Every Town - ZIZIANS: San Francisco’s Deadliest Fringe Group

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

They believed in AI safety, veganism and dismantling a broken culture in order to fix it from the ground up. But when those beliefs hardened into dogma, and dissent became betrayal, their utopian vision curdled into something far darker that resulted in 6 deaths. 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/gW1Lepv-4iY 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY for FREE! ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvtlOlODQ8g&t=5238s⁠ ⁠https://tubitv.com/movies/100029672/an-angry-boy⁠ International & Other Ways To Watch: ⁠https://www.anangryboy.com/⁠ 💀 MERCH: ⁠https://scary-mysteries.teemill.com/⁠ 💀 Free 7 Day Trail on Exclusive Episodes, Podcasts & Perks! ⁠https://www.patreon.com/scarymysteries⁠   🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠ 👁Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg⁠ 👁 TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald⁠ 👁Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠   🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you ready to dive into the unknown? Join me, Peyton Moreland, on Into the Dark, the true crime podcast from Ono Media with a hint of horror and mystery. Each week, I dive into a different case, breaking down the facts, and pondering the age-old question, why do people do what they do? Now, sometimes the answer isn't so clear, and that's why I'll also explore conspiracy theories, hauntings, and all things spooky. From the Green River Killer to the Mothman incident, we will unravel all of the questions that keep us up at night. So don't miss out. Subscribe now on your favorite podcast platform.

New episodes drop every Wednesday. Into the dark, where true crime meets the eerie unknown. Every town has a dark side. You ever notice how the line between brilliance and madness is thinner than we'd like to admit? In the high IQ echo chambers of the Bay Area? Recently, a group of tech-savvy idealists set out to fix the world. It sounds harmless enough, and it was, at least at first. They believed in AI safety, veganism,

and dismantling a broken culture in order to fix it from the ground up. But when those beliefs hardened into dogma, and descent became betrayal, their utopian vision curdled into something far darker that resulted in six deaths. And two were their own, and four of them, them, just innocent people. Hey guys, it's Andrew, and thanks for tuning

into this week's episode of Everytown, but today we're not looking into some fringe internet group. The people in today's story were the ones with Ivy League degrees, NASA internships, and resumes from Google, who ended up living on rusted out boats, and building a philosophy that justified violence

in the name of moral purity. They called it progress, but what they really built was a cult. Let's head on over to Sam Fran now and dig into the twisted story of the Zizzians. It all started in the San Francisco Bay Area around 2015. Before the pandemic hit and crime and homelessness had taken over the streets, it was a time when tech was in full bloom,

and one only needed to step foot in that city to become prosperous. And as we all know, idle hands are the devil's playground, and when things get too good, well, people have time to think about the weird things. Instead of being concerned with where their next meal might come from, instead, over $400 dinners paired with well-aged bottles of wine, well people get to talking about the meaning of life, philosophies, and dream about what could be.

So it was out of this that a loose network of young, self-described rationalists, effective, altruists, and AI researchers formed a little community. They were tech workers, but also people who believed clear thinking could save humanity's future. They wanted to help the world and people and believed in animal rights, which meant they were vegan, which all sounds well and good. They also thought that the culture and its system here in America had gotten things wrong, and effectively put us into a dark place. And if they were going to change that, then an anarchy wasn't out of the question. Change meant progress, which is in part why Jackless Soda, who went by the name Ziz, and used she-her pronouns, fit right on in. A computer science grad from Alaska with a NASA internship on her resume, she was technically brilliant.

And like many drawn to the Bay Area, rationalist scene, she wanted to contribute to what she saw as humanity's biggest challenge, ensuring that super-intelligent AI, if it emerged, would benefit all living creatures. But Lassota stood out from the start. She'd been a vegan before joining the community and viewed meat eaters as, quote, flesh-eating monsters who had created hell on earth. By 2016, she had connected with Gwen Danielson, another bright mind who'd studied engineering, math, and cognitive science at Rice University. They bonded over their frustrations with the rising Bay Area housing costs.

Those ridiculous rental prices were seen as a fundamental obstacle to their greater mission, also a symbol of everything wrong with America. So being the intelligent people they were, they got creative and started living on sailboats in the Berkeley Marina. Lesota bought a 24-foot boat for cheap off of Craigslist, and named it the Black Sagnet. Eventually, then they went bigger at purchasing a 70-year-old Navy tugboat called Caleb, with a third friend. While out there on the water, they had visions of creating a rationalist

fleet, as they called it, a floating community of like-minded people working on AI safety. But the reality of living on a russed-out tugboat isn't easy. And plagued with mechanical problems, they found themselves marooned for weeks working to make sure their boat

would function properly, and it isolated them from the wider community of the city. And they could see it from the waters, people from a distance, faint sounds, but they weren't really a part of any of it. That isolation then became fertile grounds for their increasingly strange ideas. According to Wired, Lesota wrote to someone at the time, We've been somewhat isolated from the rationalist community for a while. And the process developed a significant chunk of unique art of rationality

and theories of psychology aimed at solving our problems. Their ambitions grew beyond just finding affordable housing now. We are trying to build a cabal, Lassota wrote. She wanted to find abnormally intrinsically good people and transformed them into what she called Jervais sociopaths, people who could operate unowned by the external world, as is often the case with radicalized groups and even cults. And they start off with good intentions,

but ego ultimately gets in the way. Leaders of these types of groups see themselves as superior, indifferent from the masses. As they grow a stronger foundation and lean into their beliefs, it's very easy to get caught up in it all and believe you're headed down the path of righteousness. And soon, anything or anyone who gets in the way needs to be justifiably eliminated for the greater good. If you read Lesota's blog, Sincereously.fye, you'll see this place. lay out in real time. There you'll find over 100,000 words of increasingly tangled ideology. But beneath all the jargon and philosophical acrobatts lay something simple. A person who wanted to be a

hero committed to a moral code she believed others were too weak to uphold. And by 2017, LaSota's circle was drifting away from mainstream rationalist thought. They started wearing all black, called their philosophy vegan anarcho-transhumanism. Their spiritual beliefs, vegan Sith. Big weird words to go along with big weird ideas. Then came the brain hemisphere theory. Danielson developed it and Lesota quickly latched on.

They were cooking on all cylinders, so to speak, at this point, so long as it was plant-based. Yeah, they're like militant vegans, allegedly, who believe that it's either their way or the highway. They don't like the way technology has taken over the world and really, really doubtful and leery of AI and what its implications are. So they've been going all over the country

and taking part in protest and, according to prosecutors, violence. They believed a person's mind consisted of two hemispheres, one good and one non-beastrored. good. And these hemispheres were often at war with each other, which was the root cause of all our suffering. But through a process, they called debucketing, a person could gain awareness and control over them. And if someone was non-debucketed, like the majority of every human being on earth, well, they were a danger, a threat to the purity of society. And they didn't stop there. The group began experimenting with something called unihemispheric sleep.

A practice they believed allowed them to put portions of their brain to sleep while staying conscious. Osota described it as a means of keeping restless watch while alone. In retrospect, though, looks more like sleep deprivation with a philosophical veneer. And their tugboat venture collapsed when the Coast Guard had to retrieve Caleb after it dragged anchor and hit other boats. Eventually they abandoned it all together, looking to move on and spread their gospel elsewhere. But as they lost, their physical moorings, their ideological drift accelerated.

Lesota's followers now included Emma Borhanian, a former Google engineer, and Alex Leitham, who studied mathematics at UC Berkeley and UCLA. And together, they became fixated on perceived moral failures in the rationalist community. Now, because they were into forward thinking and AI, they orbited around like-minded individuals. The people I keep referring to as part of the rationalist community. Some of them had been involved previously with the Center for Applied Rationality, or Seafar, which was a nonprofit based out of Berkeley, California that formed back in 2012. Essentially, their goal was to use a set of techniques that could help people form their belief system about the world as accurately as possible.

Another one of these non-profits was MIRY, or the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which was founded in 2005, and they've been focused on making sure that AI systems are being implemented with trustworthy, rational reasoning. Because when you think about it, if the developers of AI do not themselves have rational, unbiased thinking,

well, that's going to be implemented into AI systems, which will eventually be a bit of, big problem for all of humanity. So you can see how all these players are working in the same realm. Well, the problem as Lesotha saw it, as well as her followers, was that Seafar's leadership discriminated against trans women. On top of that, they claimed Miri had used donor money to silence misconduct accusations in the workplace.

So they were not practicing what they preached and not doing what they needed to do to ensure AI safety. And so things then came to a head in November of 2019. On a Friday afternoon in beautiful Sonoma County, the Soda, Danielson, Borhanian, and Lethem showed up at the Westminster Woods, a retreat center where Seafar was hosting an alumni reunion. And they came dressed in black robes and Guy Falk masks,

blocking the entrances with their vehicles. They brought flyers attacking Seafar and Miri that read, Mary Seafar betrayed us. It is not what it once seemed like it would become. New things can be built. What they didn't know, or perhaps didn't even care about, was that 18 elementary school children were also at the camp that day for a ropes course. And just looking to have some fun in the great outdoors

when these people started making a scene. When they refused to leave, camp staff called the police, and someone reported a protester might be armed. So things escalated quickly, and the sheriff's office called in a SWAT team, and they evacuated the children in an armored vehicle. And for hours, with helicopter support, they searched the 200-acre property for a supposedly armed fifth protester who actually didn't even exist. It turned out what the person saw was a maintenance worker who had grabbed a hatchet

because he thought there was an active shooter. It was all pretty chaotic, but all four protesters were arrested. They face charges like felony conspiracy and five misdemeanors, including obstructing a peace officer and child cruelty. But of course, they saw themselves as the real victims. After all, they're just trying to save humanity. In legal filings, they claim they'd been subjected to excessive force and assault during searches, then tortured in jail by being woken whenever they started to fall asleep and kept naked and cold for days. and as the pandemic hit, well, that legal case moved at a glacial pace.

But proud and exhilarated that they had made an actual impact, the group at this time grew more isolated and more paranoid. And they were banned from rationalist forums and meetups. And word got around that they were nothing but trouble. And someone in their community wrote about their story, proudly branding them the Zizians for the first time, describing the group as essentially a cult. Meanwhile, Lesotha and her followers were writing about vengeance.

If you truly or reconcibly disagree with someone's creative choice, one wrote, ultimately your only recourse is to kill them. Lassota commented on that, saying, I am so effing glad to finally have an equal. By 2022, their court filings had honestly become almost incomprehensible. Elitham wrote that the judge and DA were spiritual. spiritual incarnations of the imposter police officers who kidnapped us. She requested a venue change due to genocidal intent towards transgender women,

claiming Sonoma County is infested with evil spirits who are colluding with each other to kill us. Around this time, Michelle Zadjko joined the Zizian's orbit. A bioinformatics master's graduate from Pennsylvania who identified as trans non-binary, Zadjko moved to Vermont with her girlfriend, Alice Monday. And they bought a 20-acre wooded property near the Canadian border, remote, isolated, perfect for someone, wanted to drop off the grid. Meanwhile, Borhanian and Leththam had settled in Vallejo, California. They were living in an RV on property owned by Curtis Lind. an 80-year-old former shipworker. Another young rationalist named Surrey Dow lived there too.

The Zizians communicated with one another daily, working to build up and implement their ideologies into the world. That's about when everything went wrong in a way that was impossible to come back from. And Curtis Lind stopped receiving payments for the rent the Zizians owed him, so he tried to evict them. It was several months of back and forth,

and the tension was building up. Of course, this was always one of the group's biggest issues, the capitalistic society they lived in that took advantage of people by charging a fee just to exist. It wasn't part of their whole vibe. So on November 13th of 2022, Dow called Lind over, saying he needed a check on a water leak. Now, Lind wasn't really an old-fashioned Second Amendment type of guy,

but in the rental warfare game, he had been playing with his tenants, they had threatened him at knife point before. So on this day, knowing he was entering the lion's den, he packed with him a sidearm. Lynn knocked, once he got inside, was hit in the back of the head with a rock, and knocked him unconscious. And when he came to, he was being stabbed in a frenzied attack by multiple people armed with kitchen knives. They jumped them, they use a samurai sword, and they stabbing repeatedly, including in the eye, he fought back, even though he was great. grievously injured, gunshots were fired, and he ended up killing one of his attackers and injuring another. He wounded Letham and killed Borhanian.

When all was said and done, he had received more than 50 cuts and stabs, but he managed to survive the attack. Police arrested Dow at the scene, and Lethom went to the hospital with gunshot wounds. Another woman, Julia Dawson, was at the property, but not involved in the fight, was also taken in for questioning. During that time, Julie had a medical emergency and had to go to the hospital and then just disappeared. Leitham and Dow were charged with attempted murder and the felony murder of their own friend. And California law allows prosecutors to charge instigators of a conflict with any resulting death, even if they didn't pull a trigger. Well, two days after the attack, police discovered that Julia Dawson wasn't just a random lady.

Well, she was Ziz Lasota, who, Everyone thought had drowned months earlier. Yeah, things are getting weirder, right? So back in August of 2022, the Coast Guard had received a distress call from Lassota's sister. She reported that Lassota had fallen overboard from her sailboat in the San Francisco Bay. After an 18-hour search turned up nothing, while Lassota was presumed dead. An obituary ran in her hometown paper in Alaska, but she hadn't drowned. She faked the whole thing and gone underground, hence the using of the fake name.

So things were off and running, and by this time, there were a lot of Zizians out there living on the fringe that were just waiting for an opportunity to show their worth. Not even two months after the attack on Lind, another gruesome attack happened on New Year's Eve. You remember Michelle Zadjko, who had been living up in Vermont. Well, her parents, Richard and Rita, were shot dead and their children. Chester Heights, Pennsylvania home. An elderly couple that were killed in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, were shot execution style in their homes on New Year's Eve.

Police found a gruesome scene. Richard and Rita Zadjko, Michelle's parents, had been shot to death. While most people were ringing in the New Year, a ring camera across the street from them, caught a car pulling up at around 11.29 p.m. And two minutes later, someone shot it with sounded like Mom. followed by, oh my God, oh God, God. The timing wasn't random. December 31st was Michelle's birthday.

The bodies were found two days later during a welfare check, lying in Michelle's childhood bedroom. Shortly after that, Pennsylvania State Troopers drove up to Vermont to question Michelle about the whole thing. They found her with Daniel Blank, a recent UC Berkeley student with ties to the Zizians. Zadjko claimed she hadn't spoken to her parents in a year, and had been in Vermont when they were killed. The officers asked about guns.

Zadjko showed them a 9-millimeter smith and Wesson with no warrant to take it and to leave it with her. A week later, after Zadjko attended her parents' funeral, wearing a mask, by the way, police got a warrant and found her at a hotel in Philadelphia. As they detained her, she yelled the staff to tell Daniel she'd been a woman. arrested. When officers approached Blank's room, they discovered him hiding in the bathroom with Zizlis Lissota. In Blank's pocket was a receipt for $40,000 cash, allegedly courtesy of Michelle's inheritance after her parents died. So there was the motive there. And these people who were so anti-paying rent, well, needed money after all to make their way in the world. In the hotel room

was a Smith and Wesson 9mm, with a serial number matching the one troopers had seen in Vermont, plus five boxes of ammo. So all sketchy stuff, but at the time, they had to let Blank and Zadjko out on bail as they tried to fit the pieces of the case together.

Lesotha, on the other hand, remained in custody, mainly due to the fact that she had faked her own death, which meant they could charge her with interfering with a police investigation. And after months in jail, La Soda showed up to court in August of 2023 looking totally different, black clothes, black hair, and a big N95 mask. Her mom pushed her in a wheelchair, and she barely said a word to the judge. When she was released on bail and by December, when her trial came, neither her mom or her showed up.

Zizz had had enough of playing the government's games. A warrant was issued, but just like that, Ziz vanished again. And the story could have ended there, really. A strange cult-like group splitting from the rationalist community for the leader who'd vanished and members scattered across the country. But in January of 2025, everything came roaring back into the headlines in a vicious way. On January 14th, hotel staff in Vermont called authorities about two guests in all-black tactical-style clothing. One was openly carrying a gun.

Homeland Security agents made contact and identified them as Teresa Youngblood and Ophelia Buckle. They claimed they were just looking for property, but wouldn't say more, no harm, no foul. And just two days later, across the country in California, prosecutors filed a court document about Curtis Lind, the landlord who'd survived the brutal knife and samurai sword attack. And he was the only eyewitness in the case gearing up against Letham and Dow, so his testimony was critical to the prosecution. On top of that, he had killed a Zizian, and those two things were not going to simply slip by. The very next day, Lind was walking near his property when a man in a black beanie, mask, and purple shirt attacked him from behind. Three days before he was set to testify against his attackers, he was jumped by yet another Zizian cult member, say police.

This time he wasn't so lucky. The same exact location where Vallejo police say a guy named Maximilian Snyder, another member of the Zizians, allegedly, had been seen flying in wait for Kurt Lin to show up. And when he does show up, he then apparently attacked him a number of times and stabbed him. die within an hour, and the Zizians all across the country rejoiced. Three days later, back in Vermont, border patrol agents pulled over Youngblood and Buckhold on Interstate 91. On January 20th, 2025, U.S. Border Patrol agent David Mayland stopped a suspicious vehicle in Coventry, Vermont. A car connected to Felix Bockholt and Teresa Youngblood. Moments later, gunfire erupted. Mayland was

killed in the shootout, Bokholt also died at the scene. Youngblood was shot and wounded but survived. Several days later, police arrested 22-year-old Maximilian Snyder in California, a computer science and philosophy graduate from Oxford. Snyder was charged with Lynn's murder. Investigators found connections between Snyder and Youngblood. They had applied for a marriage license together, and both, of course, were tied to Ziz. And the case got messier when Michelle Zadjko was believed to have been the one who bought the guns used in the Vermont shootout. And suddenly, everything was coming together. And the media scrambled to figure out who the Zizians really were.

From Jail Snyder sent reporters a bizarre 1,500-word letter. He denied being Zizz's friend, but the connections were clear. While he might not have been an actual friend, he was part of the growing community, as he spent most of the letter lecturing Miri founder, Elizer Yadkowski, about animal rights and weirdly bragging about his D&D skills. And finally, on February 16th at 2025 near Frostburg, Maryland, a landowner spotted three people in black

with two white box trucks on his property. And they asked to camp there for a month, could pay him a little bit of cash. Instead, though, he called the cops recognizing them from the news. police showed up and found Daniel Blank in one truck, and the other were LaSota and Zadjko wearing ammo belts. When told to get out, they refused. The cops moved in and took them down, so all three were arrested. The charges started with trespassing and obstruction, but they will likely go all the way to murder once everything is put in order. The time will tell on that front,

but now, as trials begin, big questions remain. Are more followers still out there, and will more violence be seen before it's all over? What began as a mission to save humanity from bad ideas ended with a trail of bodies and a movement now synonymous with chaos? Zizians weren't just another extremist group. They are a case study in how radical ideology can metastasize when brilliant minds isolate themselves, reject criticism, and start believing that the end truly justifying. the means. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Every

Town. I hope you all enjoyed it. If you did, then you want to go check out the links down in the description. We have YouTube, more podcasts, exclusive episodes, merch and more. Appreciate you all very much, so thank you for tuning in. Remember to come back next week for another episode of Every Town, filled with scary, strange,

and mysterious stories. Because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.