Weirdest thing I've read for a while... Amusing to me how nearly everyone involved is careful to respect the chosen pronouns and gender identity of the perpetrators, except for one cop who refers to the 'Ziz' character as 'he', carefully noted as mistaken by the writer. At what point do you decide that peoples' self-delusions aren't worthy of legitimisation, and even going along with them out of a desire for politeness or not wanting to cause upset is a step too far? Haven't got to that point yet, apparently...

I

*****

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/ziz-lasota-zizians-rationalism-20063671.php


Who is ‘Ziz’? How a mysterious group with roots in the Bay Area is linked to six deaths
By Michael Barba, Matthias Gafni, Rachel Swan, Megan CassidyJan 31, 2025

“Ziz” was dead. Or at least it seemed that way.

Just before midnight on Aug. 19, 2022, the Coast Guard steamed through San Francisco Bay after an alarming report. The eccentric computer programmer and blogger, born Jack Amadeus LaSota before adopting the name Ziz and feminine pronouns, had fallen from a boat. For hours, rescue crews searched by air and sea. They found nothing.

An obituary appeared in a newspaper. A probate case was filed in court, citing witnesses to the death.

Then, almost five months later and 2,500 miles away, Pennsylvania state troopers swarmed a hotel near Philadelphia International Airport. The elderly parents of a woman close to LaSota had been shot to death in their home several days earlier, and the troopers thought the daughter — who was staying at the hotel — might have the murder weapon.

Inside Room 111, the troopers didn’t locate a pistol but found something else: LaSota. She lay unmoving on the bathroom floor with her eyes closed. She was alive, but now playing dead.

LaSota, a 34-year-old Alaska native who once joined the tech pilgrimage to the Bay Area, is today at the center of a bizarre and sprawling mystery.

Law enforcement officials are investigating six deaths linked to associates of LaSota, the flagbearer of a small group of well-educated computer whizzes and devout vegans — referred to by some critics as the “Zizians” — who splintered away from the Berkeley circles of an intellectual movement and subculture called rationalism that seeks to understand human cognition and is concerned that artificial intelligence could destroy humanity. Her whereabouts are unknown.

The deaths include the Pennsylvania couple, a U.S. Border Patrol agent killed in a recent shootout in Vermont, a Vallejo landlord recently stabbed to death, and two people with ties to LaSota.

The Chronicle relied on interviews, police records, court documents and online writings to examine the string of violence — and what may have led to it. A picture emerges of people operating under profoundly paranoid and abstruse views of society and technology.

For years, LaSota, in rambling blog posts, set forth her beliefs on topics such as machine learning, veganism, the importance of dual personalities and the natural gifts of transgender women, luring a considerable number of followers — and critics — into the dark canyons of her mind. Her early posts had titles including “self-blackmail” and “engineering and hacking your mind.”

In a way, LaSota burst into public view in November 2019. She and three associates drove into the woods in Sonoma County, where they blocked off exits from a retreat hosted by a prominent nonprofit rationalist organization, the Center for Applied Rationality.

They wore black-hooded robes and masks, and before they were arrested, they passed out flyers accusing the center and another Berkeley-based rationalist group, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), of betraying them. “They tried to seize the keys of agency, flinched at what they saw and burned the path behind them,” the flyers read.

Now, the cascade of violence has repulsed, perplexed and transfixed the community of rationalists centered in Berkeley that LaSota and others left.

LaSota, who has not been accused of any crimes in connection with the six deaths, did not respond to an email request for comment. Reached on the phone, her father, an AI researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, declined to comment.

Jessica Taylor, a former research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, said she met LaSota and others who believed in the “Ziz theory” through the Berkeley rationalist scene around 2016. Taylor said these people adopted the most extreme versions of ideas shared by those in the community.

“Ziz theory is combining these things like rationalism, timeless decision theory, transgender related ideas, brain hemispheres and left-anarchism,” Taylor said. “A lot of these ideas on their own are normal.”

“They are,” she added of the Zizians, “just very intense.”

Drawn to the tech scene

LaSota earned an undergraduate degree in computer science from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, interned with NASA and developed a puzzle game called Dystheism before moving to the Bay Area in 2016 to work in tech, according to an online profile.

“The first startup, after other dishonesty, fired me after 4 days after I moved to the Bay for them, because I said I couldn’t implement a payment system for their game … in 2 days, and because I walked out of the office after 8 hours of work,” LaSota wrote on her blog.

She joined a niche scene of several hundred rationalists in Berkeley. They often lived in communal homes, spent time theorizing and shared a core belief that AI would become so advanced that without safeguards it would destroy humanity.

“I came to the Bay Area because all the smartest people I knew said there was a global emergency in the neglect of ethics and even care for the future by AI researchers,” LaSota later said in a court declaration.

Immersing herself in the movement, LaSota moved into a split-level house in South Berkeley with a group of grad students, tech workers and bohemian types who were all loosely interested in rationalism and AI safety, according to a person who frequently visited the house and moved in after LaSota moved out.

The resident, who asked to withhold their name out of concern for their safety, described the house and larger community as open and welcoming, regularly hosting dinners and board game nights. LaSota attended these, but appeared aloof.

LaSota began publishing philosophical musings on her blog, Sinseriously.blog, under the name Ziz in late 2016.

“So how can you be incorruptible?” she wrote. “You can’t. But you already are. By your own standards. Simply by not wanting to be corrupted. And your standards are best standards! Unfortunately you are not as smart as you, and are easily tricked. In order to not be tricked, you need to use your full deliberative brainpower. You and you need to fuse.”

In the summer of 2018, LaSota participated in an apprenticeship program run by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the Center for Applied Rationality.

“LaSota was a young person who was hanging around and who I suspect wanted to be important,” said Anna Salamon, the executive director of CFAR. She said that while LaSota generally subscribed to MIRI’s beliefs about AI, she also developed “a strange psychological theory” about the two hemispheres of the brain.

LaSota explained the theory on her blog, saying the hemispheres can hold separate values and genders and “often desire to kill each other.” She wrote: “Reaching peace between hemispheres with conflicting interests is a tricky process of repeatedly reconstructing frames of game theory and decision theory in light of realizations of them having been strategically damaged by your headmate.”

Instead of attending sessions on math and computers, LaSota would pull people aside to pitch ideas and engage in intense conversations, frequently insisting that MIRI should use the hemisphere theory as a rubric for whom to hire, Salamon recalled.

“I was not willing to recommend to MIRI that they use LaSota’s psychological theory, nor that they hire LaSota,” Salamon said, surmising that LaSota revolted after realizing she would not consolidate power and influence within MIRI. LaSota then apparently used the theory of hemispheres to entice her own followers, Salamon said, and “manipulate a number of smart, mostly autistic-ish transwomen who were extremely vulnerable and isolated.”

In court records, LaSota explained her version of the rift. She said she found “corruption” among the rationalists, particularly in how the community responded to veganism.

LaSota leveled other more serious allegations against CFAR, but provided no evidence. She said she tried to warn donors away, without success — before coming up with a more drastic plan.

A protest backfires

Around 3:40 p.m. on Nov. 15, 2019, Sonoma County sheriff’s deputies responded to a report that some sort of religious group had descended upon Westminster Woods, a 200-acre property along the Bohemian Highway north of Occidental.

CFAR members were beginning to arrive for the group’s annual retreat, which included team-building and ropes courses. LaSota and three compatriots blocked the exit, spoke on walkie-talkies and wore Guy Fawkes masks popularized by the “Anonymous” hacktivist group and the dystopian superhero film “V for Vendetta.” They distributed flyers railing against MIRI and CFAR.

“MIRI is violating basic principles of friendliness,” the flyers read. “MIRI missed the rapidly oncoming global catastrophic threat of fascism.” The flyers said trans women were being discriminated against, despite “being naturally inclined/gifted in mental tech development.”

Deputies called in a SWAT team and an armored vehicle to evacuate attendees, while arresting the four demonstrators — LaSota, Alexander “Somni” Leatham, Emma Borhanian and Gwen Danielson. They would all be charged with criminal counts including conspiracy, obstructing an officer and wearing a mask for an unlawful purpose. LaSota would later tell a judge she had hatched the protest idea to damage fundraising for CFAR.

“I would end this dangerous organization by financially starving it,” she said in a declaration.

Once in custody, the quartet gave various accounts of “torture” at the hands of responding deputies. LaSota said her clothes were cut off her body and she was thrown into a padded “suicide cell.”

Within days, all four bailed out, with LaSota’s parents paying her bond. Freed, they bounced around Airbnbs, at least until the hosts recognized them from media coverage of the protest and called the cops, LaSota said in court records.

She said her parents told her to “never to talk to my friends again,” and she lamented the failed protest and how police had treated her. “As time went on a gloom of guilty silence and collapsed illusions settled over the community,” she said in court records. “I was disappointed to see that no more than a small handful of new community members sided against the organization.

“I will actually never be able to trust society, even in a limited respect,” she said, “like trusting cops to not torture you for literally doing nothing wrong again.”

That distrust manifested in Sonoma County Superior Court, where the case languished. For three years, the four defendants ran through numerous attorneys, pushed to have judges dismissed, requested a change of venue, and leveled accusations of transphobia.

The foursome had difficulty finding lawyers because they wanted to hire only vegans, said Dan Kapelovitz, a Los Angeles-based defense attorney who specializes in animal rights cases and described LaSota as a “kind and thoughtful” person.

In the end, Leatham, who uses feminine pronouns, would represent herself and, at times, the others. She filed numerous legal motions, all denied. The research mathematician at one point complained that a judge violated her right to protect herself from COVID after she showed up on a Zoom hearing in a hazmat suit and a gas mask and the judge asked her to show her face. Another time, she called the judge “a member of a cis-supremacist cult” with “omnicidal intent.”

Then on Aug. 23, 2022, the case took a turn. LaSota’s then-attorney, Kapelovitz, told the judge over Zoom that his client was dead.

Lost in the bay

Days earlier, just before midnight on Aug. 19, 2022, the Coast Guard had gotten the call of a person overboard in the bay.

In declarations later filed in San Mateo County Superior Court, two people — LaSota’s sister, Naomi, and Borhanian, who had been at the Westminster Woods protest — said they had been on LaSota’s boat, the Black Cygnet, when LaSota fell into the water at about 11 p.m. while working on the motor.

“I lost sight of Jack while looking for a life preserver,” Borhanian wrote. She and Naomi searched the water, she stated, and called out for their companion, to no avail, ultimately using the boat’s radio and Naomi’s phone to call for help.

As rescue teams descended on the 55-degree water, Naomi and Borhanian were towed back to shore. The next day, at 5 p.m., Coast Guard officials informed Naomi that her sibling’s chances of survival had expired.

While no body was found, and no death certificate issued, an obituary for Jack LaSota appeared in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and on Legacy.com. “Loving adventure, friends and family, music, blueberries, biking, computer games and animals, you are missed,” said the posting, accompanied by a smiling photo of LaSota with sunglasses and long blond hair.

Tributes flooded in, with one mourner writing, “Jack, you were one of this age’s visionary philosophers.”

With LaSota apparently dead and co-defendant Gwen Danielson missing, the two remaining defendants in the Westminster Woods case — Leatham and Borhanian — continued fighting the charges. But the case was about to take another startling turn.

Weeks later, Borhanian was killed. And Leatham was charged with her murder.
Nightmare tenants

In the early morning hours of Nov. 15, 2022, Vallejo landlord Curtis Lind was lured to one of his tenants’ trailers to fix a purported water leak.

Lind, then 80, had rented the space to several young people, including LaSota, whom he had met in 2017. He was living on a boat in Half Moon Bay when LaSota and others pulled in from Alaska on a weathered 94-foot tug boat they’d bought named Caleb.

Some in the group lived as anchor-outs for a time and later decided to relocate to Vallejo, where Lind had decided to open a lot to renters of trailers and other makeshift homes, Lind recalled in an interview he gave last year to a documentary filmmaker.

His tenants were initially friendly, if unconventional. They lived in trailers and box trucks and had a collection of samurai swords. He would see them around the yard, dressed in all black. They were men transitioning to women, he said.

But when the pandemic hit, they stopped paying rent, and things took a turn. After Lind took the group to court for back rent, he said, one of them took out a pocket knife and patted the blade while smiling at him. Lind’s daughter said the squatters overtook the property, placing locks on trailers intended for other people.

Lind began carrying a pistol in his jacket pocket. But that wasn’t enough. “I should have been smarter,” he said in the video interview.

The morning Lind’s tenant asked him to check the leak, he said he walked to the back of a trailer and was struck over the head.

“The next thing I remember is standing up with three of them right next to me around me,” Lind said. “I was bleeding from numerous puncture wounds, I think around 50. I couldn’t see out of my right eye. It had been punctured three times. The back of my neck had some severe cuts like somebody was trying to cut my head off.”

Lind had a sword sticking through his chest, he recalled. He said he pulled out his gun and started shooting, killing Borhanian, 31, and critically injuring Leatham. Prosecutors later charged Leatham and another member of the group, Suri Dao, with murder, under the theory that it was their actions — not Lind’s self-defense — that directly caused Borhanian’s death.

It’s not clear exactly where LaSota was during the violence. But hours after the incident, Jerold Friedman — who had represented LaSota in a civil suit against Sonoma County over the protest response — received a surprising email from a Solano County prosecutor.

“I just wanted to reach out and let you know that Jack Lasota was contacted by police in Vallejo [California] this weekend,” the prosecutor wrote. “Lasota was on scene, alive and well.”

Though she was on Lind’s property at some point during or after the incident and was handcuffed at gunpoint by police, LaSota was never charged. She was taken to Vallejo police headquarters, where a homicide investigator said she faked a medical emergency and was taken by ambulance to a hospital.

A month after the Lind attack, at a hearing on the Sonoma County protest, Borhanian’s attorney alerted the court that she was dead. Prosecutors dismissed her charges.

“As far as how this case deteriorated, I’ve never experienced anything like it,” Friedman said. “I’m very sorry that Emma lost her life. And wherever the other three are, I hope they figure things out.”

Friedman would receive another call about LaSota a few months later. A state trooper from Pennsylvania contacted him to say LaSota had been arrested in that state. Could he provide any information?

‘He would not speak’

On Jan. 2, 2023, Pennsylvania state troopers responded to a home in Chester Heights west of Philadelphia for a welfare check. Inside, they found the bodies of Richard Zajko, 72, and his wife, Rita, 69.

Investigators determined the couple — the parents of Michelle “Jamie” Zajko, an associate of LaSota — had been killed in the home three days earlier.

Two weeks later, on Jan. 13, 2023, state troopers investigating the killings raided two rooms in the Candlewood Suites hotel in Chester, Pa., where Michelle Zajko was staying. They were in search of the murder weapon, a 9 mm pistol, according to transcripts of court testimony obtained by the Chronicle.

According to the transcripts, police knew Zajko — who would later be named a “person of interest” in the case — had a pistol similar to the one used in the killings because she had, days earlier, allowed a trooper to hold it during an interview. Now, investigators had legal authority to seize the gun, and they wanted her DNA, too.

The troopers had entered a second room associated with Zajko when they encountered LaSota and a second person, identified as Daniel Blank. Blank put his hands behind his back and walked out of the room, obeying police commands, but LaSota “did not do any of that.”

“He had his eyes closed,” a trooper testified, using masculine pronouns. “He would not speak. He was just laying almost unconscious or as if he was dead on the ground. … He had to be carried out.”

LaSota was jailed and charged with misdemeanor counts of obstruction and disorderly conduct, court records show. She was released on bail in June 2023, but stopped showing up for court, prompting a judge to issue a warrant for her arrest. To this day, her case is pending.

LaSota’s behavior around this time led to concern online from some in the rationalist community. A Medium post that listed facts, rumors and theories about Ziz and her friends began, “Some people in the rationalist community are concerned about risks of physical violence.”

The key witness

For more than a year, LaSota, facing active warrants in California and Pennsylvania, was nowhere to be found. The Pennsylvania double murder remained unsolved, with detectives never even discussing a potential motive.

But in Vallejo, the case involving the landlord attack moved forward. After two alleged escape attempts by Leatham and one by Dao, a judge ordered the pair to receive mental health examinations, but eventually ruled them competent to stand trial.

At multiple hearings, according to court transcripts, Leatham fought with bailiffs and yelled the same statement over and over: “This is a show trial designed for the genocide of transgender people!”

On Jan. 16, a Solano County prosecutor pleaded with a judge to push the case toward trial, explaining that the key eyewitness, Curtis Lind, was now 82 years old with a fading memory.

The next day, witnesses told the Chronicle that a man wearing all black put his arm around Lind in the elderly man’s cul-de-sac and repeatedly stabbed him in the chest. They said the assailant ran off, covered in blood, only to return and slit Lind’s throat.

Solano County prosecutors charged Maximilian Snyder, a 22-year-old affiliated with LaSota’s fringe group, with killing Lind in an attempt to silence a witness.

Three days after Lind was fatally stabbed, on the afternoon of Jan. 20, federal agents on a highway near the Canadian border in Vermont pulled over a blue Prius.

Inside were two more young people with ties to the breakaway rationalists: Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt, a German national and quantitative trader who appeared to have an expired visa, and Teresa Youngblut, a 21-year-old computer science student. She had recently applied for a license in Washington state to marry Snyder, with whom she attended an elite private high school in Seattle.

State and federal authorities had been surveilling Bauckholt and Youngblut for days after an employee at their hotel reported them over their odd attire — all-black, tactical-style clothing — and because Youngblut was openly displaying a gun in a holster.

Later, investigators watched Bauckholt wrap items — phones, apparently — in aluminum foil.

Stopped on the highway, Youngblut quickly pulled out a handgun and fired at the border agents, at least one of whom returned fire, authorities said. The fusillade killed both Bauckholt and agent David Maland and injured Youngblut, leading to her arrest.

After the shootout, investigators who searched the car reported finding a cache of tactical gear, including a ballistic helmet, a night-vision device, face respirators, two-way radios and dozens of hollow-point bullets. They also located Youngblut’s journal, which according to prosecutors contained “cypher text” and writings about her psychedelic experiences.

“This lsd trip seems pretty mellow,” she allegedly wrote. “i fell kinda high vibrationy maybe more so than other lsd trips?”

Taylor, the former research fellow at MIRI, said she met Bauckholt at a rationalist event in New York and became close to her in 2022. She was a “fan of ziz theory,” Taylor said.

“She was trying to be systematic and trying to think through things and make good decisions, but was pretty nonconformist and didn’t understand normal people very well,” Taylor said.

Newport City Inn

It remains unclear what Youngblut and Bauckholt were doing in Vermont. But they both allegedly carried guns purchased by Michelle Zajko, who lived in Vermont and was identified as a “person of interest” in the killing of her parents in bulletins distributed by law enforcement agencies. The bulletins say officers who encounter Zajko — whom the Chronicle could not reach for comment — should consider her “armed and dangerous.”

Federal prosecutors, meanwhile, said in court papers that Youngblut had been in frequent contact with an unnamed individual who was briefly detained in the Pennsylvania killings. That individual, prosecutors said, is also a “person of interest” in Lind’s slaying in Vallejo.

Whether prosecutors were referring to LaSota is unclear.

For now, Ziz has gone silent, in courtrooms and online. The last time she appears to have posted on her blog was back in the summer of 2022, when a follower praised her writing as fascinating and “steeped in culture.”

She replied, apparently checking to see whether they were vegan.

“Do you consume the flesh of the innocent?”