty Pants, and then someone
Speaker 1: named Alice Munday who was Zoshko's girlfriend and a bit
Speaker 1: of a mentor apparently according to Ziz to Ziz, and
Speaker 1: they started sort of just getting together talking about their ideas.
Speaker 1: They came up with a name for one of their
Speaker 1: theories or sort of their overarching theory called vegan an
Speaker 1: Arco transhumanism, and gwyn Danielson developed this idea that the
Speaker 1: hemispheres of the brain were basically separate and they could
Speaker 1: operate independently from one another. You can be different genders
Speaker 1: at the same time. You can be good and evil,
Speaker 1: or good or evil at the same time. And they
Speaker 1: started these experiments called un una hemispheric sleep where they
Speaker 1: were saying, you can be asleep and awake at the
Speaker 1: same time. One can be asleep and then one can
Speaker 1: be active and awake. And we say this because there
Speaker 1: are people that have accused Ziz and others in the
Speaker 1: group of basically keeping you sleep deprived through these experiments,
Speaker 1: potentially leading to a couple of suicides that we'll talk about.
Speaker 1: And again, I have no judgment on whether or not
Speaker 1: they are a cult or not at this point, but
Speaker 1: if you're making a case for cult. Sleep deprivation is
Speaker 1: a very big hallmark of something that oftentimes happens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's like chapter two in the cult Leader's playbook. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we should say also that una hemispheric sleep theoretically as possible.
Speaker 2: Humans don't do it, but dolphins do, whales do, migratory
Speaker 2: birds too. So it's sound like it just doesn't exist.
Speaker 2: It's humans trying to figure out how to do it
Speaker 2: themselves so they could think longer, more hours in a
Speaker 2: day essentially.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so this group is getting a little more upset
Speaker 1: and aggressive toward the official rationalist movement and community. They
Speaker 1: think again that Mary and c far you're not doing
Speaker 1: enough for the animals. You need to expand your I
Speaker 1: guess viewpoint on sentient beings and what that means. And
Speaker 1: you're also biased against trans people.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And there was another thing too that Ziz got
Speaker 2: really upset about. She came to believe that Mary paid
Speaker 2: off a blackmailer. Another way to put it is that
Speaker 2: somebody accused people at MIRI of sexual assault or statutory
Speaker 2: rape I think it was, and that they paid the
Speaker 2: person to go away. Some people call it a settlement.
Speaker 2: To Ziz, it was a blackmail paying off a blackmailer,
Speaker 2: and that you just did not do that, that that
Speaker 2: violated some of the basic tenets of the rationalist community
Speaker 2: and the way of solving problems that they use. So
Speaker 2: that with the ethical veganism combined, really separated her from
Speaker 2: this rationalist community. And with this growing group around her,
Speaker 2: they decided that they were going to show up go
Speaker 2: to the Seafar seminar conference that was being held in
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen, and they were going to present their problems
Speaker 2: and their issues in a very rational way, just like
Speaker 2: Seefhar would want them to. And the people who organized
Speaker 2: Sefar were like, you guys are way too aggressive for
Speaker 2: our tastes. You can't come to the Seafar retreat.
Speaker 1: And one of them said, you've got a Nazi in there.
Speaker 1: So four of them ziz Gwyn Danielson, Emma Baranian and
Speaker 1: it gets a litt confusingly all names and Alex Leatham.
Speaker 1: They went anyway, and they had their guy Fawkes masks
Speaker 1: on and they had their black hooded robes on. They
Speaker 1: blocked the exits with their vehicles and they were like,
Speaker 1: here you're going to listen to us. Here's our flyers
Speaker 1: here's our problems and our issues, and the staff didn't
Speaker 1: know what was going on. They called in a report
Speaker 1: of a possible active shooter and the cops came. They
Speaker 1: did not have arms on them or anything like that,
Speaker 1: but they were arrested on charges of false imprisonment and
Speaker 1: child endangement because there were kids there. It was a
Speaker 1: campground where they met north of San Francisco, and the defendance,
Speaker 1: we should point out, the four of them did end
Speaker 1: up filing a suit against the police alleging mistreatment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so the rationalist community is like, that's it. Not
Speaker 2: only can you not come to Seafire retreats, you can't
Speaker 2: even hang out on the Less Wrong blog. You can't
Speaker 2: come to our cocktail meetups that we have, which are
Speaker 2: a lot of fun. So you're probably going to be upset.
Speaker 2: They just got booted out. So now this wedge was
Speaker 2: a gulf. It was a break in communication between the
Speaker 2: group that would come to be known as Sizians and
Speaker 2: the rationalist community. And with that that group became more
Speaker 2: and more isolated and their ideas got a little weirder
Speaker 2: and a little more far out and a little more aggressive.
Speaker 2: Because they were all similar people who were eating off
Speaker 2: one another in this isolated situation. There weren't people on
Speaker 2: the outside coming and be like, whoa, let's let's rethink
Speaker 2: what you're saying. It was like, Yeah, that's a really
Speaker 2: good idea, and it just kept going from there.
Speaker 1: All right, I think that's a good You can kind
Speaker 1: of park all that stuff for now because this story
Speaker 1: kind of jumps around the country a bit, and when
Speaker 1: we come back, we're gonna pick up with part two
Speaker 1: a little north of San Francisco in Ballejo, California.
Speaker 3: Stop you know, stop stop stopping here? Should know no,
Speaker 3: stop you.
Speaker 2: Know, So Chuck. One of the outcomes of being like
Speaker 2: pushed out of the rationalist community somebody, he launched a
Speaker 2: website called zizzians dot info, still around today, and they
Speaker 2: basically chronicled all the things that they accused the Zizians
Speaker 2: of being a cult or that backs up their accusation
Speaker 2: of the Zizzians being a cult. And two of the
Speaker 2: things are something you referenced earlier. There were two suicides
Speaker 2: by people who were said to have gone through this
Speaker 2: una hemispheric sleep I guess boot camp, and it resulted
Speaker 2: in their suicides allegedly, so d Zizzeans just have a
Speaker 2: really bad name. At this point, the marina thing is
Speaker 2: not working out. The Rationalist Fleet is kind of sinking,
Speaker 2: as it were, and they just happened to meet somebody
Speaker 2: at the marina named Curtis Lynde, who is a seventy
Speaker 2: something guy who loved people, loved artists and had a
Speaker 2: bunch of land down in Vallejo and said, Hey, I
Speaker 2: want artists to come live down there. You guys seem
Speaker 2: kind of artsy and odd. Why don't you come live
Speaker 2: there for really cheap rent? And the Zizzians were like, heck, yeah.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 1: So Curtis Lynn offers, you know, them, the chance to
Speaker 1: go live. You know, they paid rent, but I don't
Speaker 1: imagine it was very much. And in this, you know,
Speaker 1: we're going to be introduced to some more players at
Speaker 1: this point. One of the members of the group that
Speaker 1: had joined up at this time, her name was Suri
Speaker 1: dal and she was fresh out of high school and
Speaker 1: a leftist blogger and just sort of put a pin
Speaker 1: in this. At one point in a discord chat, she
Speaker 1: said that she had had very dramatic fantasies about becoming
Speaker 1: a knife murderer, and there's you know, up to twenty
Speaker 1: people at this time on Curtis Lyn's property. The neighbors
Speaker 1: get a little freaked out. They're like, hey, they're walking
Speaker 1: around naked. Sometimes they're wearing gas masks. Lynd eventually was like,
Speaker 1: you guys aren't even paying rent anymore, and they said, yeah,
Speaker 1: well there's a COVID eviction moratorium, so what are you
Speaker 1: going to do about it? So everything just starts going
Speaker 1: really pear shaped, as you say, in like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, also check I saw that they would carry katanas
Speaker 2: around like samurai swords. So imagine seeing your neighbor walking
Speaker 2: around naked, wearing a gas mask and carrying a samurai sword,
Speaker 2: and there's twenty of them. It would be hard, especially
Speaker 2: in the context of California, to not be like, I
Speaker 2: think they might be a cult.
Speaker 1: Good point.
Speaker 2: So in twenty twenty two, like you said, things just
Speaker 2: really start to take a terrible shape. In August, Zizz's
Speaker 2: sister and Emma Baranian went to the police and said,
Speaker 2: our friend Zizz fell over while boating. So Ziz died
Speaker 2: during in a boating accident. The Coastguard launched a huge search,
Speaker 2: and I guess after eighteen hours they said there's no
Speaker 2: way that she could have survived, and she was. Although
Speaker 2: they didn't have the body, they still declared her legally
Speaker 2: dead and her sister was given a death certificate. And
Speaker 2: around the same time, Gwen Danielson, who was one of
Speaker 2: the og members of this whole group, she died by
Speaker 2: suicide too. So this group is just rocked by these
Speaker 2: two deaths in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: Two, that's right. So while this is happening, it's kind
Speaker 1: of at the same time, this COVID eviction moratorium runs out.
Speaker 1: So Curtis Lynde is like, all right, now I can
Speaker 1: actually get these people off my property finally, probably like
Speaker 1: this November. Two days before he was able to do
Speaker 1: that and sort of dropped the news that they were
Speaker 1: out of there, Suri Dal called him in and said, hey,
Speaker 1: there's a water leak on my property here or in
Speaker 1: my trailer. You got to come and check this out.
Speaker 1: Curtis Lynn says, I went to address the issue with
Speaker 1: the water and I was assaulted. They hit me over
Speaker 1: the head, They stabbed me with knives, They stabbed me
Speaker 1: with a katana, the samurai sword. He ended up losing
Speaker 1: an eye. He was stabbed through the chest apparently he
Speaker 1: alleges that Alex Leatham was the one who stabbed him
Speaker 1: through the chest, and so he shot Leatham and Emma
Speaker 1: Branian and killed her dead. If you ask the Zizians
Speaker 1: that were there, they said, no, that's not what happened.
Speaker 1: He'd been harassing us and he just opened fire on
Speaker 1: us one day.
Speaker 2: So the authorities tended to agree or believe Curtis Lynde,
Speaker 2: and in fact, Leatham and Dow were arrested, charged with
Speaker 2: attempted murder and then also charged with the death of
Speaker 2: Emma Baranian because apparently in California law, if you do
Speaker 2: something that causes the death of somebody else, even incidentally,
Speaker 2: you are responsible or you can be held responsible for
Speaker 2: that death. And the thinking was that Curtis Lynn had
Speaker 2: to kill Emma Baranian because of the actions of Dow
Speaker 2: and Lethum. Right right, So now Surrey Dow and Alex
Speaker 2: Leatham are in jail in California. That's where they are.
Speaker 2: So just park that, like you said.
Speaker 1: That's right. So police took another member of the group
Speaker 1: at the time. She gave her name as Julia Dawson.
Speaker 1: He said, come down the station with us. We got
Speaker 1: to question you. At this she seemed like she was
Speaker 1: having a medical emergency, so like, well, we got to
Speaker 1: get her to the hospital. STAT took her to the hospital,
Speaker 1: and she disappeared from the hospital. Detectives started investigating what
Speaker 1: happened there and they said, oh, you know who that was.
Speaker 1: That was Zizzzz is not dead at all. And they
Speaker 1: also determined guess who else was there, Gwen Danielson, she's
Speaker 1: actually alive as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So if you've heard our faking your death episode, this
Speaker 2: is a it's a big deal to fake your death,
Speaker 2: especially successfully. So the Zizians never thought they were dead,
Speaker 2: or if they did, it was for a very short time.
Speaker 2: It was to protect themselves from the authorities. One of
Speaker 2: the other things that was really an unsettling find after
Speaker 2: Curtis Lynde was attacked, they found a that of lie
Speaker 2: that suggested that they intended to kill him and that
Speaker 2: they were going to dissolve his body in it. So
Speaker 2: it's starting to become clear like these people are no joke.
Speaker 2: But at the time, this was like an isolated incident.
Speaker 2: It wasn't related to anything else. The authorities did not
Speaker 2: know that this was a group known as the Zizzians
Speaker 2: or anything like that. There were pieces that were starting
Speaker 2: to lay out on the table, but no one had
Speaker 2: put them together yet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. All right, So now you can park all
Speaker 1: of that because we're going to move once again across
Speaker 1: the country. This time Pennsylvania is going to come into
Speaker 1: the picture in twenty twenty one. So this is a
Speaker 1: little bit before these events. Michelle Zashko that we mentioned
Speaker 1: in Alice Munday, who were girlfriends with each other. They
Speaker 1: moved from California to Vermont, to northern Vermont, pretty rural area,
Speaker 1: and they were joined by guy named Daniel Blank, another
Speaker 1: like minded person. He went to UC Berkeley bioengineering and
Speaker 1: electrical engineering co degree and then worked at startups, and
Speaker 1: he was also a vegan and started to sort of
Speaker 1: get a little more radical about it. It got distance
Speaker 1: from his parents, started judging them for eating meat, and
Speaker 1: he hooks up with Monday and Zashko and Vermont.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so by this time, I think, I don't
Speaker 2: know if you said it or not. I think you did.
Speaker 2: Ziz had credited Alice Monday as being like her mentor
Speaker 2: y she had she modeled herself largely after Alice Monday too,
Speaker 2: like she was apparently really assertive with her beliefs and ideas,
Speaker 2: and Ziz became more and more like that after meeting
Speaker 2: Alice Monday. By this time though, she considered Alice Monday
Speaker 2: an enemy, what she called the vampire. And I guess
Speaker 2: Zajkoh was by association, guilty by association, and from what
Speaker 2: I could tell, the Alice Monday became her enemy because
Speaker 2: she and maybe Zajka were warning people away from Ziz,
Speaker 2: saying like, you need to steer clear of this person.
Speaker 2: So Ziz considered their enemies, and she contacted Zosco and said, Hey,
Speaker 2: if you want to earn my trust back, you need
Speaker 2: to murder Alice. And if you don't, I'm going to
Speaker 2: come to Vermont and murder you. And this was the
Speaker 2: kind of a precarious situation as far as Zazko was concerned.
Speaker 2: Michelle Zozkoe was concerned because this really, I think, kind
Speaker 2: of gets a lot across. She was like, I really
Speaker 2: had to kind of decide, you know, did I want
Speaker 2: to murder Alice to make this happy or should I
Speaker 2: kill Ziz. This is the position that Ziz was putting
Speaker 2: people in by this time, Allegedly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, should we just have Jerry drop in the word
Speaker 1: allegedly like just every forty seconds, allegedly, Beijing, mister Herman,
Speaker 1: I know I promised Pennsylvania and we've been in Vermont
Speaker 1: for a second. Here, but here's where Pennsylvania comes into play.
Speaker 1: On in December thirty, first last day of the year,
Speaker 1: according to Manny in twenty twenty two, this is about
Speaker 1: a month and a half after Curtis Lynde was stabbed
Speaker 1: and after that all occurred in Viejo. So Michelle Zosco's parents,
Speaker 1: Richard and Rita were murdered in Pennsylvania. They have ring
Speaker 1: camera footage from a neighbor that shows two people arriving
Speaker 1: at the house a little before midnight, and on the
Speaker 1: camera footage you can hear what sounds like mom and
Speaker 1: then a few seconds later, oh my god, Oh god god,
Speaker 1: and the parents of Michelle Zashko were found shot in
Speaker 1: the head, kind of execution style, in their bedroom.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so the Pennsylvania State Troopers went to go visit
Speaker 2: Michelle's age Cohen, Vermont, and she's like, I haven't been
Speaker 2: to Pennsylvania in almost twenty years, or more than twenty years,
Speaker 2: and I haven't talked to my parents in a year.
Speaker 2: So it's not me. I don't know who killed them.
Speaker 2: And in fact, she showed up to a graveside service
Speaker 2: a couple of weeks later, and I believe was the
Speaker 2: sole beneficiary maybe of her parents' estate. While she was
Speaker 2: there for the service, she was accompanied by Daniel Blank,
Speaker 2: and I guess they had drawn some attention at the
Speaker 2: hotel because they were both wearing black and one of
Speaker 2: them was said to have been carrying a gun around
Speaker 2: the hotel grounds. So the hotel called the police, and
Speaker 2: the police started surveilling them, and after a very short time,
Speaker 2: they went into Michelle'sajco's hotel room and searched it and
Speaker 2: I think they searched your car, found something like forty
Speaker 2: thousand dollars in cash, and they were like, we're just
Speaker 2: gonna take you down to jail. All this stuff is
Speaker 2: kind of mounting. We still think you might have killed
Speaker 2: your parents. We're going to take you in for questioning.
Speaker 2: And she said something to the hotel person that was there, said,
Speaker 2: can you contact Daniel Blank, he's in another room here
Speaker 2: and tell him what's going on, And the police were like,
Speaker 2: I think we'd like to talk to him too, went
Speaker 2: and got a warrant and then they went to Daniel
Speaker 2: Blank's room shortly after that.
Speaker 1: That's right, they detained him. They did not were not
Speaker 1: able to keep them for very long. They were released
Speaker 1: pretty quickly. But we should mention too. In addition to
Speaker 1: that forty grand in cash, they also found several prepaid
Speaker 1: cell phones, which is a bit of a potential red
Speaker 1: flag as well in Michelle Zashko's car. And while they
Speaker 1: were arresting Blank, there was someone else in the room.
Speaker 1: They were lying on the floor, they wouldn't move, they
Speaker 1: wouldn't speak, and that was drum roll Zizz. So this
Speaker 1: is getting around. At this point, police arrested Ziz on
Speaker 1: obstruction of justice disorderly conduct I guess, just for not
Speaker 1: you know, complying I guess and getting off the floor
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. It was a misdemeanor charge. But
Speaker 1: they did hold her in jail for five months instead
Speaker 1: of I guess, in lieu of a five hundred thousand
Speaker 1: dollars bail, which could not afford obviously, and the judge said,
Speaker 1: all right, we're going to release you. You got to
Speaker 1: promise to pay ten grand if you miss court. She
Speaker 1: did return to court for that August hearing in a
Speaker 1: wheelchair pushed by her mom. But when the trial date
Speaker 1: came up of December of twenty twenty three, she did
Speaker 1: not show up. So I think that's probably a great
Speaker 1: place for our second break because the story is really
Speaker 1: heating up now. Sure is.
Speaker 3: Stop you know stop stop stop? Should know no stop
Speaker 3: you know?
Speaker 1: All right, So now we're gonna find ourselves partially in
Speaker 1: North Carolina, uh, and back in Vieho and also back
Speaker 1: in Vermont, and we're gonna introduce uh what I guess
Speaker 1: three more people, Olivia Bachholt, Maximilian Schnyder, and my Milo
Speaker 1: Young Blute.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, Ophelia Bachholt was German by birth and she
Speaker 2: was described as naive, altruistic, and trusting by friends. She
Speaker 2: fell into Esday's orbit. I think by starting out reading
Speaker 2: her blog, she was trans She was a math genius,
Speaker 2: and she was really really interested in effective altruism. I
Speaker 2: think she made a couple hundred grand a year as
Speaker 2: a quant trader in New York and donated all but
Speaker 2: ten percent of it to affective altruism causes. So she
Speaker 2: was very dedicated to this. But something about Zizz's philosophy
Speaker 2: grabbed her and she ended up leaving New York one day,
Speaker 2: cutting off all contact with everyone else in her former life,
Speaker 2: and moving to North Carolina and essentially starting a new
Speaker 2: life in this orbit of ziz.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Maximilian Snyder was a data scientist, another super super
Speaker 1: smart person, and Milo Young Blute went to an elite
Speaker 1: private school in Seattle with Maximilian Snyder and they got
Speaker 1: together later on after that, and in May of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four, Young Blute's parents said they're missing. I don't
Speaker 1: know where they went. They and Snyder applied for a
Speaker 1: marriage license together in November of twenty twenty four, which
Speaker 1: is November fifth, specifically, which is guy faux Knight. And
Speaker 1: apparently they all got attracted to the Zizzians just through online.
Speaker 1: They never met zizz, They never met Gwen Danielson, they
Speaker 1: never met any of the other Rationalists fleet Zizians at
Speaker 1: all in person.
Speaker 2: Yes, that seems to be contested from what I can tell,
Speaker 2: Chuck that there's it's possible that there's evidence that they
Speaker 2: did meet them, but I don't know who said what
Speaker 2: or why. But that's yeah, that's a contested issue. So
Speaker 2: in January twenty twenty five, Young Bachholt they're in Vermont.
Speaker 2: They're a short distance away from Michelle's ageko's house. So
Speaker 2: shortly after the move where everybody was in Chapel Hill,
Speaker 2: Young Blute and Bachholt traveled to Vermont and the state.
Speaker 2: They checked into a hotel that was not too far
Speaker 2: from Michelle's ashco's house. And I thought initially that they
Speaker 2: were there to kill Michelle's ASCO, but I found that
Speaker 2: they had made contact with her enough that the police
Speaker 2: think that she bought them some guns or gave them
Speaker 2: some guns that she bought. I'm not exactly sure what
Speaker 2: they were doing in Vermont, but they eventually they fell
Speaker 2: under the radar of the Border Patrol, who pulled them
Speaker 2: over near the Canadian border. And when that happened, they
Speaker 2: were pulled over. At the very least, Young Blute allegedly
Speaker 2: got out and just opened fire on the Border patrol agents.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Border Patrol said that bachhold attempted to draw
Speaker 1: a gun, they fired back. It's basically a firefight at
Speaker 1: this point, and Bachholdt and a Border Patrol agent named
Speaker 1: David Malland were both killed. Young Blute was injured arrested
Speaker 1: obviously on assault charges. Police found hollow Point ammunition in
Speaker 1: their car, found those burner phones wrapped in foil. They
Speaker 1: found full face respirator mask, They found a night vision monocular,
Speaker 1: so sort of the Mayhem starter kit in the car.
Speaker 2: Sure sounds like it for sure. So yeah, again, I'm
Speaker 2: not sure what they were doing in traveling from North
Speaker 2: Carolina to Vermont, but this is a big deal and
Speaker 2: they killed the border patrol agent, especially when a pair
Speaker 2: of trans people dressed in all black just open fire
Speaker 2: on a border patrol agent and made national news. And
Speaker 2: this is when people started to connect the dots. Not
Speaker 2: only did you have the attack of Curtis Lind. A
Speaker 2: couple of years later, as everybody is starting to go
Speaker 2: to trial, Surrey Dow and Alex Leatham are moving toward trial.
Speaker 2: Curtis Lynd is a star witness, I guess, allegedly to
Speaker 2: shut him up, Maximilian Schneider shows up in Viejo and
Speaker 2: murdered Curtis Lind before he could testify.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this was just three days before this shootout
Speaker 1: in Vermont. So it's all really coming to a head
Speaker 1: very quickly, in almost real time to where we are today.
Speaker 1: So on February sixteenth of this year, three people dressed
Speaker 1: in all black, driving a couple of white box trucks.
Speaker 1: A sudden, we're in Maryland. They went to Maryland to
Speaker 1: a property owner and said, hey, can we camp out
Speaker 1: here for a month. He did not take kindly of that,
Speaker 1: so we called the cops and it turns out that
Speaker 1: was Daniel Blank, Zizz, and Michelle Zajko, and they arrested
Speaker 1: them initially on trespassing charges, but they found a bunch
Speaker 1: of guns in the trucks and said, oh wait, these
Speaker 1: are the three people there. Like you said, they started
Speaker 1: really connecting the dots at this point in February.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I couldn't find out what Michelle's AGCO or
Speaker 2: Daniel Blank were wanted for. But Ziz was wanted for
Speaker 2: jumping bail for that court case in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: Well, they were arrested for trespassing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I don't know what they were wanted for already,
Speaker 2: is what I'm saying. So that was February as of May,
Speaker 2: late May, last month, a couple of weeks ago, a
Speaker 2: couple of days ago, even you could say, Zizz, Michelle's Ageko,
Speaker 2: and Daniel Blank are all in jail in Maryland for treuspassing. Letham,
Speaker 2: Dow and Snipe are all in jail in California for
Speaker 2: the attack on Curtis Lind and then the murder of
Speaker 2: Curtis Lind and then Young Blute is in Vermont for
Speaker 2: allegedly trying to draw a gun on the Border Patrol
Speaker 2: agents during a firefight where a Border Patrol agent was killed.
Speaker 2: So the the Zizians are still like around essentially, they
Speaker 2: still will say like, we're not a cult, we're not
Speaker 2: even called Zizians. But now there's more and more journalists
Speaker 2: who are starting to dig into it and putting together
Speaker 2: deeper and deeper profiles of this group and what was
Speaker 2: going on. But like you said, this is real time, man,
Speaker 2: this is there's no resolution to this. This this is
Speaker 2: this is where it stops, because this is as far
Speaker 2: as it's gotten so far.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're still writing. Apparently, Daniel Schnyder in jail is
Speaker 1: writing stuff to the Rationalist group saying, hey, like you
Speaker 1: still need to focus on animal rights, and Michelle Zashko
Speaker 1: is writing She wrote an open letter to the world
Speaker 1: that's in quotes stated March ninth of this year and
Speaker 1: where she was like, hey, I didn't kill my parents
Speaker 1: zizz hasn't done anything wrong. A lot of these people,
Speaker 1: like I don't even know those other people. I'm not
Speaker 1: with Maximilian Schneyder, like I've never met these people. They're
Speaker 1: not Zizians, aren't a group like Josh said, Well, she
Speaker 1: didn't say, like joshad that'd be kind of fun though,
Speaker 1: But they're not even associated with us as a group
Speaker 1: that we don't refer to ourselves as Zizian's.
Speaker 2: Right, So Alice Monday and Gwen Danielson thought to be alive.
Speaker 2: Still Alice Monday, I saw is thought to be in
Speaker 2: hiding that she's very scared of Zizz and the Zizians,
Speaker 2: especially now. And then there's other people. There's people in
Speaker 2: the rationalist community who were willing to speak to journalists
Speaker 2: about this, but not like anonymously because they're scared of
Speaker 2: the Zizians too. So it's still a thing, even though
Speaker 2: Zizz is in jail, and it's just a question of
Speaker 2: where it goes from here. But just kind of everything up.
Speaker 2: We'll go back to Half Moon Bay where the Caleb
Speaker 2: was docked in the Berkeley Marina, and since the Zizzian's
Speaker 2: abandoned it, it has sunk in the Marina half sunk
Speaker 2: and is a nuisance to that. You have to get
Speaker 2: around now, poor Caleb. Yeah, Caleb's like, what did I
Speaker 2: ever do? Yeah, I just wanted to help people. I'm
Speaker 2: a born tugboat.
Speaker 3: I know.
Speaker 2: If you want to know more about this stuff, go
Speaker 2: look it up. There's a lot of stuff to read,
Speaker 2: and just keep an eye on the news. We definitely
Speaker 2: will be too. And since I said that, I think
Speaker 2: it's time for listener mail Chuck.
Speaker 1: This is from James. Hey, guys, I'm fascinated that terms
Speaker 1: we take for granted often come from slurs meant to suppress,
Speaker 1: and in some cases similar slurs. I love knowing that
Speaker 1: pagan came from a word that his Chuck puts. It
Speaker 1: means bumpkin was meant to belittle in diminish, and now
Speaker 1: it covers a huge chunk of the faith pie. I
Speaker 1: was reminded of the word jaywalking. I feel like we've
Speaker 1: talked about this in something, maybe the origins of jaywalking.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe as cars became a thing and started driving
Speaker 1: with some velocity in the places where people were used
Speaker 1: to walking, big car had to make sure they weren't
Speaker 1: the bad guy. They had to rewrite convention and get
Speaker 1: people pedestrians specifically off the road. So what did they do? Slurs? Obviously,
Speaker 1: if I remember correctly, j like paganas meant an uneducated
Speaker 1: country folk too stupid not to walk in the road
Speaker 1: like a dingus. This word must have worked because now
Speaker 1: it is a legal term to describe the act of
Speaker 1: crossing the street at a non crosswalk. Big car one,
Speaker 1: constantine one. Thanks for the potting guys and fulfilling my
Speaker 1: brain with stuff that is James.
Speaker 2: Thanks a lot, James. That's a good one. And think
Speaker 2: you jogged my memory to an episode about like how
Speaker 2: cars became the dominant mode of transportation in the US.
Speaker 1: Sounds like that might have been the one I think
Speaker 1: that was.
Speaker 2: That was a good one. That was a sleeper episode.
Speaker 1: Agreed.
Speaker 2: If you want to be like Jay and send us
Speaker 2: an interesting email that we may or may not read
Speaker 2: on the air, but we'd still like to receive anyway,
Speaker 2: you can send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio
Speaker 2: dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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