The Zizians
About That Bay Area Vegan AI Murder Cult
On a cold November night in 2019, under the towering redwoods of Camp Meeker in Sonoma County, four cloaked figures moved with uncanny purpose. Dressed in black robes, gloves, and Guy Fawkes masks, they arrived in a convoy of vehicles – a box truck, a shuttle bus, and a Prius – and quietly barricaded the entrance to a woodland retreat center. A group of alumni from the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), itself having a long story related to cultlike practices, was planning to spend the weekend there for a workshop on ‘clear thinking and ethics’. They haven't arrived there yet. Instead, a group of children were still finishing their activity. Meanwhile, the robed intruders used their vehicles to seal everyone in, blocking roads in and out, while walkie-talkies crackled in the dark. Attendees later described the scene as something out of a thriller – masked avengers materializing from the night, intent unknown.
Sheriff’s deputies rushed to the Westminster Woods retreat at Camp Meeker and found the gate obstructed and dozens of frightened children trapped inside. The masked protesters, strangely silent and reportedly “speaking incoherently” when confronted, surrendered only after a SWAT team and helicopter were deployed amid rumors that one might be armed. No gun was found, but deputies did discover a written manifesto and bizarre flyers explaining the intrusion. “CFAR does not do remotely what they claim to do… They do not appreciably develop novel rationality/mental tech,” one flyer read. Other flyers railed against artificial intelligence, hinting that the protesters saw the retreat as a node of some great evil. In the confusion, deputies had to identify the suspects by fingerprint because they refused to give names. When the dust settled, four people were under arrest: Jack LaSota, 28, of Berkeley; Gwen Danielson, 25; Emma Borhanian, 28; and Alexander “Somni” Leatham, 24. Each was charged with an array of felonies – conspiracy, false imprisonment, and child endangerment – as well as misdemeanors like resisting arrest and trespassing. It was the first escalation for a community that prided itself on rational discourse. This surreal confrontation in the woods was the world’s first dramatic glimpse of the Zizians, a budding cult-like movement led by Jack LaSota – better known by the chosen name “Ziz.”
Just a few years prior, no one would have expected LaSota to end up in a midnight standoff against fellow rationalists. Born in Alaska in 1991, Jack LaSota was a gifted computer engineer with a keen interest in artificial intelligence and ethics. After earning a computer science degree and interning at NASA, LaSota’s promising career was set. In 2016, she moved to the Bay Area with idealistic ambitions. By her own account, she aspired to do “earning to give” – securing a tech job and donating money to fight existential threats like unaligned AI. She embedded herself in the Bay Area rationalist community, an informal network of thinkers and do-gooders orbiting around blogs and meetups that sought to “understand human cognition through reason and knowledge”. LaSota, who by this time was openly a transgender woman and an ardent vegan, found a niche among these like-minded futurists. She described herself as a “Vegan Transgender Anarchist Rationalist,” a tagline that captured the diverse influences on her worldview. In practice, she was intensely focused on morality and the future: how to save the world, how to liberate all sentient beings, and how to live with total integrity to her principles.
For a while, Ziz was just another passionate rationalist voice, albeit an eccentric one. She lived cheaply on a boat in the San Francisco Bay – part of an experiment called the “Rationalist Fleet” that she and friend Gwen Danielson undertook to escape the high costs of Bay Area living. By day, Ziz studied decision theory and existential risk at local meetups. By night, on the gently rocking deck of her sailboat, she wrote lengthy blog posts grappling with the nature of good and evil, the fate of humanity, and the moral worth of animals. On her blog “Sinceriously,” launched in 2016, Ziz’s tone grew increasingly radical and mystical over time. Early posts discussed concepts from AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky and philosopher Nick Bostrom – who warned about superintelligent AI – but often with a critical twist. Ziz argued that mainstream AI safety researchers were unwittingly “drinking the Kool-Aid” of institutional thinking. She lambasted academia and nonprofits like MIRI (Machine Intelligence Research Institute) for, in her view, starting an AI arms race under the guise of preventing one. In one fiery passage, she accused prestigious researchers of pushing the world toward destruction for the sake of “prestige and career success,” calling them captives of funding and social approval. This anti-establishment undercurrent set Ziz apart from her rationalist peers even as she used the community’s own jargon and logic to make her case.
There was also a deeply personal, psychological side to Ziz’s burgeoning philosophy. In blog entries that often read like fever-dream journal entries, she expounded a theory that each person’s brain hemispheres could harbor separate personas, values, even genders – halves of a self that “often desire to kill each other”. The standard rationalist fare debated “system 1” and “system 2,” but Ziz wove it into her quest to understand and purge “evil.” She believed that society’s corrupt influence could literally split a mind in two. According to later accounts by people who knew her, Ziz even tried to put these ideas into practice on those around her. In one disturbing episode, she allegedly encouraged a vulnerable friend to adopt a new name and identity (“Maia”) for one half of her psyche – an experiment in identity deconstruction that ended in the friend’s mental breakdown and eventual suicide. By pushing at the bounds of psychology, Ziz was drifting from pure theory into something far more cultic: she was testing her power to reshape minds in the name of her ideology.
By early 2019, Jack “Ziz” LaSota’s transformation from cooperative rationalist to renegade prophet was in full effect. She cut ties with established rationalist organizations, scorning them as sellouts. In a mass email sent to CFAR alumni that year, she issued an apocalyptic warning.
The message baffled and alarmed its recipients. Ziz was declaring, in essence, that CFAR and allied groups had been compromised by what she called “vampires” – her term for malignant actors parasitizing the community – and that those who truly wanted to live should abandon ship. On her blog, she elaborated that if “the state has been seized by vampires” who misuse laws to silence truth, then “there would be no moral obligation not to perform self defense”. In Ziz’s eyes, the social contract was null and void if the powers that be were sufficiently evil. It was a strikingly militant stance coming from someone in the ostensibly pacific rationalist scene. The stage was set for confrontation.
The Rise of the Zizians
After splitting from the mainstream rationalists, Ziz began attracting a small cadre of followers who resonated with her uncompromising ethos. In online forums and private chats, she found kindred spirits: mostly young, brainy outsiders who shared her distrust of authority and her almost fanatical concern for the suffering of all sentient life. Many were fellow trans women or gender-nonconforming people, some on the autism spectrum – “smart, mostly autistic-ish transwomen who were extremely vulnerable and isolated,” as one community leader later described Ziz’s recruitment pool.
What these individuals had in common was that they felt alienated from the conventional paths of tech and rationalist culture. Ziz gave them a new tribe and a grand purpose. They began referring to themselves half-jokingly as “Zizians,” embracing the moniker originally used by an alarmed rationalist whistle-blower who had launched a warning website about “the cult of Ziz.”
Inside the Zizian circle, a unique moral code took hold – one that fused high-minded rationalist principles with a near-religious zeal. Ethical veganism was at the core. Ziz taught that killing animals for food was as abhorrent as murder, and that a truly rational being would recognize a chicken, a pig, or a fish as equally worthy of life as a human. She herself agonized over the harm she had once indirectly caused. “I wanted to know exactly how many animals I had killed before I became a vegan,” she wrote, expressing a haunting wish that she could identify each creature and apologize or atone. She referred to those animals as people, signaling how completely she rejected the boundary between human and non-human life. This animal-rights stance went beyond the Effective Altruism movement’s usual concern for factory farming; it was personal and militant. One father, whose son fell in with Ziz, recalled receiving a final text message from him – a link to a gruesome farm animal abuse video followed by the words “Look what you have done.” The implication was clear: the son renounced his meat-eating parents as complicit in a holocaust. Militant veganism became a kind of litmus test for loyalty in the group, often accompanied by a general rejection of mainstream society’s comforts and norms.
Another pillar of Zizian ideology was a fixation on AI and existential risk, but in a form far more radical than that of her former peers. Ziz and her followers believed that mainstream AI researchers and rationalists had lost their moral compass – they were either too timid or too corrupted to do what was necessary to prevent a future ruled by a malevolent artificial superintelligence. The Zizians adopted concepts from decision theory to justify dramatic action. In their private discussions, they spoke of Timeless or Updateless Decision Theory – abstruse ideas from rationalist mathematics – and twisted them into a kind of cosmic permission slip for violence. If an action could acausally benefit other beings or other “worlds,” they reasoned, it might be right to take that action here and now regardless of the immediate consequences. It was a philosophy of ends-justify-means on steroids, cloaked in geeky language.
In simpler terms, Ziz preached that conventional morality was holding humanity back from doing what needed to be done. To her followers, she offered an identity as righteous warriors in a battle stretching across dimensions – a heady vision that proved intoxicating. They lived communally at times, moving between makeshift housing arrangements. At one point, they rented condos in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where they parked large box trucks outside and ran electrical cables inside to power their equipment. Neighbors occasionally spotted black-clad figures holding hands and walking in eerie silence at midnight.
The group cultivated an image of monastic secrecy and total dedication. For income and resources, they relied on tech jobs and, allegedly, the pilfered money of those among them who betrayed their “unenlightened” families. They trained themselves physically and mentally – practicing combat techniques, experimenting with sleep hacking, and drilling on how to respond if police or “hostiles” confronted them. In their online postings (often pseudonymous), Zizians spoke of “liberating all sentient life” and declared, in defiance of their detractors, “You can’t silence the truth, you can’t kill us in a way that matters.”
From Protest to Violence
In the wake of the Camp Meeker protest arrests, LaSota and her followers doubled down on their narrative of righteous persecution. They genuinely believed they had been acting in self-defense – that CFAR and its attendees were complicit in dreadful injustices, ranging from the slaughter of animals to enabling future AI catastrophe or even covering up sexual abuses in their community. Ziz in particular saw the November 2019 incident as vindication of her warnings: the “vampires” in the system had revealed themselves by jailing her for trying to expose the truth. After spending a weekend in jail, during which they claim to have been mistreated and even assaulted by guards, the four arrestees were released on bail. They emerged angry and unbowed. In 2021, Ziz, Danielson, and the others sued Sonoma County and the retreat center for violating their civil rights during the protest and detention. The lawsuit described their protest as an attempt to alert fellow rationalists to corruption, and it detailed the harsh treatment they allegedly received in custody – details calculated to cast them as victims rather than villains. That suit would later be dismissed by a judge, but not before things took an even darker turn.
Facing looming legal troubles and sensing a crackdown, the Zizians went underground. They stopped appearing at rationalist meetups entirely and cut remaining cordial ties. Ziz began to prepare for a long war. In August 2022, as court dates for the Camp Meeker case approached, Gwen Danielson mysteriously vanished. Rumors spread that she had died by suicide – rumors that were stoked by a cryptic note left behind. A month later, incredibly, an obituary for Jack “Ziz” LaSota ran in an Alaska newspaper, claiming she had died in a boating accident on the San Francisco Bay.
Friends in the rationalist world were stunned. Some suspected a hoax or faked death; others mourned what they thought was the loss of a troubled soul. In truth, both Ziz and Danielson were very much alive and in hiding. By staging their own deaths, they hoped to throw law enforcement off their trail. For a while, it worked. With two of its leaders now “dead” on paper, the group had additional freedom of movement. They drifted through obscure locations – living out of vehicles, crashing at sympathizers’ houses, and staying one step ahead of inquiries. It was during this period in late 2022 that the whisper of violence became a roar.
In mid-November 2022, Ziz and several followers re-emerged in Vallejo, in a confrontation that would mark the beginning of the end. Emma Borhanian, Somni Leatham, and another ally, Tessa Burns (also known as Suri Dao) had covertly taken up residence in a lot with multiple box trucks owned by a local landlord, then 80-year-old Curtis Lind. Exploiting California’s pandemic-era eviction moratorium, they hadn’t paid rent for months. From the Zizian perspective, refusing to pay was an act of principle – why feed a system they viewed as predatory? As Jessica Taylor, an AI researcher who knew Ziz, later put it, the group believed “it’s reasonable to avoid paying rent and [to] defend oneself from being evicted” as part of their ideology.
By November, the moratorium was ending and Lind was determined to evict his mysterious tenants. Tensions escalated rapidly. On the night of November 13, 2022, a violent altercation broke out. By the time police sirens lit up the quiet residential street, a chaotic scene lay before them: Curtis Lind had been stabbed through the chest with a sword, Somni Leatham, the sword-wielder, had been shot and wounded, and Emma Borhanian lay dead from a gunshot wound. Ziz was also present and was briefly handcuffed at gunpoint by officers who arrived to sort out the bloody melee.
What exactly happened in that lot became the stuff of competing narratives. Prosecutors would later allege that when Lind tried to force the squatters out, the Zizians launched a premeditated attack – Somni with his blade and Lind returned fire that fatally struck Emma in the chaos. The Zizians claimed self-defense: that Lind showed up with a gun and they fought for their lives. Ziz, notably, did not stick around to clarify the story. While in police custody that night, she feigned a medical emergency – going limp and unresponsive until officers sent her to a hospital.
Once at the ER, she simply walked out and disappeared into the night, astonishingly evading arrest. It was a move straight from her own playbook of exploiting system loopholes. Authorities were left with Emma dead, a wounded sword-wielding Somni, and a landlord who survived his stab wounds only to become a key witness against the group. They would later charge Suri and Somni with murder and attempted murder, but their prime target – the elusive “Ziz” – had slipped away yet again, like a ghost.
Now officially fugitives, the remaining Zizians scattered and went on the run across state lines. In December 2022, an even more heinous crime came to light: the execution-style murder of Richard and Rita Zajko, an elderly couple in Chester Heights, Pennsylvania. They were the parents of Jamie Zajko – Ziz’s fervent young disciple. Investigators suspect Jamie lured her parents into a trap or at least abetted the killers; The Zajkos were shot dead, and their house was ransacked – perhaps for money or firearms. Investigators discovered the Ring doorbell camera footage, captured by the neighbor across the street. The video showed that an unknown vehicle pulled into the Zajkos’ curved driveway. A minute later, the screams could be heard from the surveillance feed. Twenty-four seconds elapsed between a person yelling “Mom!” and “Oh my God! Oh, God, God!” This double homicide, seemingly an inside job, raised the stakes of the Zizian saga to a whole new level. It showed that some followers were willing to forsake not just society’s rules but their own flesh and blood. Whether Ziz directly ordered the hit or not remains unclear, but the crime was linked to her circle.
In that January 12, 2023 raid, officers finally caught up with Ziz – almost by accident. They were there looking for evidence in the Zajko double murder, they found Ziz and Daniel Blank holed up together in one of the rooms. The authorities were stunned: the cult leader who was supposed to be dead, then a fugitive from California, had resurfaced on the opposite coast. Blank surrendered quietly, but Ziz refused to cooperate. She lay on the floor, eyes shut, her body limp, forcing officers to carry her out as if she were a corpse. Ziz was arrested on minor charges of obstruction and resisting, since the Pennsylvania cops had not yet tied her to the murders directly. After a brief stint in jail, astonishingly, a judge granted her bail in mid-2023 – on the promise that her mother would supervise her return to court. Predictably, Ziz absconded the moment she could; by the end of 2023 she’d skipped her court date and gone underground once more. At this point, the FBI and multiple state agencies were actively hunting LaSota and any remaining Zizians. The pattern was clear: wherever this ideology went, death and chaos followed. Three violent deaths across three states had been linked to the group – from the blood-stained house in Pennsylvania to the sword fight in California.
On the night of January 17th, 2025, the Zizians would have their final revenge against Curtis Lind. Another Zizian, Maximillion Snyder, allegedly stabbed Lind in Vallejo, ending his life. In the ensuing chaos, as sirens wailed and shocked onlookers scrambled for cover, Snyder’s face hardened into the mask of a man who’d long flirted with defiance. Within hours, police had tracked him down and arrested him in a swift operation. The violent encounter, a grim punctuation mark in the Zizian narrative, signaled that the movement was no longer confined to online rants but had spilled into deadly real-world retribution.
Meanwhile, police traced a marriage license between Maximillion Snyder and Teresa Youngblut, fueling their growing suspicions of Teresa. Teresa, known for her steely resolve and almost clinical detachment, found in Snyder a kindred spirit. Together, they galvanized a cadre of followers, knitting a network that spanned from disillusioned rationalists to violent street operatives. Their collusion wasn’t just about shared radical ideas; it was a deliberate forging of a militant arm, a transformation of abstract philosophy into concrete, and often deadly, action. In the shadowy realm of the Zizians, Snyder and Teresa became the embodiment of a movement gone off the deep end—a chilling reminder that when theory turns to practice, the cost can be measured in blood.
The Zizians would soon graduate from a local rumor to front-page news as a roving cult with a body count. On January 20, 2025, events came to a head in a most unexpected place: a lonely stretch of Interstate 91 in rural Vermont, just a few miles from the Canadian border. Acting on a tip and weeks of surveillance, border patrol agents stopped a blue 2015 Toyota Prius Hatchback with a North Carolina license plate that was heading south through the snowy Vermont landscape. Inside were Teresa Youngblut and Ophelia Bauckholt. Instead of surrendering, they chose to shoot it out. In the wild firefight that erupted on the highway shoulder, U.S. Border Patrol Agent David Maland was killed. Bauckholt was also shot and died at the scene, and Youngblut was severely wounded before being taken into custody. The gun battle was brief but bloody – and it blew the Zizian story wide open at the national level. Within days, federal authorities publicly connected this Vermont shootout with the earlier murders in California and Pennsylvania.
But where was Ziz? The cult leader was conspicuously absent from the Vermont incident, and rumors swirled that she might have been the mastermind who slipped away yet again. For nearly a month, Ziz remained at large, an FBI fugitive sometimes compared to a real-life Keyser Söze – always talked about, never quite seen. The manhunt finally ended in mid-February 2025 in the backwoods of western Maryland, of all places. In a desolate hollow in Allegany County, MD, a property owner grew suspicious of a trio of people camping on his land in two box trucks. They had asked permission to stay for a month, which he refused, and their odd behavior (all dressed in black, the trucks fitted for long-term dwelling) prompted him to call the police. Maryland state troopers and sheriff’s deputies descended on the makeshift encampment on February 16, 2025. Inside one truck, they found Daniel Blank in the passenger seat; in the other, Jack LaSota and Michelle “Jamie” Zajko were hiding in the back. The two had bullet belts strapped to their waists, though apparently no guns immediately in hand. At first they refused officers’ commands, with Zajko tearfully pleading “don’t kill us” as law enforcement surrounded them. Ultimately, the standoff ended without violence. Ziz at last stepped out of the shadows and into handcuffs. This time, there was no quick escape, no legalistic wriggling free. She was wanted on multiple warrants and now faced federal charges. As she was dragged off, one can imagine the scene: Ziz, 34 years old, gaunt from life on the run, still defiantly silent; Blank and Zajko, her last remaining lieutenants, looking equal parts frightened and relieved as the blue lights flashed around their battered trucks.
With Jack “Ziz” LaSota in custody, the bizarre saga of the Zizians appeared to be approaching its endgame. In press reports that followed, officials described the group as a “Bay Area death cult” and detailed how its members had been tied to at least six deaths, including a federal agent. At her arraignment, prosecutors painted LaSota as a cold-blooded instigator – a woman who had indoctrinated her followers with an extreme cocktail of rationalism, anarchism, and absolutist vegan ethics. For the families of those involved, there were mixed emotions: grief for the lives lost, but also a grim sort of relief. “I believe he’s kind of a victim of the cult,” Daniel Blank’s father said of his son, expressing hope that perhaps now, removed from Ziz’s influence, Daniel might return to his senses. Parents of other Zizians echoed the sentiment, heartbroken at how their idealistic children had been led down such a dark path.
The tale of Ziz and the Zizians is more than an internet curiosity turned true-crime drama – it’s a cautionary parable for our times. The movement sprang from the heart of the Bay Area rationalist and effective altruist scene, a community built on logic, ethics, and the desire to do good. How did the ‘rationality’ movement give rise to this?
Part of the answer lies in the very nature of fringe movements. Within any visionary ecosystem, there are bound to be those who take ideas to unsettling extremes. LaSota’s writings were gripping and provocative to those predisposed to feel alienated, yet laced with notions of cosmic justice that could justify almost any earthly deed. As cult expert Poulomi Saha noted, Ziz’s blog likely “made readers feel seen,” offering a sense of identity and purpose to people who felt adrift. Ziz managed to do what many charismatic cult leaders have done throughout history: convince her followers that the end of the world was at stake and that they were the heroes in their own story. She just happened to use the lexicon of AI risk and utilitarian calculus instead of religious prophecy.
Within the broader rationalist and tech circles, the rise of the Zizians prompted intense reflection. Some long-time rationalists publicly disavowed LaSota, insisting that she had profoundly misunderstood or misused the community’s teachings. Eliezer Yudkowsky himself – the AI theorist whose work Ziz often referenced – weighed in to reject any suggestion that mainstream rationalist philosophy condoned Ziz’s actions. With a hint of frustration, he remarked that one shouldn’t blame “Consequentialism” or decision theory for the cult’s crimes, dryly noting that if the Zizians had any real grasp of those technical ideas, “I’d let you know.”
Still, the embarrassment lingered: a movement predicated on sanity had incubated something insane. Effective Altruists and rationalists began to more openly discuss the warning signs of cultishness in their midst – from insular group houses to messianic leaders – and how to prevent future tragedies. As one Rationalist forum user observed, “while EA/rationalism is not a cult, it contains enough ingredients that we must stay vigilant”.
For society at large, the story of Ziz and her followers is a striking example of how idealism can curdle into extremism. They alienated themselves from friends and family, eventually resorting to medieval weapons and modern firearms in what they saw as a battle for goodness. It’s a narrative that resonates with many earlier ones: from radical political cells of the 1970s that turned to violence, to cults like Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate where brilliant minds were lost to all-consuming dogma. The Zizians added a 21st-century, Silicon Valley twist – mixing in AI apocalypse scenarios and gender identity journeys – but at root it was a human story of longing for meaning and clarity in a confusing world. Ziz offered a fierce kind of clarity: an absolute division of reality into good and evil, where anyone not with her was against the very future of life. In the end, that black-and-white worldview led to red on her hands.
As of this writing, Jack “Ziz” LaSota sits in jail awaiting trial, her transformation complete: from idealistic rationalist to alleged cult leader. Many of her one-time followers are dead or incarcerated. The forests of Camp Meeker are quiet again, and the rationalist meetups in California proceed – though perhaps with an extra dose of caution and humility.
The broader cultural implications of the Zizian saga continue to unfold. It challenges tech communities to remember that intelligence is no guard against fanaticism. Ironically, it was this very willingness – to die, or to kill, in the name of “Good” – that destroyed her and her movement.
The story of Ziz and the Zizians will likely be told for years to come, a dark fable of how the road to utopia can run dangerously off course when one believes, with absolute certainty, that she alone can save the world.
Note: The piece was updated to clarify several of the identities involved.
Note 2: The piece was updated to correct several errors about where the Zizians were staying and at what time.
Amazing how many parallels there are to Manson family.
Great piece, almost ruined by your insistence on using "She" which is certifiably insane.
Nonetheless come on my pod to tell this story!
Fascinating. Best treatment of this strange group that I've seen. They were bizarre (and not as smart as they thought they were) but I'll give them this: they walked the walk. That's a rare quality these days.