Today, Explained - The Zizian "death cult"

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Journalist Max Read explains how a bunch of Silicon Valley computer scientists spun into a cult accused of killings. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn with help from Travis Larchuk, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members A mugshot of Jack 'Ziz' Lasota, leader of the Zizians, after her arrest in connection with the killing of a Border Patrol Officer in Vermont in January. Image courtesy of the Allegany, MD County Sheriff's Office. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In late January, Vermont Border Patrol agent David Maylind pulled over a car near the Canadian border. While trading fire, Maylind was killed, as was one of the car's occupants. The other was injured. As the days passed, authorities realized that the people in that car had links to what's been described as a cult called the Zizians. Most of the Zizians are now dead or in jail, but do their ideas still have purchase? This isn't like the Manson family driving around every night looking for people to murder. But I do think, you know, it's possible that there are people out there

who are influenced by Ziz, or who were in fact fellow travelers, so to speak, who are still waiting for the final confrontation that they're going to have. That's coming up on Today Explained. With tons of free reality shows, you are totally free to watch what you love on Pluto TV. And for me, that's Dance Moms, Bar Rescue, The Challenge, and Jersey Shore. All totally free on Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.

On this week's episode of Network and Chill, I'm chatting with internet sensation and everyone's favorite Philly influencer, Bran Flakes. He's a social media maverick and content creator turning viral moments into cold hard cash. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on the Your Rich BFF YouTube channel. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. The Zizians emerged out of a movement called The Rationalists. Max Reed has been following this story. He's the owner-operator of the ReadMax newsletter on Substack. And so I asked Max to start by telling us what the Rationalists are. So Rationalism is a kind of community or movement of people largely based in Silicon Valley, though there's certainly people who would call themselves Rationalists all over the world.

This is a big group of people with a lot of different politics and many different sort of attitudes and ideas about what rationalism entails. But I think it's fair to say the sort of main idea is that human beings can and in fact should develop their reasoning skills to better approach the world, to better pursue good political outcomes, economic outcomes, philanthropic outcomes, personal outcomes. So in practice, this means having very long, very prolix conversations with other rationalists, usually online, like on forums, following chains of logic, sort of deep as far as they possibly go. And even if they come to absurd conclusions, taking those conclusions seriously so long as the logic seems sound, experimenting with sort of cognitive hacks or what they sometimes

call debugging tricks to sort of eliminate bias and think more rationally in their lives. Do you yearn to defend your own beliefs? Or do you yearn to see the world as clearly as you possibly can? Rationalism's been very influential in the AI research community, in part because a sort of original set of concerns among maybe the most prominent rationalist,

a man named Eliezer Yudkowski, is about the inevitability or likelihood of a coming superintelligence and the need to ensure that this superintelligence is aligned with human values and morality. My prediction is that this ends up with us facing down something smarter than us that does not want what we want, that does not want anything we recognize as valuable or meaningful. Just to give a sort of flavor of what rationalists thought, often the kind of crazy thought experiment that ends up being taken as, if not gospel, at least something to take seriously, is a famous thought experiment called a Roko's Basilisk. The idea of which is, if there is a far future super intelligence that is going to come,

it is likely to punish anybody who prevented it from coming into existence. And it will have the power to copy your brain onto its hardware in some kind of simulation and torture you for eternity. So if you spend any time at all thinking about this coming super intelligence, but not helping it come into existence, then you may be damning yourself or like a copy of you, which would be functionally equivalent to you, to an endless simulated hell, basically.

Hmm. I like the thought experiment. Probably because I don't think it's real. Do you know what I mean? Like, oh, this is... Oh, yeah, it's a fun, it's a very fun sci-fi. Like, you know, if you read that in a sci-fi story, you'd get a little chill and you'd be like, that's so cool. Exactly.

That's so interesting. Exactly. But like, I don't, I wouldn't make life choices based on it. No. But the folks that we're about to discuss did appear to make some life choices based on things that, you know,

were more thought experiment than real. So let's bring this into the real world. Who is Ziz? And how does Ziz become involved with the rationalists? So Ziz is a computer programmer, originally from Alaska, I believe, who moved to the Bay Area in 2016, a few years after graduating college. Ziz is a trans woman who, based on what I can tell from the record, transitioned during or after college. She was very interested in the rationalist community.

So there's two sort of big nonprofit institutions associated with rationalism. One is called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, or MIRI, and the other is called CIFAR, the Center for Applied Rationality. And these are places where you can attend workshops and lectures about AI alignment, about AI safety, which are sort of the broad terms for talking about, you know, making sure that AI doesn't kill all of us.

So she's really interested in this stuff. She is attending these workshops. She's meeting a bunch of rationalists. She is hard to find housing, affordable housing in the Bay and she moves onto a houseboat in the marina and becomes sort of well known in the community for proposing a rationalist flotilla where a bunch of rationalists can all come live

on houseboats in the marina for relatively cheap. Our aim, whether or not we thought success probable, was to make something much larger than the boat that we got, to appeal to the entire rationality community. People refer to the Zizians as a cult. Cults believe things. Cult leaders often have a big idea or two that they're very good at getting other people to believe. What is Ziz's big idea? Ziz describes herself as a Sith vegan. Sith being, you know, for people who have never

watched the Star Wars series, God bless you, the evil, the evil Jedi's. Destroy the Sith. We must. For the purposes of like the basic understanding of Zizianism, there's sort of three important pillars to what Ziz believes. The first is that animal lives are worth the same as human lives, and because of that, factory farming, carnivorism, these are crimes on the order of genocide that millions of animals, hundreds of millions of animals are being hurt or killed or enslaved every year.

And moreover, you know, once you've sort of entered this thought experiment, you now have a kind of moral, the same moral obligation you would have to prevent a genocide, you now also have to prevent the killing and the death of animals. So far, so good. This is kind of, this is not that far from what somebody who belongs to PETA might believe, but because of Ziz's and the sort of rationalist general commitment to their principles, no matter how kind of out of the mainstream those principles might take you, it suggests that violence, often extreme violence, is a necessary or allowable response to what you see as this enormous crime. The second and sort of related part, Ziz seems to believe that you can kind of indefinitely

just say no, that you can avoid compulsion and arrest and surrender simply by resisting at all times. And then the third part is that Ziz has what I suppose you would call a bicameral theory of mind. That she believes that every brain has two hemispheres. I mean, every brain in fact does have two hemispheres. She's not wrong about that. But that each hemisphere contains a different person or a different personality that has been sort of melded

together in most people, but that through techniques like sleep deprivation, judicious application of hallucinogenic drugs, you can separate out these two halves of your brain, these two personalities. She believes that each brain has a sort of independent moral quality and that, again, I can't believe how many times I have to say this is a blanket non-endorsement of all of Ziz's beliefs, but I do want to establish that, you know, as I described this, it's

not necessarily that we should take it at face value, but she basically believes that something like one in 20 people, one part of the brain, one half of their brain has an intuitive understanding of animal lives as being worth the same as human lives. So that person is called single good. One of the two halves of their brain has this goodness, this understanding. In one in 400 people, both parts of their brain

have this intuitive moral understanding. Those people are called double good. So I bring up this schema both to establish that Ziz is encouraging her followers to sort of pursue the sleep deprivation, the hallucinogenic drugs in pursuit of like, you know, a genuinely pretty out there and strange vision of like human consciousness, but she's also established this kind of hierarchy of moral worth that she is double good. She's looking for other double good people

and if you are only single good, well, you're just not as good as is basically. So you can kind of, you know, you can begin to see a sort of social dynamic emerge that allows her to take control of a group of people, to establish herself as the leader, to establish herself as the sort of moral exemplar. Hmm.

Okay, so the Zizians have some strange ideas. They have a charismatic leader. That doesn't necessarily mean trouble has to happen. When do the Zizians first have trouble with the law? Ziz starts to become disillusioned with the rationalist community around 2019. And around the same time, a set of accusations becomes public against some of the higher-ups at Meary. That's, remember, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, one of the prominent nonprofits

involved in AI safety and rationalism. These accusations, which are made on an anonymous website, are essentially that some of the higher-ups at this, at Mary, have sexually assaulted minors. And these accusations have never been sort of specifically elaborated in court. You know, these are accusations about not just sexual assault, but also cover-ups. But there has been some really important and significant

and really well-documented reporting about sexual harassment, sexual assault, if not with minors, with adult members of the community. So, you know, to be fair, it is, it's not like she's inventing these charges. She is, I think, maybe picking up on some real messed up power dynamics.

I should note that this is not necessarily, her crusade here is not necessarily a sort of moral, like, you know, for the sake of the victims of this harassment or assault. It's that she thinks that if the messengers of rationalism are imperfect in this way, that it will damage their ability to pursue the goals of AI safety, of AI alignment. And so in 2019, she and three of her followers, I suppose at this point we can say, go to a CIFAR reunion and they blockade the entrance.

They wear Guy Fawkes masks in the manner of anonymous and they pass out flyers, basically elaborating that Elisa Yudkowski does not deserve to be leading the rationalist movement. So obviously freaks out the people at CIFAR who call the cops. Sonoma County sends in a SWAT team who basically by all accounts assaults Ziz

and her three followers, and they get arrested and thrown in jail in Sonoma County. And this on both sides represents a kind of escalation. For the rationalists, the establishment rationalists, such as they are, they realize that this Zizien group is maybe potentially dangerous. So a website gets created called zizians.info that's a sort of warning website about interacting with Ziz, about Ziz as a potential cult leader, what they call an info hazard, which is like somebody who has knowledge that if you know it, it might drive you insane

or compel you to do bad things. On the side of the Zizians, this is an escalation in the sense that they seem to not have expected to get the cops called on them, and certainly they didn't expect to have like a full militarized police force come through and beat them up. So all four of the Zizians are eventually able to post bail, but almost immediately they file a lawsuit against Sonoma County for civil rights violations. From this point on, I think you can see a more militant, if I can use that word, a more militant Zizianism. Coming up after the break, Max returns to tell us what a more militant zizianism led to.

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We're back with Max Reed of the ReadMax substack. Max, you said in 2019, this altercation in Sonoma and some arrests turned the Zizians more militant. What happens next? More in the pandemic at this point, People aren't really gathering in person. Things are moving slowly. Ziz and the three people she was arrested with have court hearings, but they're slipping by.

We don't hear a lot about them. There's not a lot of record in the sense of blog posts or message board posts. In 2021, Ziz and one of the other arrestees, a woman named Gwen Danielson, skip bail and fail to show up to the court dates that have been assigned to them.

A few months later, their lawyer attests in a filing that Ziz has died in a boating accident, which is not in the end surprising, given what we know that she lived on a houseboat. He also writes that Danielson seems to have disappeared and was rumored to have killed herself at the age of 28. So for some people who were paying attention from the sidelines, interested rationalists, this was sort of the tragic end of the story. But around the same time, two of the other people who'd been arrested at the CIFAR protests, a woman named Emma Borhanian and another person

who goes under the name Somni, were involved in an altercation with an 80-year-old man named Carl Lind. Lind was a landlord, though a sort of very Bay Area situation where he had a chunk of property, and he was letting people camp or park RVs on it and live there, you know, artists and people who were otherwise having trouble finding housing. So a bunch of Zizians, including Emma Somney, another person named Suri Dao, had been living there for the last few years, but were supposedly in deep arrears and were also, from what we understand, kind of strange and difficult to deal with. They would walk around naked all the time and otherwise just sort of not be productive members of the community.

So Lind, who again is 80, has called the police to finally evict the Zizians when Somni stabs him with a samurai sword. Lind, who has a gun, shoots Somni and Emma Borhanian. Lind and Somni both manage to survive this assault. Borhanian unfortunately dies. And what's particularly interesting about this, beyond the fact that an 80-year-old man was stabbed with a samurai sword by an avowed Zizian, is that based on statements from the police, both Ziz and Gwen Danielson, who we've been told are dead, are alive. According to a write-up by a blogger named Sefa Shapiro, police in Solana County encountered Ziz at the scene.

They knew that she'd skipped bail. They knew there was a warrant out for her arrest, but they didn't arrest her. She went to the hospital. They didn't want to wait for her to be discharged, and she disappears again. A few weeks later, Ziz is arrested again in Pennsylvania, this time for obstruction of justice

and disorderly conduct, in connection with a double homicide of two senior citizens, Richard Zyko and Rita Zyko. Quiet neighborhood in Delaware County has been turned upside down tonight. Investigators in Chester Heights have ruled two suspicious deaths as homicides. An investigator said they did not believe it was random. Court records, detailed surveillance video where mom could be heard around the time of the murder. This is interesting because the Zyko's daughter is a woman named Michelle, who went by the

name Plum online, who is known to be a friend of Zyzz. And Plum once wrote a blog post describing Zyzz's attempts to pressure her into murdering another rationalist named Alice. Hmm. Zyzz has got this whole Sith thing going on where she thinks Alice was her mentor and guess what Siths do to their mentors? Police in Pennsylvania said that Ziz and Michelle Plum and a third person, Daniel Blank, were very plausibly involved in this double homicide. But again, nothing seems to happen.

Ziz is again released. At this point, it's mid 2023. And once again, we have another 18 month long period where we don't hear much from the Zizians. Nobody's in custody. There's not clear what the progression of this civil rights lawsuit they filed is. It's not clear what the progression of the charges

in Pennsylvania or in California are. But then in January 17th of this year, Carl Lind appears in the news again because he's stabbed to death in the Bay Area. This is the landlord. Yes, who had survived the previous stabbing. That's January 17th. On January 20th, which is the day of the Trump inauguration, we have a shootout in Vermont. Back here tonight, new developments in the deadly shooting of a Border Patrol agent in

Vermont. The agent shot and killed during a traffic stop near the Canadian border. An exchange of gunfire occurred. The agent was killed along with one suspect. The FBI says a second suspect was injured. The two people in the car were computer scientists, one of whom went by the name Ophelia online, and the other was a computer science student named Teresa Youngblood. People online start to pick up that these are people who they've interacted with before, who are members of the rationalist community, who are potentially affiliated with Ziz. And then some dots start to get connected.

So a few days after the shootout, a data scientist, 22-year-old data scientist named Maximilian Snyder is arrested for the stabbing of Lind in California. And it turns out that Snyder and Teresa Youngblood, the survivor of the border shootout, had applied for a marriage license in Washington state. Meanwhile, Michelle Zyko, Plum, whose parents had been murdered in a double homicide for which Ziz was briefly detained, is revealed to own property in Vermont not far from the location of the shootout. And then based on some filings by prosecutors in Vermont, she appears to be the person who purchased the guns that Ophelia and Teresa Youngblood used in the shootout.

And she's named as a person of interest. So at this point, you know, we're looking at a kind of bi-coastal cross-country, you don't want to call it a killing spree because we're talking about over the course of three or four years, but a set of murders that seem to be very clearly connected effectively in the person of Ziz, who is friends and perhaps even a leader of this sort of loose group of suspicious people, I suppose we'd say. Eventually, in mid-February, Ziz is arrested. So is Michelle Zyko, and so is this person Daniel Blank. So at this point, I believe all of the Zizians are in custody, almost all of them without bail, awaiting trial on a number of these different crimes.

That's where we are right now. That's where we're leaving off with the Zizians. Everybody involved here will get a trial. Everybody involved here who wants a lawyer will get a lawyer. These folks will go through the justice system. But I wonder, given your reporting, if you have a sense of how much of this is Ziz? Was Ziz calling the shots? Was Ziz ordering her followers to do these things?

That's a great question. I mean, it's something that I think is going to be incredibly interesting to follow in court. Based on chat transcripts and blog posts that we've seen, I think Ziz has a particular style of pressure that isn't precisely orders. This is not a cult in the sense of, it's not like the mafia, right, where there's a boss who's giving direct commands. It's more, I think that Ziz cultivates a sense of moral or even existential importance to the beliefs of the group,

and then puts people in a position to feel obligated to commit crimes. But I think cult is a fair word to describe the Zizians as we're talking about them, but from by all accounts, it's not really a sort of Jim Jones type, this person is a savior who we need to respect and follow and whose teachings are sort of divinely inspired. It's much more a case of an extremely charismatic person

who is able to talk people into things without necessarily needing to create a kind of church or again, hierarchical structure of power that people would follow, if that distinction makes sense. So, let's position these people, the Zizians, within the times in which we live, because yes, every age has its cults and every cult has its reasons. And some of those reasons are genuinely interesting and they often fit the times in which they live.

Even five years ago, these worries about artificial intelligence seemed very far away. When the rationalists got started with their thought experiments, you could look at this and say, oh my God, you guys, it's years in the future, stop freaking out. But in the last 30 months, we've seen major developments and improvements in AI, and we now appear to be barreling toward a future that these folks were really worried about. Do you think it was the times in which we live that made the Zizians?

Yeah, we've been cultivating a sense of danger about AI for the last two or three decades. The rationalists themselves have been cultivating this sense. AI researchers, whether or not they're influenced by rationalists, have been cultivating this sense of danger. And, you know, journalists who cover AI, captivated by the sort of dramatic, apocalyptic stories told about the coming AI future have that same sense.

And I think there's a real feedback loop that gets created in discourse about artificial intelligence where it's flashier to say that so-called AGI or artificial general intelligence is just around the corner. It's more compelling to say that it's going to be a huge existential danger to the labor market, to the world, to humanity as we know it. In that way, if you have a particular personality and if you are in a position where you are constantly hearing about the dangers posed by AI,

it's not hard to see how somebody might end up in a position where they're willing to buy and draw a gun on behalf of a set of beliefs about artificial intelligence that maybe, you know, to use the word in its original sense, that maybe a more rational person probably wouldn't pursue. Max Reed, his substack is Read Max. If you found this interesting and you want to hear more about the rationalists and some of these risks and fears around AI, Vox has got a new series coming out on March 12th called Good Robot, and you can hear it in the unexplainable feed. Today's show was produced by Amanda Llewellyn with

help from Travis Larchuk. It was edited by Amina El-Sadi and fact-checked in Howe by Laura Bullard. It was mixed by Andrea Christen's daughter and Patrick Boyd. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. you