Part Four: The Zizian Murder Spree (or Exactly How Harry Potter Fanfic Killed A Border Patrol Agent)
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We're back. Oh my gosh. It's Behind the Bastards, a podcast where Robert Evans ruined his life by reading too many blogs by internet poisoned nerd rationalist people. And I deeply regret everything I've done. How are you doing, David? I'm

I'm good. I am concerned for you. This is a difficult place for you to spend a week. Yeah, I've had an... This is an info hazard. They're not wrong to use that term. Just not in the way they mean it. Yeah, exactly. This whole...

I'm half committed to selling my house, putting my goats into a big trailer and traveling around the country, finding people who are going on online doom loops and handing them a goat. Just play with this goat for 20 minutes. Touch an animal, look into its weird little eyes, get off of your phone. That's real. You need to go do goat yoga. Yeah. Yeah.

Something has to be done. Oh my God, yeah. This is, it's so wild. It's so wild. Yeah. Again, folks, if you want to immunize your stuff to this, a great way to do it is to just like have friends who don't live in a boat with you. Right? A very, very small boat. Yeah. Yeah.

Barely a boat. Even a big boat. Yeah. Let alone barely a boat. And talk to like, you know, my neighbor's like a Mexican dude who loves gardening and has had a completely different life than me and knows nothing of the internet. And I talk with him a couple of times a week. And it's always one of the best things for me because I spend so much of the rest of my time with people like Garrison who are all...

all like poison their brains with the same things I've poisoned my brain with. Like, please go find people who don't know all of the weird internet things you do and spend more time with them. Aggressive on the people like Garrison. Look, I love Garrison, but they also have started spending a lot of their time with people who aren't in the same weird internet doom circles that we are. And it's been good for them. It's good for everyone.

Truly. Save yourselves. It doesn't have to be like this.

So when we left off, Ziz had kind of psychologically jailbroken her friend into suicide and then created an info hazard named after her friend. Yes. Great stuff. Healthy community. Now, a few things happened in quick succession after this point. The rationalists start to blame Pasek's suicide on Ziz. And this is really when a lot of folks in rationalist circles start breaking off the

and calling, like saying like, hey, this is what Ziz and Gwyn are doing. They've made like a cult, right? And again, I don't think they're really off base here, but also they tend to ignore all of the suicides in the rationalist community, right? I was going to say, they are in a cult. Yeah. You know, it's more because cult is...

I think like you get like they're in a there's a cultic milieu that rationalism forms, which is like the substrate. Right. You know, if a cult is like a plant growing up from it, like they're like rationalism is this soil that is extremely optimized for growing cults. I think that might be closer to.

you know? Um, although it's also one of those things where if you're just trying to explain the story, you could just say it's a cult. You can say it's this weird Bay area cult about science and AI and shit. Like that's probably close enough. Yeah. Um,

A few things happen in quick succession after this point. One is that a story broke later in 2018 confirming Ziz's suspicion that the rationalist community was rife with abuse. Two people accused an influential rationalist who worked at CIFAR, a guy named Brent Dill, of abuse while they were dating him. Both were 19 and he was close to 40. The allegations here remind me a little of the ones against Neil Gaiman. You've got a very powerful man accused of coercing much younger women into extreme BDSM situations and plying them with drugs.

Obviously, none of this is – I don't think any of this has been litigated. So I will continue to refer to them as allegations. I don't know exactly what happened here. But this breaks, right? And it's a big deal within the community. Rumors spread that CIFAR had kind of tried to like hush the whole mess down in order to protect this guy. They conducted an internal investigation. We all know like when the cops do an internal investigation, right? That's always reliable. No.

Trust us to figure it out. We'll police ourselves. That's rational. This internal investigation exonerated Dill and included the line, he is aligned with CIFAR's goals and strategy and should be seen as an ally who embodies a rare kind of agency and a sense of heroic responsibility. There's those words again. Agency, heroic responsibility, dating a 19-year-old when you're 40 and giving her drugs. Jesus Christ.

Good stuff.

People respond with outrage. CIFAR eventually banned Dill from future events. They kind of cave. And Ziz would describe Dill later as a true negative. That's someone who both halves of their brain are evil. Double bad. Yeah, double bad. Now, at this point, she still thought Yudkowsky and some other CIFAR leaders might be double good, but she's really not sure about it. And she's especially not sure because none of them embrace this terminology. I was going to say, at this point, has Yudkowsky – is he like –

Is she still, are they on good terms? Is he still acknowledging? No. Okay. I don't think she's ever on close terms with Yudkowsky. She is, she is speaking and communicating directly with Anna Salomon, who is like one of Yudkowsky's like top people quite a lot. I don't think she's super close to Yudkowsky. Like I'm sure they're at the same events and stuff several times. And she sees, she definitely like sees him speak. She definitely talks with him, but like, I don't think that they would ever have been close. Right. Okay. Um,

She does try to force a conversation with Anna Salomon outside of CFAR HQ about this and other discoveries she and Gwyn had made on their boats. And Ziz, like, writes in the blog post about it that, like, she felt it was going pretty good and Anna was listening to her. There are context clues that I don't think Ziz picks up on that, like, oh, no, Anna immediately felt uncomfortable and like you were assaulting her, like coming up to her and just like kind of barraging her with all of this nonsense.

And she did not want to have this conversation. And she kind of pretended to be agree with you in order to end this because she's not sure if you're dangerous, which to be fair, you are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Soon later at a CFAR board meeting, Anna recommended that Ziz be disinvited from joint MIRI CFAR events. And both of these are separate organizations, but basically like the, the,

membership overlaps or like a circle, right? Her reasoning for not wanting Ziz at events is that Ziz wore, quote, black clothes, took supervillains as role models and came up with dangerous plans. Yeah. Yeah. More or less correct. I forgot that she was also wearing black robes. She's also started dressing like a wizard. Yes.

Speaking of dangerous plans, the Rationalist Fleet or Rat Fleet was falling apart by this point. Coast Guard and San Mateo Harbor District authorities had issued numerous warnings over the danger of this tugboat leaking poison into the bay. On several occasion, the Caleb nearly hit other ships while drifting like the anchor gets fucked up. I don't know that they probably don't know how to use it because like they're maybe got he left.

Is he still involved? He's gone. He's bounced. He had at least the judgment to cut his losses. So they don't even know how to work boats particularly? They do. I think Gwen's actually reasonably competent with a sailboat. Oh, because Gwen has a sailboat. Right. And Ziz gets trained up. And these are both smart enough people that I suspect they're competent with a sailboat. But like a 24-foot sailboat and a 94-foot tugboat. Very different. That's like I'm good with driving my Prius.

Give me that fucking 18 wither with two fucking storage containers on the back, shipping containers on the back. I could probably back that thing into a parking space. No problem. They're just different, you know? Damn. Damn, damn, damn. Authorities. Right. And what's very funny, these accounts of like boat cops getting on the Caleb and talking to Zizians, they're like, these people must be sovereign citizens, which is like a totally different kind of

thing and to me I'm like they don't sound at all like but to them it like this mix because it's this mix of anarchist theory right because these people are anarchists so they're telling these cops why they don't think the cops have any authority but they're also like insulting them with these like logical arguments based on obscure rationalist doctrines and these cops are

heavy jargon right heavy heavy jargon these cops are just like okay so we got some sovereign some sob sits here all right yeah they're out of boat it's a 284 now we know what to do yeah yeah

And again, this is like the Bay Area. I think cops in the Bay Area are a little, especially since they're all white, more used to dealing with like people who are clearly like eccentric, right? Yes. Than maybe like if this had happened in another city. So nothing, there's not really a conflict yet. The cops are just being like, hey guys, you're, and to be fair, the boat is leaking diesel into the Bay. Like see, it is a problem, right? That's a net negative. Yeah.

In 2019, another scandal hits the rationalist community. The story broke that a former employee had blackmailed the company over a dispute and used donor funds to pay. This got stacked on top of the scandal that Dill had just created. And as is in many of her comrades saw it, the issue was not whether this employee had been mistreated, but that Miri hadn't made the proper timeless decisions to ensure they couldn't be blackmailed.

Per an article for the Rolling Stone, quote, in their view, this not only represented bad decision theory, but called the organization's entire existence into question. In other words, it's not whatever happened with this employee. It's that you didn't make the timeless decisions to make it so that anyone would be scared to try to blackmail you because they'd know that your response would be so intense.

That proves you don't have what it takes to really save the world because you're not ruthless enough to just jump to killing people like us. You're not a psychopath. You're not a fucking psychopath, right? And we need psychopaths. Which is good. To save the world. We love psychopaths. We aspire to it. And one of the big problems within the rationalist community is people talk about different mental health conditions as if they're like tools in a toolbox.

Like you can go into a psychopathic mode and that's really good for accomplishing these things. So you could go ADHD, you can make yourself autistic in this, they talk this way, right? I'm not saying this is, this is not how anything works. I'm not comparing autism and psychopathy. I'm just saying this is how they talk, right? Yeah, they go psycho mode and then save the world. Right, and it's like, no, that's,

that's not, none of this is accurate to like the way brains are. Like that's just not how anything works. You can't just be like, I'm going to turn off my autism today. I got some shit to do. No, that's not how it works. And some of this is downstream from how I think online discourse has damaged the discussion of mental health because people sometimes do talk about it like Pokemon, you know? Very much so. Like, I think there's some issues there that do it.

Anyway, and a lot of this is – yeah, it's just – this soup is not exclusive to Ziz. So Ziz is banned now from Miri CIFAR events, and her whole crew is increasingly radicalized against the organizations. They have also – it's both where like CIFAR has good reason to not want Ziz around, but also all of Ziz – most of Ziz's complaints about rationalists like CIFAR and Miri are very valid, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. You're both right about each other. It's like how Elon Musk and Peter Thiel would shit talk each other. Exactly. You both do have each other's number. Yes. No, everybody's got a point. Everybody's got a point. I just kind of wish you would all go away. Yeah.

In November of 2019, CIFAR held their annual alumni reunion out in a chunk of the California redwoods down the street from the Bohemian Grove. The road that passes is literally the Bohemian Highway, right? This is like for an idea of how much money there is in mainstream rationalism, right? They are having their big party next to Bohemian Grove.

Ziz had sent an open letter and like a letter to Yudkowsky a few days earlier, urging members of both organizations to quit in the interest of saving the world. Basically saying these groups are so compromised, they can no longer like add effectively to the things we're trying to do to our important work. So you should all leave and kind of the subtext is and do what me and Gwyn are doing, you know? Start a cult. So on the day of this event,

Ziz, Gwen and two others in their circle drive up to this like this location out in the woods with a box truck, a shuttle bus and a Prius. And they block the entrances and exits of the venue with their vehicles. And they jump out wearing black robes, Guy Fawkes masks and black gloves. Now, this is not a violent protest. There's no evidence that they intended violence.

They had walkie talkies. One person had a can of mace, but like, you know, people carry mace. That's not suspicious. And all they're trying to do is distribute flyers, lying out their case against CIFAR and MIRI. But they have blocked the entrances and exits and they talk like Sith wizards, right? So everything they say sounds cryptic and kind of threatening. Yeah.

And they're wearing black robes. And they're wearing, and Guy Fawkes masks. The police get called immediately. And as best as I can tell, it does, maybe I'm wrong. It seems like the Seafarm Uri people like knew, because there's like send out an email saying, hey, maybe don't come. Or like, if you do just like be note that these weird people are here. But the venue owner, like the people running the venue call the cops is what it seems like happens. There are different allegations here. I don't precisely know, but for whatever, whatever the case is,

Two false pieces of information are given to the cops when they get called. They are told, the cops are told, one person has a gun and another person has an ax, right? So, and I think it's people who worked at the venue who make these allegations. It was definitely an employee at the venue who were alleged that he saw an ax, right?

A county sheriff who responded or so it was a person at the venue who picked up an axe and someone saw them and reported that to the police, too. Right. Because he was scared of these people. A county sheriff, sheriff's deputy responds and immediately calls for major backup because he's told someone has a gun. And, you know, as a cop with just kind of like a pop culture knowledge, you hear like a bunch of people in robes and masks with a gun outside of this area.

big event where like there's children doing a ropes course next door. Like his thought is there's a mass shooting brewing, right? Some people are going to do something fucked up, right? So he calls for a massive like SWAT response basically, you know, compared to the actual danger these people present, which is right now nil. The author of that wired piece spoke to the sheriff's deputy who responded initially, a guy named Parks. And this is that account quote.

In Parks' account, which he relayed to me in the fall of 2023 at a local Starbucks, the protesters were speaking in unison. Just stuff I didn't really understand, but it was somewhat rehearsed, he said. The group had printed flyers outlining their complaints against CIFAR and Miri. They alleged that Miri had paid out blackmail using donor funds to quash sexual misconduct allegations, and that CIFAR's leader discriminates against trans women. Other allegations were more esoteric. CIFAR does not appreciably develop novel rationality mental tech.

The path to avoiding extinction, they wrote, involved escaping containment by society through mental autonomy and inter-hemispheric game theory. So some random sheriff's deputy is not going to understand what's going on here. What the fuck are you talking about? He and his men default to the thing that cops do when they get confused, which is they get violent, right? Um,

Quote, "He and Ricks ordered the protesters to get on the ground. As they did, each one called out demanding a same gender pat down, like one might request at an airport. All three were trans women, but Parks says he couldn't discern their genders because of the robes and masks. Regardless, they were not going to get that luxury at that time, he told me. It's like, well, we don't know if you're a boy or a girl and we got to handcuff you. Parks' deputy subdued the three in prone positions, what Parks calls a high risk style takedown, requiring more force than a normal handcuffing style."

So there's several articles I've read will refer to a discrepancy between how the Zizians and the cops describe these events. I've read both accounts. I really don't see a gap. What I see is the cops describing their violent and dehumanizing behavior as like this is the normal way to respond and the Zizians describing it as dehumanizing and traumatizing.

The only question here is like the moral quality you give to the cops tackling a bunch of people basically who don't have weapons because they got a phone call, right? Which like if you're a cop, you're like, well, this is the only way to act. And if you're, I think most people like, you're like, well,

Probably could have just talked this situation down. I don't see where an arrest would like. Yeah. Gwen later writes this about the experience. When we arrived, a staff member called the police and falsely told them we had a gun and that we were going into buildings and that that we were too afraid to get off the they were too afraid to get off the phone. Later, a report said there was an active shooter with a duffel bag. None of us had a duffel bag.

"Police arrived with their guns out "and we were immediately arrested "within about 10 minutes of us arriving, "after which we were sexually assaulted. "In my case, I was groped and I had my pants pulled down "and then sat on by an officer in a mounting position.

They are mocked and derided as they're naked. Cops are making comments about their bodies. It's like a really ugly situation, right? And I have no trouble believing that this is true because it comports with dozens of arrest stories I've heard in multiple states. Yeah, that's par for the course. Yeah. And it's also the fact that they are specifically, the police are making fun of them for being trans is very much in line with what statistics say about trans people and police violence.

A 2013 report from the Anti-Violence Project found that trans individuals are seven times likelier to experience violence while interacting with the police than cisgender people. So I have no trouble believing Gwen's accounts here, even though, again, I treat her with proper scrutiny in most areas. This all seems like what cops do. Now, the other big discrepancy where the Zizians are, I think, a little off base is that they claim they are immediately dead named and misgendered by the newspapers covering their initial arrests.

And they are dead named, but the newspapers don't really have an option here. Right. It's like their legal names. Right. They don't talk when they're arrested. Right. Which is a very normal thing for like a protest. They say absolutely nothing and they have no idea on them.

So the police fingerprint them, which brings up their legal names, and that's what's given to the newspapers. So like the initial news articles aren't – this is just the only name available, but it escalates this situation, right? And it is worth noting that a number of outlets do continue to deadname them up to the present. But that initial reporting, it's like, well, that's just the only information that was available.

But all of this is going to like – this court case is going to wear on. They get charged initially with felonies. Bail is set at like 50 grand for Ziz and Gwyn. This is eventually reduced and they're reduced to misdemeanors. But it takes like four days for them to make bail. And they will be fighting because they're going to counter sue over these arrests.

And both the trauma of the arrests, their anger over them, and the fact that there's the stress of this years-long court battle is going to have this extremely deleterious effect on everybody's mental health when they're already not doing well. Right? It's great stuff.

Yeah. Right around this time, the Zizians move. They stop doing their fleet thing, right? They move out of the boats and they kind of end things by leaving their tugboat adrift because there's nothing to do with a 94-foot tugboat. Nobody can handle a tugboat, right? Like it's too big to do much with. And they probably could have figured something out, but they decide the opportunity cost of figuring out how to dispose of this boat is

is it will distract from their important work. So it's okay for it to sink and cause like a modest environmental crisis by leaking diesel into the bay. Basically, Ziz decides that the value of all the sea life that it kills is less than the value of them continuing their work, which at this point, if you're keeping track, is trying to figure out how to live out of box trucks.

So that's what they're doing now. And this is where a guy named Curtis- They've got a worse living space. They've got a worse living space. They made it worse than boats. Oh boy. I can't tell you how much of this story is just the result of Bay Area rent prices being unreasonable. It's really a real estate story. It's a real, just like Superman 1. So,

Enter Curtis Lind. Lind is a guy, he made his career doing shipping. He lived in a boat in and around where Ziz and her friends were living at sea and they met each other through that. He sells them an anchor. But he's also pushing 80. And so he's interested in getting out of the boat life because it sucks. And he's got a plot of land that he's got a house on and he's got extra space that he's interested in renting out.

There's not like most there's not like full houses, but there's like some shipping containers and I think like some RV, like a busted RV or whatever. And he's got like some power and water hookups. Here's how his son, Carl, described what his father wanted to do with this place. He just wanted this as a place to let artists or woodworkers, electricians to be able to come and live in a little trailer and have a container where they could work and put their tools and have a safe place.

So again, depending on how you're looking, he's either trying to like have a cheap space where like, you know, artists and the like can afford to like survive and have little working spaces or he's trying to be like a punk slumlord. Right. And I mean, the line is thin, right? The line is thin, right? The line is so thin. Speaking of a thin line, the sponsors of this podcast are the thin line keeping society safe from me not having sex.

enough money to live in a boat. You know? This is why I have enough money to live in a boat where I would go crazy. Or a box truck. Or a box truck. Ah, to live in a box truck. The joy. The glory days. Yeah, we're back. In a box truck. We're talking about how good it is to live in a box truck. Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha!

Good stuff. Do we know roughly how big the group is at this point? I think at any given time, there's between like six and nine people, you know? Okay, so very small, very small. Very small, somewhere in that neighborhood. It fluctuates. And there's also, there's a bunch of people who are like, you could call them Zizians.

They're in and out. They'll visit sometimes, or they even live in other states, but they're always in contact with multiple members of the group through the internet. This is a very geographically decentralized group, although there is that core inner circle who are all together on this land.

And for a while, things are okay there. The Zizians pay rent. Ziz continues to write blog posts and run her followers through unihemispheric sleep sessions to upgrade them. And it's also important for me to note, they don't ever call themselves Zizians. That name first comes up around this period of time, right after that disastrous protest.

When an anonymous rationalist publishes a paper called like Zizians.info that first identifies them as a cult and describes like their unihemispheric sleep tactics. And it's written because this person is in the community and wants to stop other people from falling in with Ziz.

I think they have good intentions here. They see the danger. They also ... One of the issues with the document is I don't think they see some of the danger of other rationalist stuff. Yeah, right. This is why I say that it's like a cultic substrate rather than being a pure cult, because there are people in it who can recognize stuff like this and try to provide a degree of accountability. Just like there are people who will report on and they hold CIFAR's feet to the fire when people get accused of abuse.

So the document alleges that Ziz had started telling her followers she was the, basically she's the only double good or intrinsically good person there and one of the only intrinsically good people on the planet. UHS sessions tended to reveal that other people in the community are just single good. And per Ziz's theories about the hero contract, they can only accomplish maximum good by feeding their energy and resources to the hero Ziz. Here's an example of the kind of things she sent people she saw as single good.

Saying you're single good is saying, help, I have a yerk in my head. Did you ever read Animorphs as a book, David?

- Wow, yes, they were great. - That's what that's a reference to is those worms that control your brain and that's another picture. - Oh my God. - Right, yeah, yeah. That's, yes. I know, deep cut, deep cut. - Whoa, that unlocked a part of my brain that I have not used in for, that's right. - Right, right. A bunch of people are now like having like the severance moment, but like remembering every scholastic book fair they ever went to as a kid. - Oh man.

Oh man, all they got to do is hit goosebumps today. I know, I know. Oh, if only. So saying you're single good is saying, help, I have a yerk in my head that's a mere image of me. I need you to surgically destroy it, even if I'm then crippled for life or might die in the process. Then kill me if I ever do one evil act for the rest of my life. That's better than being a slave.

Again, that's her role is surgically destroying the evil brains of her half brains of her followers. And then she has to be willing to murder them if they ever do anything bad, because if they ever do anything bad, then it means that the evil side could take over and it could do like mega bad. Right. Doom the world. Right. And she takes this on herself.

Yes. And also, I mean, she's going to have other people do the killing basically, but like, yes, this is what she's saying is the stakes. And this is how she sees her role within the community. Right. And I think at this point, that's pretty cold leader. That's pretty cold leader. Yeah. I think we're probably crossed that KT boundary, right? Yeah. Yeah. Box trucks saying you got to kill some people. Yeah. Saying you got to murder people because they're the devil, the yerk inside their brain. Yeah. Oh,

It might be a little bit of cult weather. Feels like a cult outside. So some Zizians, not implicated in any crimes, have attacked this piece, this Zizians.info thing as being inaccurate and basically a rationalist hit job. And again, there's some reason for suspicion here. But most of the claims made in it, I have backed up through reading the individual sources. One of the issues is that a lot of people writing about this will credit Ziz with all of the unihemispheric stuff. And that's mostly Gwynn.

So there's a point worth making. Around this time, a woman named Jamie Zajko started living nearby with her girlfriend Alice Monday. Both are rationalists that are interested in Ziz's ideas. Alice and Ziz have been in contact for years. And in fact, Alice, because she's an older, more established rationalist,

When Ziz was kind of new to the community, had sent Ziz an article on the Gervais principle for the first time, which had spawned her ideas about needing to jailbreak people into psychopathy. And at varying times, Ziz would claim Alice as a mentor. There are some, I don't, like very vague accounts that Alice has done some problematic abusive stuff in the community. I don't know how true any of that is, but this is what people talk about. And I think Ziz may have had a break with her over some sort of disagreement because

It seems like, from what I can tell, Jamie, who is dating Alice at the time, is in direct contact with Ziz and interested in her, but also is not communicating with Ziz under her real name. She is making a bunch of sock puppet accounts on her blog.

And she is specifically commenting and trying to engage Ziz in different conversations, pretending to be multiple different people to quote unquote sabotage the hold she believed another woman in the community, Emma Borhanian, had on Ziz. And Borhanian is that former Google engineer.

Okay. So this is, you know, this is part of the messy thing is that like these people are all influencing each other and trying to like, their kind of go-to is like mind games to fuck with each other's heads. Yeah. Not a lot of straight conversation, huh? No.

Now, Emma Borhanian, who Jamie alleges has like- Jamie's girlfriend. No, Jamie's dating Alice Monday. Oh, I'm sorry. Borhanian is this former Google engineer who has been with Ziz since the Rationalist Fleet days. And Jamie thinks that she's controlling Ziz and she has like this bad influence that's leading them in a bad direction. And I've read Borhanian's blog too, because of

Of course I had to. Emma is she was as long winded as is fewer pop culture references. She wrote a lot about narcissism. But unlike most of these people, she tended to like use or she's like, I don't know. I don't understand the kind of point she's trying to make about narcissists, but she's very interested in the idea of like how narcissists work.

Jamie didn't like Emma, and she claims that because Emma and another member of the community had started shit-talking Alice to Ziz and convinced her that Alice was double evil. So Jamie creates all these sock puppet accounts to argue with Ziz with the goal of fucking with her head and making her distrust Emma. Quote,

So this isn't- And then what? And then what? Yes, exactly. There's never seems to be a plan behind fuck with each other's mental health constantly. It's like this is because there's all these overlapping fields of influence between all of these mostly women and everyone is fucking with each other's heads deliberately and also constantly trying to hack and upgrade each other. It's basically Scientology in the form of a codependent friend group, right? Like that's what's happening here. Wow.

This is so bad for everybody. Oh, man. They just dig deeper and deeper and deeper. Yes. That's what happens. Again, if you don't... This is the... You know, the touch grasp has been turned online. People have some, as you said, some problematic ways of discussing it. But this is the importance of turning out from your weird little subculture every now and again. Yes, definitely. Because if this world...

How often are they interacting with the world in general? Very rarely. And most of the people they do interact with are like these other people who are kind of on the edge of dropping out of society, living on this guy's property, this 80-year-old man's property and box trucks. Yeah. Who wants to- Those are their normies. He just wants to woodwork. Yeah. Yeah.

So while Jamie and Ziz are fighting online, COVID hit. And with it comes that eviction moratorium in the state of California. So Ziz and her friends, they stop paying rent to lend, either because they're broke or just because they don't need to anymore. And more than a year goes by. In April of 2021, Ziz posts this to her blog.

Housing in places like the Bay Area is a hierarchy of rent seekers, and the rent seekers above landlords rule by rule surplus, selective enforcement, fear, uncertainty, and doubt, corruption. It's all a complex, and it makes landlords incredibly vulnerable to blackmail from someone who can do even a little bit of investigative work. It's bad praxis to pay them rent. So, again, she's- I get it. I get it. But this is also going to lead you to a bad place. Yes. And this is where we-

Get to divergent stories. Curtis Lind, the landlord story, is that he was very supportive of these people and of trans people in general, taking one Zizian out to shop for her first bra. His friends and family say he was a decent guy. And I actually, when I started talking about writing these episodes on Blue Sky, someone chimed in to say they had known him too and that he was a nice person. I don't know. To Ziz, he was a landlord. And there are claims from the Zizians that he was verbally abusive and transphobic and

By the end of 2021, after a year and a half of unpaid rent, Lind had started working on the process of having police evict them. He and other residents claimed that the Zizians had become aggressive, acting as if the property was theirs now, threatening other people, basically squatting on it and like being violent at times, including like throwing rocks at Lind's cabin and brandishing knives at other people.

So there are allegation knives. Yeah. Yeah. They have taken to like threateningly playing with knives while talking about how they will not leave the property or pay rent. And you get the feeling like I'm not again, I'm not I'm not against the idea that this again, ambitious slumlord may have done some problematic things. But it sounds like the Zizians are being pretty deeply abusive to everyone around them. Right. Right. Which is also they believe is praxis. Right.

It's like these other people who aren't double good and who aren't aware of the great work, they're not working towards the cause. They're a-causal is the term they use. Their lives don't really have value. If you're not working for the cause, Ziz earlier will decide that- It's not like they're doing outreach, right? It's not like they're trying to convert their neighbors or anything like that. They're trying to convert rationalists, but they don't care about these weirdos living on the property with them.

Right. And again, remember, like Ziz had earlier decided that it would be worth four human lives for her to like get a she would kill four people to get a shower before work. Right. Basically. Oh, with the ants. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So these people don't have a lot of value for other people. Right. Now, the court case over the protest arrests dragged on. And in November of 2021, Ziz and her friends who'd been arrested filed a countersuit against Sonoma County, as well as several individuals associated with CFAR and the venue. Right.

By the time 2022 starts, the pressure is on for Ziz and the people living with her to figure out what they're going to do next. They do at some point work out a deal with Curtis, who will give them a little more time to fix their RV if they promise to bounce as soon as possible. Ziz is no longer actively adding to her blog, but she's still responding to comments and communicating with other sympathetic rationalists regularly. She becomes much more focused in her writing in this period on vengeance, violence, and death, as do others in her community. Per Wired, quote,

Great stuff.

In spring of 2021, one of the rationalist fleet veterans close to Ziz, Jay Winterford, who went by the name Fluttershy, killed themselves. Winterford had written about seeing Ziz's techniques as a way to deal with his childhood trauma. And Lesota wrote on her blog about her repeated attempts to fix and upgrade him. Now,

Now, Ziz wrote about this person and calls him a death knight. And as best as I can tell, a death knight is a Zizian term for someone who snaps and murders a bunch of people. She calls Hitler a death knight, but she also uses the term for mass shooters. And she claims Winterford, quote,

And basically, this person's talking about doing like a mass shooting or some other terrorist attack against the rationalist community in Ziz's name.

And Ziz claims that she's like spent seven months trying to stop them from doing this. And then finally they just kill themselves rather than killing anybody else. And again, they frame Ziz frames is like their heroic battle to stop this person from murdering other people and damaging the cause. But like, I don't know, maybe, maybe like this person needed professional help when they started talking about wanting to do a mass killing. When it's wanting to murder a bunch of people, maybe they needed help. Like, yeah.

Not your help? I don't know if anyone needs Ziz's help. No, no, Ziz does not even need Ziz's help. No. And she weaves this person's death into this very, this messianic hero's journey for herself, posting this in the summer of 2022.

This is all just...

someone may have given her a mean look at a grocery store and she decides, right? Like that's the mindset she's in. And she spins out. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Rationalists who had declared Ziz a cult leader considered all of this further evidence that she was dangerous. Again, rationalists also convince people to kill themselves, be a logic traps, but like they're not wrong to point this out. Now, I brought up Jamie's Ashko and Alice Monday a little earlier. They had moved out of the Bay in late 2020 and headed to Vermont where Jamie, who had some family money, bought land and a gun.

In February of 2022, she made a blog post with the subtitle, I Trolled Ziz and Now She Wants to Murder Me. In it, she claims, she talks about how like, yeah, she made all these fake accounts. And in late 2021, she and Ziz finally start talking under their real names. And Ziz talks about these trolling messages from the fake accounts Jamie had made. And like I said, that they really fucked with her head. And so Jamie, who's starting to view Ziz as a friend,

comes out and admits what she did. And Ziz responds by saying, the only way you can make this right is to murder your like girlfriend, ex-girlfriend, it's a little unclear, Alice Monday, my old mentor. Like you have to kill this person for me in order to make this right. Here's what Jamie writes.

During her last phone call, Ziz informed me that the only way I could gain her trust and make up for what I did was to murder Alice, preferably sometime soon. Ziz helpfully suggested I use a gun with a potato as a makeshift suppressor and that I might destroy the body with lye, and then told me that after I should video call Ziz and show her the body before I destroy it so she could get proof positive that I'd really done it. And if I didn't do it, Ziz planned to drive across the entire continental United States to murder me.

The die is cast. The die is cast. Shit. Jamie says that Ziz wants Alice dead because she thinks Alice is a mentor and she's got this whole Sith thing going on. So she's like, guess what? The Sith always kill their mentors. So I have to kill Alice or I can't get powerful enough to save the world. It's crazy. I love philosophy. In a story that has escalated so crazy, it is wild to hear it where it's like, okay, this is where...

This is where it starts, the wheels start to really fall off. Yes, this is where that border patrol officer's death becomes inevitable. Yeah, yeah. Because now you feel like Ziz has backed herself into a corner where someone's going to die. Yes, someone- Like you're talking about it, you're threatening it seriously, you're telling it like, at this point, right, is someone, this is going to happen. At this point, if no outside power comes in to disrupt these thought chains and decision chains,

someone is going to die and no one does come in, right? And several people die.

I mean, how could someone rationally even- How could you? I'm saying rational. How could someone even get there? It's so insular. You think about something like 5150, this Fluttershy person, right? Or 5150s is, does that make it better? Probably not. Probably just makes them even more paranoid and angry and convinced to do violence. It becomes the 11th assassination attempt or whatever, yeah. I don't know how you fix this at this point.

No, no, it's it's it might be is I think it might be too far gone. Yeah, there's there's I'm sure there's some possible way that this could have been fixed, but it's not clear to me.

And who? Who would be the person to do it? Maybe get George Lucas in there. George. Yes. Oh my God. Some ladies have taken your movies way too seriously. We need you to fly out and talk them out of committing murders. This is going to sound crazy. There's a bunch of people in a box truck wanting to kill in your name.

Or Ricky Gervais. Yeah, Ricky Gervais. Get Ricky Gervais and George Lucas on a fucking chopper. Get him in here on a blackhawk. They gotta talk these people down. Oh, shit. Oh, fuck. Oh, man, it's so funny. Just a week later, George Lucas is completely in the cult. He's wearing all black. He's living in Boxstrap. Oh, no, oh, no. Oh, no.

So he's writing, it's not even fan fiction. He's writing canonical Star Wars. He's writing canonical Star Wars stuff. Canonical rationalist Star Wars. Ponder that and ponder these ads, my friends. We'll be back with more.

So we're back. Now, Jamie is one of the few people who is like as good at manipulating Ziz as Ziz is at other people in this community. And after Ziz is like, hey, look, very high mana. Ziz is like, look, I'll have to kill you if you don't kill Alice, you know, and you know I'll do it because it's a timeless decision.

Jamie counters in a very effective way by saying like making a blog post saying Ziz said all this. I am not suicidal. If I die, it's her. And also letting Ziz know, quote, I have friends who will avenge me. Murdering Alice or me now is tantamount to committing suicide by proxy. So they have this like checkmate, counter checkmate chess match in blog posts that

That gets interrupted in March when Gwen fakes her death. Probably to escape the litigation they're all about. Honestly. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Gwyn, get out of here. Gwyn does make the good decision because sometime after faking her death, she bounces from this whole community. She does get out of there. There was just no way this story was going to end without somebody faking their own death. Oh, Sophie, so excited for you. This story doesn't even end. This story like late middles with two death fakings.

Because in September of 2022, Ziz fakes her death in a boating accident on the Black Signet. Emma calls the cops, says that she fell overboard. The Coast Guard, they work so hard to try to find her and save her that they get fatigue waivers so they can work all night. But they find nothing because she's not dead. Is she on the Black Signet?

I don't know where she actually was, but she doesn't. She's not dead. Ziz is declared dead and her of her family prints an obituary like Gwyn's death faking is a little less successful. Like their lawyer in court after they come in with legal evidence that Ziz is dead. Gwyn's lawyer is like, I really don't think they're dead. I think they're faking it. Oh,

Oh, man. Wow. What a snitch-ass lawyer. These lawyers don't like them, and they don't like their lawyers. Wow. That's where they fucked up. Your lawyer has to ride for you. Look, L. Ron Hubbard knew this about having a cult. Who's riding for this? Who knows what the fuck they're talking about? How do you even talk with these people at this point? When they're asking for counsel, what?

Oh, here's what's going on. The sanest decision one of them has made is to fake their death. Honestly, maybe we need more lawyers in this story. Maybe they could have saved it. Maybe a couple of lawyers additional could have fixed this. So I don't know precisely. Also, they have lawyer money?

No, these are public defenders. Oh, okay. Yeah. So Gwyn clearly fakes their death just to clear themselves of their legal problems. I think Ziz does it for that, but also she and her closest friends are now plotting the murder of Curtis Lind. We don't really – yeah.

That's the landlord. Now they want to kill Curtis. Yes. Yes. They want to kill Curtis. They want to stay on the land. Is that the kind of the thought? I think they want to stay on the land. I think they also, their escalation logic is that if he is having the cops evict us, that is a situation that could end in our death. So he's trying to murder us. So the logical thing for us to do is to kill him now to protect us both from him and from other people.

and then have sex with his body? I don't think they're going to do that, but they are at least aware of that as an option. It's on the table. Yeah. So the reality of what happens next is a little bit in dispute, but what no one disagrees is that on November 13th, 2022, this is like right after midnight, Curtis Lind is stabbed repeatedly and impaled with a samurai sword. He also, during the same altercation, shoots and kills Emma Borhanian and wounds another member of the group.

In one Tumblr post, a Zizian with the username aflowerbyanothername gives what I think is probably a representative example of how the Zizians want to depict what happened next. What happened here? Kurt, quote, Curtis Lind and his ex-CIA best friend Patrick McMillan spent months threatening Emma and her friends.

Unlike what the papers claim, Emma and her friends weren't squatters. They were tenants who were struggling to find jobs or a place that would lease to them after Merrick and Seafar called a SWAT team on them in 2019. Now,

I don't know if McPhail was in the CIA, and I don't know if he and Curtis threatened these ladies, but I will say the preponderance of evidence suggests they were in fact squatting. This account blames them on not being able to make rent on their legal bills, but by this point, they had been squatting for like two years and change. I don't know if Lind was transphobic. I don't know if he – they say he alienated them from their neighbors by telling them that they were in a cult. I don't know if that's true or if they alienated their neighbors by being very off-putting and aggressive.

This Zizian account claims that other individuals started threatening to call the cops on the Zizians and thus, quote, it was an unending nightmare for them of terrifying, insane threats from every corner. Now, the author of this document says they weren't there themselves, but heard other members of the community explain what happened. And they said that Lind made specific threats in the fall of 2022, which culminated in one member of the group buying a bulletproof vest and wearing it at all times.

I don't trust this account. And among other things, it lies about the nature of their living situation. It lies by saying Emma had filed paperwork to take Curtis to court over the eviction. There was no court thing filed here. There's a very good comprehensive source on this by an individual who goes by Ken the Cowboy on Twitter. And he notes in this timeline of events, the last sentence is not true. There's no record of any lawsuit being filed in 2022 with any of the Zizians as plaintiffs and with Curtis Lind as a defendant.

So they claim basically this guy was aggressive and threatening us. And one day he attacked us, right? Quote, that morning he decided to stop them. He walked all the way from his trailer to their trucks while they were packing their things and opened fire. Lynn shot Emma point blank through her heart and lung. She collapsed to the ground and immediately her lung began filling with her heart's blood. She died within 20 seconds, violently coughing up chunks of her lung tissue in a futile attempt to clear her airways.

Somni was shot six times, rushing in a futile attempt to save Emma's life. The vest saved her life, but she was still hit through the neck and stomach. She acted only in self-defense. That's the Zizian claim here, that he just walks in as they're getting ready to leave and starts shooting them, right? Yeah, that's stupid. Now, that's their claim. This leaves out a very important fact, which is that Curtis Lind is stabbed 50 times. 50? Yes. What?

Lynn's account is somewhat less sympathetic to these people. He claims that after getting successfully getting a judgment against them in a court, he moved to evict and the sheriff agreed to do an eviction on November 15th. And this is what Lynn later said, quote, so they're worried about where they were going to go and what they were going to do. And they had a meeting with me.

And the meeting was about them staying for another two months and not paying. I said, no, I can't do that. So one of them took out a knife. It was a folding knife. It was a fairly large folding knife. It started patting the blade in their hand like this and looking at me and smiling. And they don't specify who this was. I don't know entirely which person he's accusing here or whatever. But he says this is his account of the attack itself is that –

After this, after he gets threatened with a knife, he goes and he buys a pistol and he gets a license to carry. And then right before the sheriffs are supposed to show up to evict them, one of the Zizians named Suri shows up and she tries to get him to like come help turn the water off in her trailer. So he goes over to there to turn the water off. And as he bends over to do that, he gets hit with something that shatters the right side of his skull and

Quote,

You know, I had no idea what was happening or when this had all happened. I was completely gone while this was happening. And how I stood back up or got to that spot, I have no idea. But I looked at all the blood coming out of me. Oh, and I had a sword, a long sword, all the way through my chest, right next to my heart, sticking out the other end, which I went to the hospital with. I was afraid to take it out. But anyway, at that time, I pulled out my pistol and started shooting. I killed the person to my right. And...

I got to say, based on the physical evidence, I think Lin's account is the real one of what happens here. I think they ambush him and stab him repeatedly and he shoots and kills one in self-defense. Obviously, again, he has a samurai sword entirely through his back. Can we acknowledge that this man took 50 to the chest and a samurai sword? And he's like 80. Yeah.

It'll make him like that anymore. And it's one of those, one of the like doubting claims by the Zizians is that like he couldn't survive being stabbed this many times. People survive getting stabbed a crazy amount of times, all the time. It's all like, if you read about enough stabbing accounts, you will read about people who die because they get stabbed once. And you will read about people who live through getting like 70 stab wounds. It's nuts. Stabbings are very hard to predict.

Tricky, tricky. Yeah. And also, it's also so worrisome because now they've done it, right? They've crossed that line. They've crossed that line and one of them has died.

- Yes, so the stakes are as high as they had always thought that they were. - And when the box trucks are cleaned out after they get arrested, the ones who had carried out the attack, because Ziz is on the property, and I think Gwyn is too still at this point, but Ziz does not participate in the attack. And like cops recognize Ziz and know that she's faking her death and don't arrest her, which is one of like the weird things. - They're familiar enough to know that- - Yeah.

I think this is that because like they've been called before because of these people. Yeah, I think they're aware of who she is, but just don't do even after this mass stabbing shooting. Like, again, the cops just don't do their jobs also as part of this story. You know, it's a.

It's also worth noting that after this arrest, when their box trucks are being cleaned out, they find tubes, containers of lye, which Ziz had talked to Jamie about dissolving bodies in lye. That's probably what the plan was with Curtis, my guess is. That's certainly what Curtis gets convinced of. Now-

My thinking, and I can't – this is not proven. I'm sure courts will try. We'll see how well they are able to do this in a court. My suspicion is that Ziz orchestrated this attack and convinced her friends to do it or convinced them to convince themselves to do it and justified it using the same escalatory logic that they used on everything else.

On her blog, when discussing theoretical acts of deadly violence, Ziz referred to what she called Quirrell's algorithm from the Harry Potter rationalist fanfic these people all love. And she quoted this line from the book describing the mental state she believed was necessary to survive a life-threatening situation. Intent to kill. Think purely of killing. Grasp at any means to do so. Censors off. Do not flinch. Kill.

Again, this Harry Potter book really- It really goes all the way back to that. Yeah. Be careful what you write, authors. You might get someone impaled by a samurai sword.

Of course they had a samurai sword. Of course they had a samurai sword. I'm sure they bought them all from the Bud K catalog. So Ziz had also written in late 2021 in a comment on her blog, I get so many people lining up to commit suicide by Ziz. And then she hyperlinks to the wiki for suicide by cop. And her meaning is that anyone acting in a way to like harm her or her goals is killing themselves because she has to kill them now. Right? Right.

And there's a good Medium post by someone named Sefa Shapiro that traces around how around this time Ziz's online writing becomes increasingly obsessed with the idea of using deadly violence to make oneself less vulnerable, right? That you – again, you have to always be ready to kill in order to protect yourself.

So the police arrest two of her friends, Somni and Suri Dow, who are the two surviving Zizians who'd taken part in the attack, and they take them to jail. Per a California law, these two are not just charged with trying to kill Curtis, but with the murder of their friend Emma. It's like if three people rob a liquor store and one of them kills someone, the other two will get charged with murder because someone died in the commission of a crime that they were involved in.

often, right? It's just California state law. A lot of people get life sentences as a result of this. Usually not in this exact scenario. No. Usually not.

Somni was placed in a men's jail and complained. Dow, after being assigned to a women's jail, demanded a men's jail. I think this is because they were trying to make a case that they weren't in their right mind, but it's kind of unclear to me exactly why this happens. There's a lot in terms of these two and their interactions with the court system that I'm not going to get into, right? Because it's just...

We simply can't go down all of those rabbit holes. But you should know that this is a factor in everyone's thinking is like their two friends are in prison. They're constantly sending these letters to the judge. They're making these weird rationalist arguments in their court cases. And that's all going down while Ziz and the remainder of her inner circle kind of go on the run.

Right. Because, you know, now they've been involved in a murder. Right. Gwen seems to go go fully into hiding at this time. I don't know if that's because of the murder or just because she had finally had enough of Ziz and all of her talk about killing. But in any case, she goes to ground around this point. Now, while all this is going on, I hate to keep bringing in new people, but there's a bunch of them. Right.

Jamie up in Vermont, I don't think is continuing to is seeing Alice Monday anymore. Alice seems to have also made the wise decision to fucking bounce and go to ground. Jamie is living with a another Ziz follower named Daniel Blank up in Vermont at this point. And Jamie has gotten increasingly into Ziz's ideas.

Blank is one of the people we know he delivers several documents to the court on Somni's behalf during this whole like after they go get charged with murder. And he's like a guy who has like a job and, you know, stuff going on in his life. And then like a month after this shooting, stabbing, he drops out of society, cuts ties with his family and quits his job to go live with Jamie and like.

It's a little unclear of exactly what's happening, but my belief is basically Jamie and the people who are around her, who are up in Vermont, who are Zizians, are being, before Ziz gets there, told to prepare for Ziz because they want to get access to money and a private property, a compound, right? Where they can both not be on the run, have a living space, and continue to work on their ideas.

That is what I think is happening. And Daniel Blank is someone who has been following Ziz online, gets convinced to drop out of his life, cut ties with everybody, move in with this person, Jamie. And it looks like they're kind of working to like ready a situation for Ziz and the Zizians in Vermont. And again,

There's a lot of this that has not been litigated yet, but what we know is that on December 31st, 2022, Jamie Zaschko's parents, who were 72 and 69 respectively, are murdered in their home. Oh my God. On the property of Vermont? No, they live in a separate state. They live in Pennsylvania, right? Okay. But-

We don't know who committed this murder. No one has yet been charged for it. Unlike in the lens stabbing, we do not have an obvious explanation. There is a ring video that shows an unknown vehicle pulling into the driveway, followed by screams. Some investigators think they hear someone yell mom before another person yells, oh my God, oh my God. But other people who have viewed the recording say it's unclear if that first word is mom. I have not seen this recording, so I can't

tell you what's accurate. But Zashko's parents were worth several million dollars and had a sizable estate to inherit. Yeah. You said that she had bought the property initially off of family money, right? Right. She's got some amount of access to it, right? And her last, right before these people are murdered, Jamie's mom messages with Jamie earlier that same day about savings bonds that Zashko is due to receive. Right.

In blog posts from 2021, Zaschko had written about her parents and repeatedly accused them of being abusers. One specific accusation she makes is that they snuck meat into her food and forced her to eat it after she expressed a desire to go vegan. So she has talked extensively online about her parents being fundamentally evil people. We know that at this point she lives with Daniel Blank and that their phones go dark.

right around the time of the murder, as if they had placed them in a Faraday bag, basically. Okay. Right? But we don't know where they are on the day of the murder. Police visit them in Vermont shortly after the murder, because obviously the daughter is someone that you're going to think of as a potential. Because one of the things about the murder is that whoever did it had some degree of knowledge of the property and an ability to get on it without forcing an entry. Right? So obviously the cops, they're going to think who's the next of kin. Right? Right. So police...

visit them on their property in Vermont and talk to Blank and Jamie. They ask if she has a gun. Jamie says yes, and she shows them a handgun that she owns that is the same caliber as the one used in the shootings. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean much. It's a nine millimeter, ton of nine millimeters. One thing the cops will point out is that Zajco owned the same type of bullet, the same make of bullet as those used in the shooting. But again, they're

Like I, I, the bullets I use keeping my carry gun or Hydra shocks, which is like what cops get. Cause that's the safest thing in court. If you're in a defensive shooting, you want to be like, I have the same bullets the cops have. Right. Because someone can't, you don't want to have like the, the man shredder zombie rounds or some shit. So the fact that like a common defensive caliber would murder these people was in the gun. That's not a smoking gun if you'll forgive it, but it also is like, that's not nothing either. Right. Like that's not nothing. Right. Yeah.

What means more is that Jamie is now the full beneficiary of her parents' estate.

And while she has not been charged, an attorney for Pennsylvania has filed a potential slayer statute issue, which is a law in Pennsylvania that you can't inherit someone's stuff if you kill them. Right. But again, they haven't been charged. There's a lot of suspicious shit about this. She also lies to her relatives claiming she couldn't have driven to Pennsylvania from Vermont because she didn't have a working car. And we know she did. So, you know. Yeah, it's it's.

Very suspicious over here. I don't think it's unlikely that she may have been basically tasked with killing her parents to get access to her money for the cause, their money for the cause. Right. That's kind of my suspicion, you know, and she was partly told it was OK because they were abusive. And so, like, you maybe have to do this.

in order to protect yourself and other people from abusers, which is the kind of logic they have too. On January 13th, right after midnight, Pennsylvania state troopers raid a hotel near the Philadelphia airport where Blank and Zaschko are staying. A Vermont judge had issued a warrant for their home, but police had not found the gun they believed was the murder weapon. They touch that weapon when they're in Vermont, but they don't have a warrant for it, right? So they don't get to take it.

Zashko was detained and the only one – and would have been the only one detained if she hadn't shouted to hotel staff as they're taking her away, tell Daniel in room 111 I'm being arrested. So that –

"Damn, smooch." "Smooth, smooth." These rationalists and their brilliant crimes. The cops obviously get interested in this and they recognize Daniel's name and they find on surveillance footage that she has handed a bag to him outside of his room in the night before, right? And they recognize his name 'cause they visited Zashko and Blank in their Vermont home. So they get a warrant for his hotel room and raid it like an hour or two later.

later. Blank is found in the bathroom next to a blonde person dressed in black. This is Ziz. So...

Right. Yeah. An article by the San Francisco Chronicle explains what happened next. Blank put his hands behind his back and walked out of the room, obeying police commands, but Ziz did not do any of that. He had his eyes closed, a trooper testified, using masculine pronouns. He would not speak. He was just laying almost unconscious or as if he was dead on the ground. He had to be carried out. Again, this

This is misogyny. I don't know if it's intentional or if this was like acting and like portraying themselves as masculine because they're on the run, you know, at this point in time. It's not actually clear to me. Whatever the case, Ziz is taken into custody and charged with disorderly conduct and interfering with a police investigation.

A nine millimeter handgun was found in the room along with ammo. $40,000 in cash is found in Zashko's Subaru. And again, she doesn't get charged with murder. They let her out very soon and she just leaves. The cops are shocked because they have to give her back her car and the 40 grand, which she abandons. She and Blake just leave the car and $40,000 in cash. Oh.

I don't think they're making good decisions at this point is my only explanation for you, David. How? Maybe they're thinking like, well, they put a tracker in the money. They'll track the car. It's not safe to have any of it. I don't know why they're making this decision, but it's very weird, right? Now-

During this same time, several other Zizians are at least suspected to have been coming in and out of like Pennsylvania during the area around the murder. It is unclear how many people if they were if the Zizians killed this husband and wife, it's unclear how many of them were there. And again, no one has been charged.

But it's at this point that another Zizian enters the playing field. This person goes by the name Ophelia. They are a German citizen. They have like a legal residency in the US. Their last name is Bockholt. They used to work at James Street, or Jane Street, which is where Sam Bankman Freed worked. They're a quant trader, right? So this is someone functioning at a high level of the finance industry who like drops out of their career and life to go to Vermont and

Hours like really like they fly in like right before the murders That's such a troubling theme about this. Yeah whole thing about how many of these people really do Integrate in a major way like it's not just like fringe people No, these are people who are successful in their other lives, but they're lacking I think a lot of this is just that desperation that is also core to like fascism's appeal and

To feel like a sense of heroism, like I am part of a heroic struggle. People are very vulnerable to that. And even if you're making the money, if you're succeeding at a tech company or in finance, but it all feels empty to you because it kind of is. If someone's like, you can save the cosmos. Yeah, here's the cause. Maybe you'll give up your whole life in order to do that, right? Yeah. Yeah.

So Blank and Zajko are released in short order. As I said, they get out of jail quickly. But Ziz stays in custody for a while. And Bela said, I think, 50,000 initially. Are they aware of the fake death and everything? Yes. They are aware she has faked her death. California shows no interest in sending police out to get her, which is like it is a crime. Yeah.

The bail is set very high for two misdemeanors and police justify it in the court documents by saying Ziz had recklessly created a dangerous situation by making the police move her.

Per that argument, that article in Wired, quote,

So the authorities here have recognized this is all centered around this person, but it's very difficult for us to hold them legally responsible at this stage. We can't even arrest anyone for the murder yet. We don't have enough.

And, you know, it's it's I'm not going to pretend to know precisely what happened, but I think it's pretty clear Ziz probably gave the order to do this killing. Yeah. Or everyone using her logic talk themselves into, well, this is the only way to further our crucially important work is we need the money that these abusers are selfishly keeping to themselves.

Ziz's bail is eventually reduced. She winds up in the wind immediately. The authorities are like, she's going to immediately bounce and we'll lose her. And that's exactly what happens. Zashko and Blank, it's kind of unclear exactly what they do initially after this, but we know Jamie reaches out to her aunt and begs for help. And her aunt is like, did you kill my sister? And

Jamie says no and blames the murders on Less Wrong, which is Eliezer's blog. So she's blaming the rationalist community. She claims that she's being targeted and that CIFAR had committed and murdered her parents to basically make Ziz look bad. A year or so goes by, right? Ziz misses a court date. She never shows back up. We really don't know what the fuck these people are doing for most of this period.

In February of 2023- She's no longer blogging either. She's not. No, no, no, no, no, no. But she's still communicating. Well, you said she had stopped. She was just responding to people. Yeah. And she is communicating with people still, but I think it's primarily through more direct means. In February of 2023, a community alert is posted by someone named Sefa Shapiro. It warns that, quote, over the past few years, Ziz has repeatedly called for the deaths of many different classes of people.

And this post lays out a lot of what I've described in these episodes, but there's still no public awareness of the Zizians. Everything happening here is so weird. The circumstances around the murderers are so murky that most law enforcement kind of shrugs it off. And there's not a public... These people are so...

It's very difficult to even talk about them, right? Yeah. How do you qualify that on the nightly news? Yes, exactly. Yeah. This is all going to change. In February of 2024, Jamie Zaschko purchases three handguns, I think, from a Vermont gun store.

A few months later, in May of 2024, a 20-year-old woman named Teresa Youngblood disappears from her home in Seattle. Youngblood is one of the scattered community of people who still obsessively followed and interacted with Ziz and her inner circle's teachings. Her parents feared that she was in a controlling relationship with someone, and months after disappearing, she applies for a marriage license with another rationalist who's obsessed with Ziz named Maximilian Snyder.

Now, like most Zizians, Snyder has a very impressive academic record. He was a national merit scholar who attended Oxford University. Then he starts posting on Less Wrong, like all the others. He is initially a fan of Yudkowsky, but at some point he gets convinced that Ziz's vegan Sith radicalism is the true path. In the summer of 2023, just months earlier, he won $11,000 from an AI alignment contest, and he won that award under his legal name, but he also goes by Adir. It's kind of unclear to me.

what the situation is there. Around the same time, he tried to raise money for Ziz when she was briefly behind bars. I don't know if this guy, Snyder, this person, if Snyder marries Youngblood because they're actually in love. They had gone to high school together. But,

I think there may have been some sort of weird legal reason that Ziz wanted them married. Again, very unclear, but they don't stay together physically very long. By January of 2025, Teresa is in Vermont looking at rural properties for purchase alongside Ophelia, the German quant trader. Well, Max Snyder is in California. And reading between some lines, I think

Because Ophelia and Teresa aren't involved in any of the court cases, Ziz is using them to help actually scout out and find an isolated compound where they can hide out. They are doing the groundwork of figuring out a place for them to live. They are acting as the legal individuals who can kind of handle everything for the folks who are legally compromised.

Later investigation would show that Bockholt and Youngblood had been living in Chapel Hill, Vermont, in a duplex, and neighbors say that several other people also lived with them. These people were always dressed in black and owned a box truck.

It is unclear, but I think what happens is after she goes on the run, Ziz starts reaching out to people she'd been in contact with around the world and says, hey, the time is now. Drop out of your lives and come devote yourselves to the cause, right? Okay. And these three are the ones who follow, Bockholt, Youngblood, and Snyder, right? Because they all cut ties with their families, with their jobs, and leave home around the same time.

While they're looking for rural compounds, Bockholt and Youngblood wind up in a hotel in Lindenville, Vermont. An employee reports them to the police because they're wearing body armor and other tactical gear, and at least one of them is openly carrying a pistol. Something is very weird here because they're approached not just by Virginia State Police, but by a Homeland Security Investigations officer.

There's evidence that Homeland Security is surveilling them for a week before the shootout that happens. I don't know what Homeland Security thought was happening. They may have just seen, "We're on the border. Obviously, shit's escalated there. This is a foreign citizen with an American citizen. They're wrapping their electronics in tinfoil. They've got guns. They're driving around being very suspicious in tactical gear."

Maybe they just thought it was like some run of the mill terrorism bullshit. It's worth checking out. Right. So they are surveilling these people. And I think Youngblood and Bockholt realize they're being surveilled. Right. And that starts that escalatory loop in their head of Zizian logic where, well, if the police confront me, there's only one way to respond. Yeah. Yeah.

Two days later, prosecutors in California asked the judge in the Curtis Lind case to speed up the process of going to trial. He's in his 80s. He's got a bad memory, and he's the only witness of the attack. So they say it's necessary. We need to do this quickly. So the next day, January 17th, before this can happen, before Lind can go to trial, a masked assailant assaults Lind near his property and slits his throat, killing him.

Maximilian Snyder, Youngblood's husband, will be arrested days later in Redding, California for the murder. Fuck, because they had been separate. Oh, man. So there's a possibility that this is sent after the marriage. Yeah. I don't see why. Now, he hasn't pled yet, at least as of the time we record this, but he sent a letter in jail to Eliezer Yudkowsky trying to make him become a vegan. Ha! Ha ha! Ha ha!

Priorities in order. Oh, fuck. He also claimed, quote, I am not one of Ziz's friends. Neither she nor her friends endorse me or my words. So far as I know, I speak only for myself as myself for the sake of everyone.

Sure. Yeah, okay. Okay, man. You just decided to kill this guy for no reason? Dog, you are. Oh, man. This guy who happened to have a relationship with this very small group of people. Who is this person he has filed for a marriage license with, Youngblood, the day after Lind gets assassinated. Youngblood and Bockholt are heading back from a trip out target shooting when they get pulled over by Border Patrol.

Youngblood almost immediately draws her sidearm. There's a shootout. She killed or I think she kills. Now, anytime there's a shootout and an officer dies, a decent amount of the time that officer is like killed by another cop's bullet. I don't actually know for sure if it was Youngblood or if they all start shooting and he just gets killed in the crossfire. I don't fully know whose gun kills him, but she definitely starts shooting. Right. Right. And Border Patrol agent David Mallon dies.

Bokholt is killed in the immediate shootout before she can draw a weapon. And both of the firearms used in this shooting were guns purchased by Zadji, by Jamie in early 2024, right? So again, all of these things are, it's very easy to connect them if you like know all these people, but it takes so long to trace out. For all their talk of murder, the, uh,

In practice, they're not very good at it, huh? No. I mean, they didn't plan for the shooting to happen, right? It's just that their kind of escalatory logic made it inevitable. After all this, authorities finally start putting the whole story together. A manhunt is launched, and on February 16th of 2025, Ziz, Jamie, and Daniel Blank are finally caught. After the shootout, they seem to have started living in box trucks again, one of which was registered to Youngblood.

Yeah, back to what you know. And again, one of these is Youngblood. The box truck is registered in her name. They pulled onto a property in Frostburg to camp, and the owner spotted them and said, hey, get off my land. And Ziz tries to talk this person into letting them stay for a month. But he's like, no, I'm going to call the cops. You're in a robe. You're in a wizard's robe. You look like a wizard. I don't need any of this.

So ultimately, they all get arrested and charged with everything the cops could throw at them, which is like a legal possession, carrying a firearm, stuff like that. Right. Inside the other box truck, state troopers found Jamie and Ziz, according to the charging documents, dressed all in black and wearing gun belts with ammunition.

So yeah, and that's the situation where we are now. That's it, the story's done. No! Oh man.

Yeah. So this is basically where we are. Ziz asked for pretrial release. Didn't get it. Not shocked about that. Quote, speaking, and this is from a Seattle PI article. Speaking haltingly, she also requested a vegan diet and said that she was in a mild state of delirium due to lack of food. I have not done anything wrong, she told a judge. I might starve to death if you do not intervene. I need the jail to be ordered to have a vegan diet. It's more important than whatever this hearing is.

So I don't think this whole court process is going to end super well for Ziz. No. But I also, it's very hard to tell, like, what are you going to charge? Like, I'm legitimately, like, very, like, I'll be fascinated to see what the charges are here. Yeah, it's exciting to know that we can see this play out real time. Yeah. This was weird.

Yeah. Hell yeah, it was. Hell yeah, it was.

Great. Anyway. But, like, I would like to know how things fucking shake up. Yeah. Maybe we'll revisit this when my brain has healed. I need to go, like, read about Hitler some to calm down. Yeah. You need to go talk to your neighbor. Yeah, I need to go talk to my neighbor. That's a better suggestion. Thank you. Yeah. Not just keep reading my Hitler books and coming up with theories. Yeah.

That's how you get double bad. That's how you get double bad. Exactly. That's how it happens. You got to go on a run, go talk to your neighbor, go pet a goat, you know. Everyone else, go talk to somebody, you know, pet an animal.

Walk, you know, in the woods or something. Maybe stay away from boats for a while, just in case. Stay the fuck away from boats. Don't go live on a boat. Don't go live on a boat. Stay out of the water. I don't care how bad it is. Stay out of the fucking water. Oh, man. Fuck.

God. Wow. How do you feel at the end of this, David? Yeah, David, how are you doing? This is your first experience on our show. What's up? How's the vibe? I honestly don't know. To tell you the truth, I don't know how I feel. I'm going to have to, really going to have to kick this around for a couple of days. But this was interesting. Yeah. Interesting as hell. Yeah. That's one way to describe it. Yeah. That's one way to describe it. Yeah.

This is a wild time. David, do you have anything you want to plug for the listeners? Oh, yeah. I produced my own comedy special. It's available on my Patreon, patreon.com backslash David Borey, G-B-O-R-I-E. It's called Birth of a Nation, spelled with a G because that's...

My last name, and I think it's funny. But yeah, check that out. It is funny. I have a podcast. My mama told me. I also have one called All Fantasy Everything where we draft fantasy things that aren't sports. But yeah, check that stuff out.

Oh shit, that sounds really cool. It's a lot of fun. That sounds so much better for you than everything we've talked about today. It's different than this. And it reminded me I need to set my fantasy basketball lineup, so thank you, sir. Oh, there you go. It's time. Check it out, everybody. Alright, that's been the podcast. Don't do any of this. Don't do any of the things in this episode. Please. Bye. Bye.

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