Who are the Zizians?

Published Jun 19, 2025, 9:00 AM

The story of the Zizians is an unusual one. Are they a cult? Or are they simply a group who wants a better world? And why have six deaths in three states been linked to them?

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know. This is I guess, a timely topical true crime edition The Three.

T's CooA Alert. Yeah, I feel I should sound the clacks on on this one. Yeah, we'reishing a CoA on this one, A pretty a pretty robust one because a this is something we don't do a lot, which is tackle true crime and almost real time. As far as the fact that none of this is settled, the alleged crimes, We're probably gonna say alleged a lot because there's not even been court dates a lot of times for some of these cases where we're you know, we're talking about potentially six murders in three states by a group that may or may not have done it, that may or may not be a cult. So just a big CoA there. This is one of the true crimes where like neither one of us are going to be like, well, here's my theory on this, because just who knows, this has got to play out first, And the other big CoA is a lot of the sort of a disproportionate amount of members of the Zizians who are going to be talking about are members of the trans community. And it's just one of the sort of facts of the case. It's obviously no suggestion or judgment on our part of the trans community, but it seems to be a big sort of part of this group of people who got together. So just kind of keep all that in mind as we lay all this out there.

Right, Nice word, Chuck, Thanks for that. Yeah, So, like you said, we're talking about the Zizzians. How do you hear about this? This is your pick, you know what.

I have no idea and even went to look to see if somebody has suggested it, and no one had. I think I might have just seen a news story and been like, wait a minute, this is this is something that hasn't been attend Netflix series yet, right, so it must be super super current, which it is.

My theory is that the Great Gazoo said doe on the Zizian's dome dome, and you were like, I should do one on the Zizzians.

Yeah, thanks for bringing a joke into this thing.

So the Zizians are called such because they center around Zizz, a trans woman who is often portrayed as the leader of this cult, and I mean you can make a pretty fair case that at the very least she's the leader of the most influential member, because the whole thing's named after her. Although we should say that this group of people do not call themselves the Zizians. That was a name that was given to them by somebody who's critical of them, an anonymous person who's critical of them.

Yeah.

But Zizz herself, we know, was born in nineteen ninety one in Fairbanks, Alaska, And like the other people that she attracts into her orbit, she was brilliant, I mean, very precocious as far as like working on computers goes, as far as mathematics goes. I think by the time she was at the University of Fairbanks in Alaska, she had internships at both Oracles, the cloud computing company, and NASA. So I mean like she had pretty great resume, I guess, is what you'd say if you're on LinkedIn.

Yeah, for sure. And like you said, this is going to be sort of a common thing with everyone who got together with Ziz and the others. So in college, Ziz started learning about what's called the rationalist movement or the rationalist community, which were also very science minded people. They kind of gathered around Silicon Valley. And one of the big things with rationalism is and a lot of this stuff makes sense, like a lot of the stuff that they're laying down, like, Hey, let's use logical tools to just always question ourselves. Let's not get set in our way of thinking about anything. Let's always revise what we're thinking about everything. And one of the key people here, one of the names you'll heal early and then later on, as a guy named Eliezer Yudkowski, who is an AI researcher who is kind of doing something different than what a lot of AI researchers are doing in that he has devoted much of his career to basically saying, hey, warning, this could really go wrong, and I'm going to do everything i can to make sure it goes down in the right way.

Yeah.

He dedicated himself to solving the AI alignment problem, which is, how do you create an artificial intelligence whose motivations are totally aligned with humans and we don't accidentally wipe ourselves out with the AI we create. Yeah, and like you said, it kind of flies in the face of especially what's going on these days, which is like, hurry up and build an AI or else China's going to do it first and we're going to lose out, and there's so much money to be made off of AI. And Eliezer Yukowski is a very very interesting duties self taught AI researcher, incredibly brilliant and just by happenstance. I got an email yesterday from somebody at a publishing house that mentioned that he has a new book coming out in September with Nate Soors, one of his collaborators. It's called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and it's about AI.

Right, which doesn't have a whole lot to do with the Zizzians, but that just sets up kind of who this guy is. In two thousand and nine, he founded a blog called less Wrong, as in let's do less wrong, and I mean, I assume that's what it means.

It means so it's about overcoming your biases, like you want to be less wrong kind of, it's all about thinking clearly and not letting your bias as guide you're thinking. I think, yeah.

So they started gathering, as I guess, a de facto sort of community of rationalists. A lot of this, again is taking place in and around Silicon Valley in northern California, and he founded a couple of Berkeley, California based organizations that'll come into play. The Machine Intelligence Research Institute or MARY, and again that's about, you know, minimizing the risks of AI, and then the Center for Applied Rationality or ce FAR, and again same deal. Clear unbiased thinking is what they're after, never getting too set in your ways and always trying to revise how you think about things right.

They're also very closely tied with effective altruism, which is essentially using rational thinking to donate your money to the greatest good. We did an episode on that, if I'm not mistaken.

We did my friend.

All of this attracted Ziz to move from Alaska down to the Bay Area in San Francisco, and she got involved with SEFAR, got involved with MIRY, and dedicated herself also to trying to figure out this AI alignment problem too. And she the thing about this rationalist community is they are as open as you can be. You can be a Nazi and show up and be like, I'm a Nazi and here's what I think about everything, and they will engage you in debate because that's just what they do. They like no thought processes off the table, and that attracted a lot of interesting people who were the average normy would probably not necessarily feel comfortable sitting in a room with just because you know, of awkwardness, but also because they probably wouldn't have much to converse about because the people were talking about in this rationalist community are so brilliant that they probably would not be able to relate to the average person and vice versa.

Yeah, or at the very least on some of the radical fringes of whatever movement that they're in. Zizz is one of those people and was started writing on the less wrong side and her own blog and writing about again, stuff that's on the more radical end of the spectrum, like hey we got a you know, sort of a twelve Monkeys kind of stuff, like hey, we got to do whatever it takes. Some people might think, you know, something we're doing is evil, but if it's in the service of what we think has a good end, then that's what we should do. Sometimes she calls herself a scyth as in you know, star Wars, and apparently the name Zizz comes from a speculative fiction story called Worm that a lot of rationalists love, in which Zizz in the story is a villainous entity that if they listen to for too long, you will go crazy. And so Zizz is all of a sudden hanging around the Bay Area go into these rationalists hangouts and meetings wearing black robes, as in sort of dressed like a syth.

So all this is what around twenty sixteen seventeen, that this is all starting, that Ziz is showing up. And again, like I said, this community is very open, so even those Ziz would show up wearing black robes, declaring yourself as Sith Lord and that that's her religion is Sith. But despite the community being open, she still stood out, not necessarily because she wore black robes and call herself the scyth, but more because she was more intensely devoted and dedicated than even the average rationalist, right, so she did stand out some. One of the other things that she was radically dedicated to was veganism and animal rights, and this would actually end up separating her from the rationalist community eventually, and that you can kind of make a case it seems like is the initial schism that causes wedge that led to all the events that would follow.

Yeah, like basically, hey, you're trying to protect human life, like what about the animals? Like every sentient animal is a person, and that these are resisious words, and you know, so we gotta kick up the the intensity on the animal front as well. The problem with all of this is that this was around San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where it's really really expensive to live. If you're someone like Zizz, You're not going out and getting some big tech job where you're making tons of money to afford that condo downtown. So you got to live somewhere. And this is when Zizz meets up with somebody named Gwen Danielson. Had a lot in common, another rationalist, another trans woman, another person who was very much into animal rights. And Gwen happened to live on a sailboat in Berkeley Marina and said, Hey, this is a much cheaper rent here. Why don't you just come and live on this boat with me. I'm also into math, I'm also into science, and I'm also have some pretty radical ideas about stuff.

Yeah, and so the point of this was if you and this is Zizz's belief, if you could free yourself from things like paying rent, especially the high rent of San Francisco, and keep your cost down to as minimal as possible, you could devote that much more time to figuring out the AI alignment problem, figuring out how to push Sea Far and Miri into protecting animal rights too. Like just thinking and learning to think better. That was kind of the point. And so I think Ziz initially moved into the sailboat with Gwen Danielson, found that they were not quite exactly compatible roommate wise, but still friends, and so Ziz bought her own sailboat and docted it the same marina in Berkeley, and they became what was called the Rationalist Fleet. This they invited more and more people to come join them at the marina, and they actually went so far as to buy an old tugboat that by this time was in its seventies or eighties. Maybe they not a good age for a tugboat, and they actually bought it from Alaska and tugged it down or sailed it down all the way to San Francisco.

Yeah, the name of the boat was Caleb. So now It's in Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco. And Caleb was a problem though. Cabb, like you said, was an old boat, an old World War Two era tugboat, So it wasn't like, you know, even like a a mid seventies houseboat would have been a better option. Probably this thing they couldn't. Had a hard time anchoring it. It was too expensive to maintain. It would drift out of control and hit other boats. So it was not, you know, everything they thought it was going to be, so just you know, sort of park that for now, I'm going to say that a lot through me parking a lot of things. As this jumps around is at this point, we have to introduce some new characters to the scene. Again, had a lot in common with Ziz and Gwenn in that they were very very smart, very much into math and science. Some were trends and some were non binary. And the first player here is someone named Emma Baranian, a programmer worked at Google but left Google because they thought the company was corrupt.

Yes, and we should say these people fell into Ziz's orbit because Thisiz was a prolific blogger and blogged in a way that like a lot of the language and thoughts and ideas were impenetrable to all but a certain group of people. And these were the people that she ended up attracting through her blog. There's a really great Guardian article about all of this written by Alliver Conroy, and Conroy says that there was a glossary that somebody gave him that one of Zig's blog followers created of Zig's words, and that when he printed it out it was forty eight pages long. So like, she had a certain thing going on that attracted a certain kind of person and these were the people who were falling into their into her orbit at this time. And we should also say all of these people were in their early to mid twenties. I think Ziz was the oldest maybe at the time, at twenty six. So they were all disaffected, brilliant, often trans vegan twenty somethings who were living very close to homelessness in San Francisco in the late two thousand teams.

Yeah, So the second person was Alex Leatham, occasionally known as Somny, a mathematician in this case went to the UCLA study at UC Berkeley as well. Then we have Michelle Zashko biometrics researcher, another Smarty Pants, and then someone named Alice Munday who was Zoshko's girlfriend and a bit of a mentor apparently according to Ziz to Ziz, and they started sort of just getting together talking about their ideas. They came up with a name for one of their theories or sort of their overarching theory called vegan an Arco transhumanism, and gwyn Danielson developed this idea that the hemispheres of the brain were basically separate and they could operate independently from one another. You can be different genders at the same time. You can be good and evil, or good or evil at the same time. And they started these experiments called un una hemispheric sleep where they were saying, you can be asleep and awake at the same time. One can be asleep and then one can be active and awake. And we say this because there are people that have accused Ziz and others in the group of basically keeping you sleep deprived through these experiments, potentially leading to a couple of suicides that we'll talk about. And again, I have no judgment on whether or not they are a cult or not at this point, but if you're making a case for cult. Sleep deprivation is a very big hallmark of something that oftentimes happens.

Yeah, that's like chapter two in the cult Leader's playbook. Yeah, we should say also that una hemispheric sleep theoretically as possible. Humans don't do it, but dolphins do, whales do, migratory birds too. So it's sound like it just doesn't exist. It's humans trying to figure out how to do it themselves so they could think longer, more hours in a day essentially.

Yeah, so this group is getting a little more upset and aggressive toward the official rationalist movement and community. They think again that Mary and c far you're not doing enough for the animals. You need to expand your I guess viewpoint on sentient beings and what that means. And you're also biased against trans people.

Yeah. And there was another thing too that Ziz got really upset about. She came to believe that Mary paid off a blackmailer. Another way to put it is that somebody accused people at MIRI of sexual assault or statutory rape I think it was, and that they paid the person to go away. Some people call it a settlement. To Ziz, it was a blackmail paying off a blackmailer, and that you just did not do that, that that violated some of the basic tenets of the rationalist community and the way of solving problems that they use. So that with the ethical veganism combined, really separated her from this rationalist community. And with this growing group around her, they decided that they were going to show up go to the Seafar seminar conference that was being held in twenty nineteen, and they were going to present their problems and their issues in a very rational way, just like Seefhar would want them to. And the people who organized Sefar were like, you guys are way too aggressive for our tastes. You can't come to the Seafar retreat.

And one of them said, you've got a Nazi in there. So four of them ziz Gwyn Danielson, Emma Baranian and it gets a litt confusingly all names and Alex Leatham. They went anyway, and they had their guy Fawkes masks on and they had their black hooded robes on. They blocked the exits with their vehicles and they were like, here you're going to listen to us. Here's our flyers here's our problems and our issues, and the staff didn't know what was going on. They called in a report of a possible active shooter and the cops came. They did not have arms on them or anything like that, but they were arrested on charges of false imprisonment and child endangement because there were kids there. It was a campground where they met north of San Francisco, and the defendance, we should point out, the four of them did end up filing a suit against the police alleging mistreatment.

Yeah, so the rationalist community is like, that's it. Not only can you not come to Seafire retreats, you can't even hang out on the Less Wrong blog. You can't come to our cocktail meetups that we have, which are a lot of fun. So you're probably going to be upset. They just got booted out. So now this wedge was a gulf. It was a break in communication between the group that would come to be known as Sizians and the rationalist community. And with that that group became more and more isolated and their ideas got a little weirder and a little more far out and a little more aggressive. Because they were all similar people who were eating off one another in this isolated situation. There weren't people on the outside coming and be like, whoa, let's let's rethink what you're saying. It was like, Yeah, that's a really good idea, and it just kept going from there.

All right, I think that's a good You can kind of park all that stuff for now because this story kind of jumps around the country a bit, and when we come back, we're gonna pick up with part two a little north of San Francisco in Ballejo, California.

Stop you know, stop stop stopping here? Should know no, stop you.

Know, So Chuck. One of the outcomes of being like pushed out of the rationalist community somebody, he launched a website called zizzians dot info, still around today, and they basically chronicled all the things that they accused the Zizians of being a cult or that backs up their accusation of the Zizzians being a cult. And two of the things are something you referenced earlier. There were two suicides by people who were said to have gone through this una hemispheric sleep I guess boot camp, and it resulted in their suicides allegedly, so d Zizzeans just have a really bad name. At this point, the marina thing is not working out. The Rationalist Fleet is kind of sinking, as it were, and they just happened to meet somebody at the marina named Curtis Lynde, who is a seventy something guy who loved people, loved artists and had a bunch of land down in Vallejo and said, Hey, I want artists to come live down there. You guys seem kind of artsy and odd. Why don't you come live there for really cheap rent? And the Zizzians were like, heck, yeah.

All right.

So Curtis Lynn offers, you know, them, the chance to go live. You know, they paid rent, but I don't imagine it was very much. And in this, you know, we're going to be introduced to some more players at this point. One of the members of the group that had joined up at this time, her name was Suri dal and she was fresh out of high school and a leftist blogger and just sort of put a pin in this. At one point in a discord chat, she said that she had had very dramatic fantasies about becoming a knife murderer, and there's you know, up to twenty people at this time on Curtis Lyn's property. The neighbors get a little freaked out. They're like, hey, they're walking around naked. Sometimes they're wearing gas masks. Lynd eventually was like, you guys aren't even paying rent anymore, and they said, yeah, well there's a COVID eviction moratorium, so what are you going to do about it? So everything just starts going really pear shaped, as you say, in like.

Yeah, also check I saw that they would carry katanas around like samurai swords. So imagine seeing your neighbor walking around naked, wearing a gas mask and carrying a samurai sword, and there's twenty of them. It would be hard, especially in the context of California, to not be like, I think they might be a cult.

Good point.

So in twenty twenty two, like you said, things just really start to take a terrible shape. In August, Zizz's sister and Emma Baranian went to the police and said, our friend Zizz fell over while boating. So Ziz died during in a boating accident. The Coastguard launched a huge search, and I guess after eighteen hours they said there's no way that she could have survived, and she was. Although they didn't have the body, they still declared her legally dead and her sister was given a death certificate. And around the same time, Gwen Danielson, who was one of the og members of this whole group, she died by suicide too. So this group is just rocked by these two deaths in twenty twenty.

Two, that's right. So while this is happening, it's kind of at the same time, this COVID eviction moratorium runs out. So Curtis Lynde is like, all right, now I can actually get these people off my property finally, probably like this November. Two days before he was able to do that and sort of dropped the news that they were out of there, Suri Dal called him in and said, hey, there's a water leak on my property here or in my trailer. You got to come and check this out. Curtis Lynn says, I went to address the issue with the water and I was assaulted. They hit me over the head, They stabbed me with knives, They stabbed me with a katana, the samurai sword. He ended up losing an eye. He was stabbed through the chest apparently he alleges that Alex Leatham was the one who stabbed him through the chest, and so he shot Leatham and Emma Branian and killed her dead. If you ask the Zizians that were there, they said, no, that's not what happened. He'd been harassing us and he just opened fire on us one day.

So the authorities tended to agree or believe Curtis Lynde, and in fact, Leatham and Dow were arrested, charged with attempted murder and then also charged with the death of Emma Baranian because apparently in California law, if you do something that causes the death of somebody else, even incidentally, you are responsible or you can be held responsible for that death. And the thinking was that Curtis Lynn had to kill Emma Baranian because of the actions of Dow and Lethum. Right right, So now Surrey Dow and Alex Leatham are in jail in California. That's where they are. So just park that, like you said.

That's right. So police took another member of the group at the time. She gave her name as Julia Dawson. He said, come down the station with us. We got to question you. At this she seemed like she was having a medical emergency, so like, well, we got to get her to the hospital. STAT took her to the hospital, and she disappeared from the hospital. Detectives started investigating what happened there and they said, oh, you know who that was. That was Zizzzz is not dead at all. And they also determined guess who else was there, Gwen Danielson, she's actually alive as well.

Yeah.

So if you've heard our faking your death episode, this is a it's a big deal to fake your death, especially successfully. So the Zizians never thought they were dead, or if they did, it was for a very short time. It was to protect themselves from the authorities. One of the other things that was really an unsettling find after Curtis Lynde was attacked, they found a that of lie that suggested that they intended to kill him and that they were going to dissolve his body in it. So it's starting to become clear like these people are no joke. But at the time, this was like an isolated incident. It wasn't related to anything else. The authorities did not know that this was a group known as the Zizzians or anything like that. There were pieces that were starting to lay out on the table, but no one had put them together yet.

Yeah, exactly. All right, So now you can park all of that because we're going to move once again across the country. This time Pennsylvania is going to come into the picture in twenty twenty one. So this is a little bit before these events. Michelle Zashko that we mentioned in Alice Munday, who were girlfriends with each other. They moved from California to Vermont, to northern Vermont, pretty rural area, and they were joined by guy named Daniel Blank, another like minded person. He went to UC Berkeley bioengineering and electrical engineering co degree and then worked at startups, and he was also a vegan and started to sort of get a little more radical about it. It got distance from his parents, started judging them for eating meat, and he hooks up with Monday and Zashko and Vermont.

Yeah, and so by this time, I think, I don't know if you said it or not. I think you did. Ziz had credited Alice Monday as being like her mentor y she had she modeled herself largely after Alice Monday too, like she was apparently really assertive with her beliefs and ideas, and Ziz became more and more like that after meeting Alice Monday. By this time though, she considered Alice Monday an enemy, what she called the vampire. And I guess Zajkoh was by association, guilty by association, and from what I could tell, the Alice Monday became her enemy because she and maybe Zajka were warning people away from Ziz, saying like, you need to steer clear of this person. So Ziz considered their enemies, and she contacted Zosco and said, Hey, if you want to earn my trust back, you need to murder Alice. And if you don't, I'm going to come to Vermont and murder you. And this was the kind of a precarious situation as far as Zazko was concerned. Michelle Zozkoe was concerned because this really, I think, kind of gets a lot across. She was like, I really had to kind of decide, you know, did I want to murder Alice to make this happy or should I kill Ziz. This is the position that Ziz was putting people in by this time, Allegedly.

Yeah, should we just have Jerry drop in the word allegedly like just every forty seconds, allegedly, Beijing, mister Herman, I know I promised Pennsylvania and we've been in Vermont for a second. Here, but here's where Pennsylvania comes into play. On in December thirty, first last day of the year, according to Manny in twenty twenty two, this is about a month and a half after Curtis Lynde was stabbed and after that all occurred in Viejo. So Michelle Zosco's parents, Richard and Rita were murdered in Pennsylvania. They have ring camera footage from a neighbor that shows two people arriving at the house a little before midnight, and on the camera footage you can hear what sounds like mom and then a few seconds later, oh my god, Oh god god, and the parents of Michelle Zashko were found shot in the head, kind of execution style, in their bedroom.

Yeah, so the Pennsylvania State Troopers went to go visit Michelle's age Cohen, Vermont, and she's like, I haven't been to Pennsylvania in almost twenty years, or more than twenty years, and I haven't talked to my parents in a year. So it's not me. I don't know who killed them. And in fact, she showed up to a graveside service a couple of weeks later, and I believe was the sole beneficiary maybe of her parents' estate. While she was there for the service, she was accompanied by Daniel Blank, and I guess they had drawn some attention at the hotel because they were both wearing black and one of them was said to have been carrying a gun around the hotel grounds. So the hotel called the police, and the police started surveilling them, and after a very short time, they went into Michelle'sajco's hotel room and searched it and I think they searched your car, found something like forty thousand dollars in cash, and they were like, we're just gonna take you down to jail. All this stuff is kind of mounting. We still think you might have killed your parents. We're going to take you in for questioning. And she said something to the hotel person that was there, said, can you contact Daniel Blank, he's in another room here and tell him what's going on, And the police were like, I think we'd like to talk to him too, went and got a warrant and then they went to Daniel Blank's room shortly after that.

That's right, they detained him. They did not were not able to keep them for very long. They were released pretty quickly. But we should mention too. In addition to that forty grand in cash, they also found several prepaid cell phones, which is a bit of a potential red flag as well in Michelle Zashko's car. And while they were arresting Blank, there was someone else in the room. They were lying on the floor, they wouldn't move, they wouldn't speak, and that was drum roll Zizz. So this is getting around. At this point, police arrested Ziz on obstruction of justice disorderly conduct I guess, just for not you know, complying I guess and getting off the floor and stuff like that. It was a misdemeanor charge. But they did hold her in jail for five months instead of I guess, in lieu of a five hundred thousand dollars bail, which could not afford obviously, and the judge said, all right, we're going to release you. You got to promise to pay ten grand if you miss court. She did return to court for that August hearing in a wheelchair pushed by her mom. But when the trial date came up of December of twenty twenty three, she did not show up. So I think that's probably a great place for our second break because the story is really heating up now. Sure is.

Stop you know stop stop stop? Should know no stop you know?

All right, So now we're gonna find ourselves partially in North Carolina, uh, and back in Vieho and also back in Vermont, and we're gonna introduce uh what I guess three more people, Olivia Bachholt, Maximilian Schnyder, and my Milo Young Blute.

Yeah. So, Ophelia Bachholt was German by birth and she was described as naive, altruistic, and trusting by friends. She fell into Esday's orbit. I think by starting out reading her blog, she was trans She was a math genius, and she was really really interested in effective altruism. I think she made a couple hundred grand a year as a quant trader in New York and donated all but ten percent of it to affective altruism causes. So she was very dedicated to this. But something about Zizz's philosophy grabbed her and she ended up leaving New York one day, cutting off all contact with everyone else in her former life, and moving to North Carolina and essentially starting a new life in this orbit of ziz.

Yeah.

So Maximilian Snyder was a data scientist, another super super smart person, and Milo Young Blute went to an elite private school in Seattle with Maximilian Snyder and they got together later on after that, and in May of twenty twenty four, Young Blute's parents said they're missing. I don't know where they went. They and Snyder applied for a marriage license together in November of twenty twenty four, which is November fifth, specifically, which is guy faux Knight. And apparently they all got attracted to the Zizzians just through online. They never met zizz, They never met Gwen Danielson, they never met any of the other Rationalists fleet Zizians at all in person.

Yes, that seems to be contested from what I can tell, Chuck that there's it's possible that there's evidence that they did meet them, but I don't know who said what or why. But that's yeah, that's a contested issue. So in January twenty twenty five, Young Bachholt they're in Vermont. They're a short distance away from Michelle's ageko's house. So shortly after the move where everybody was in Chapel Hill, Young Blute and Bachholt traveled to Vermont and the state. They checked into a hotel that was not too far from Michelle's ashco's house. And I thought initially that they were there to kill Michelle's ASCO, but I found that they had made contact with her enough that the police think that she bought them some guns or gave them some guns that she bought. I'm not exactly sure what they were doing in Vermont, but they eventually they fell under the radar of the Border Patrol, who pulled them over near the Canadian border. And when that happened, they were pulled over. At the very least, Young Blute allegedly got out and just opened fire on the Border patrol agents.

Yeah, the Border Patrol said that bachhold attempted to draw a gun, they fired back. It's basically a firefight at this point, and Bachholdt and a Border Patrol agent named David Malland were both killed. Young Blute was injured arrested obviously on assault charges. Police found hollow Point ammunition in their car, found those burner phones wrapped in foil. They found full face respirator mask, They found a night vision monocular, so sort of the Mayhem starter kit in the car.

Sure sounds like it for sure. So yeah, again, I'm not sure what they were doing in traveling from North Carolina to Vermont, but this is a big deal and they killed the border patrol agent, especially when a pair of trans people dressed in all black just open fire on a border patrol agent and made national news. And this is when people started to connect the dots. Not only did you have the attack of Curtis Lind. A couple of years later, as everybody is starting to go to trial, Surrey Dow and Alex Leatham are moving toward trial. Curtis Lynd is a star witness, I guess, allegedly to shut him up, Maximilian Schneider shows up in Viejo and murdered Curtis Lind before he could testify.

Yeah, and this was just three days before this shootout in Vermont. So it's all really coming to a head very quickly, in almost real time to where we are today. So on February sixteenth of this year, three people dressed in all black, driving a couple of white box trucks. A sudden, we're in Maryland. They went to Maryland to a property owner and said, hey, can we camp out here for a month. He did not take kindly of that, so we called the cops and it turns out that was Daniel Blank, Zizz, and Michelle Zajko, and they arrested them initially on trespassing charges, but they found a bunch of guns in the trucks and said, oh wait, these are the three people there. Like you said, they started really connecting the dots at this point in February.

Yeah, and I couldn't find out what Michelle's AGCO or Daniel Blank were wanted for. But Ziz was wanted for jumping bail for that court case in Pennsylvania.

Well, they were arrested for trespassing.

Yeah, but I don't know what they were wanted for already, is what I'm saying. So that was February as of May, late May, last month, a couple of weeks ago, a couple of days ago, even you could say, Zizz, Michelle's Ageko, and Daniel Blank are all in jail in Maryland for treuspassing. Letham, Dow and Snipe are all in jail in California for the attack on Curtis Lind and then the murder of Curtis Lind and then Young Blute is in Vermont for allegedly trying to draw a gun on the Border Patrol agents during a firefight where a Border Patrol agent was killed. So the the Zizians are still like around essentially, they still will say like, we're not a cult, we're not even called Zizians. But now there's more and more journalists who are starting to dig into it and putting together deeper and deeper profiles of this group and what was going on. But like you said, this is real time, man, this is there's no resolution to this. This this is this is where it stops, because this is as far as it's gotten so far.

Yeah, they're still writing. Apparently, Daniel Schnyder in jail is writing stuff to the Rationalist group saying, hey, like you still need to focus on animal rights, and Michelle Zashko is writing She wrote an open letter to the world that's in quotes stated March ninth of this year and where she was like, hey, I didn't kill my parents zizz hasn't done anything wrong. A lot of these people, like I don't even know those other people. I'm not with Maximilian Schneyder, like I've never met these people. They're not Zizians, aren't a group like Josh said, Well, she didn't say, like joshad that'd be kind of fun though, But they're not even associated with us as a group that we don't refer to ourselves as Zizian's.

Right, So Alice Monday and Gwen Danielson thought to be alive. Still Alice Monday, I saw is thought to be in hiding that she's very scared of Zizz and the Zizians, especially now. And then there's other people. There's people in the rationalist community who were willing to speak to journalists about this, but not like anonymously because they're scared of the Zizians too. So it's still a thing, even though Zizz is in jail, and it's just a question of where it goes from here. But just kind of everything up. We'll go back to Half Moon Bay where the Caleb was docked in the Berkeley Marina, and since the Zizzian's abandoned it, it has sunk in the Marina half sunk and is a nuisance to that. You have to get around now, poor Caleb. Yeah, Caleb's like, what did I ever do? Yeah, I just wanted to help people. I'm a born tugboat.

I know.

If you want to know more about this stuff, go look it up. There's a lot of stuff to read, and just keep an eye on the news. We definitely will be too. And since I said that, I think it's time for listener mail Chuck.

This is from James. Hey, guys, I'm fascinated that terms we take for granted often come from slurs meant to suppress, and in some cases similar slurs. I love knowing that pagan came from a word that his Chuck puts. It means bumpkin was meant to belittle in diminish, and now it covers a huge chunk of the faith pie. I was reminded of the word jaywalking. I feel like we've talked about this in something, maybe the origins of jaywalking. Maybe maybe as cars became a thing and started driving with some velocity in the places where people were used to walking, big car had to make sure they weren't the bad guy. They had to rewrite convention and get people pedestrians specifically off the road. So what did they do? Slurs? Obviously, if I remember correctly, j like paganas meant an uneducated country folk too stupid not to walk in the road like a dingus. This word must have worked because now it is a legal term to describe the act of crossing the street at a non crosswalk. Big car one, constantine one. Thanks for the potting guys and fulfilling my brain with stuff that is James.

Thanks a lot, James. That's a good one. And think you jogged my memory to an episode about like how cars became the dominant mode of transportation in the US.

Sounds like that might have been the one I think that was.

That was a good one. That was a sleeper episode.

Agreed.

If you want to be like Jay and send us an interesting email that we may or may not read on the air, but we'd still like to receive anyway, you can send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Stuff You Should Know

If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD,  
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 2,591 clip(s)