Vegan Siths: The Rise and Fall of the Zizians

On January 20, 2025, a Border Patrol agent pulled over a blue Toyota Prius on Interstate 91 in Coventry, Vermont. Within seconds, Agent David Maland was dead, one of the two women in the car was dead, and the other, Teresa “Milo” Youngblut, was in handcuffs.

This episode traces how two strangers in head-to-toe black tactical gear ended up on that road, from a motel in Lyndonville, VT, to a rental in Chapel Hill, NC, to a Vermont realtor who knew them only as “Connie” and “Sam” and listened to a cash offer on a snowed-in property that couldn’t wait until spring. Along the way, we meet Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt, a math prodigy and Wall Street quant trader who gave away much of her salary before vanishing from her friends’ lives. We also find: a federal database error, a journal entry about a “high vibrationy” LSD trip, and a surprising amount of aluminum foil.

From there, the trail of gun purchases leads back to Michelle Zajko and on to a Maryland campsite, where police found two box trucks, a loaded Sig Sauer, and Ziz LaSota herself. We also read from a sprawling jailhouse “Open Letter to the World,” including its four-paragraph complaint about...margarine.

Six deaths, three states, and one question nobody has answered yet. This episode asks what actually connects these killings, and why the answer has so little to do with artificial intelligence.

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On New Year's Eve 2022, Rick and Rita Zajko were shot to death in their Chester Heights, Pennsylvania home, in what used to be their daughter's childhood playroom. The only suspect law enforcement could find was the couple's own child, Michelle "Jamie" Zajko, who claimed they hadn't set foot in the state in over a year.

This episode traces the investigation from a neighbor's Ring doorbell footage, to a Vermont cabin, to a Philadelphia airport hotel bathroom, where police found a fugitive Ziz LaSota lying motionless on the floor, playing dead. Along the way: a gun purchase blocked by the wrong driver's license, forty thousand dollars stuffed under a car seat, an alias with exactly one letter changed, and a family fortune that might explain all of it - and, oh yes, plenty of beet juice.

We also go back further, to how a Harry Potter fan-fiction forum turned into an on-ramp for a woman accused of orchestrating her parents' murder, and what her aunt has to say about the family she left behind.

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In Chapter 2, we follow the Zizians from a rusted-out tugboat to an even stranger address: an 82-year-old landlord's trailer yard in Vallejo, California.

Curtis Lind was a retired crane operator with a soft spot for outcasts. He didn't seem to mind that most of his new tenants were transgender women. But once COVID hit and the rent stopped coming, in Lind's eyes, they weren't tenants anymore - they were squatters. When California's eviction moratorium finally lifted and Lind moved to reclaim his property, the arrangement collapsed into something out of a horror movie: a pre-dawn ambush, a samurai sword, and a landlord who lost an eye but somehow lived to tell about it.

We untangle two irreconcilable versions of that November morning, trace Ziz LaSota's audacious reappearance under a new alias, and follow two Zizians into a legal system unprepared for gender-identity disputes, faked seizures, and jailhouse escape attempts. Then, more than two years later, Curtis Lind is targeted again - this time by a stranger with no apparent ties to the group, in an attack investigators say was designed to silence him for good.

Curtis Lind survived the first attack. He didn't survive the second. This episode asks who's willing to do the dirty work for the Zizians, and why.

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In the premiere episode of this limited series, host Andrew Westlund follows the digital breadcrumbs back to the very beginning of the "Zizians", a fringe network of militant vegan computer whizzes.

We trace the early life of their de facto leader, Jack "Ziz" LaSota, from a gifted but troubled childhood in Alaska to her disillusionment with the Bay Area tech scene. After walking away from conventional startups, Ziz embedded herself within elite artificial intelligence safety circles, where she and a brilliant collaborator envisioned a radical new path to save humanity from technological extinction.

Step onboard the Caleb, a rust-streaked, 94-foot World War II-era Navy tugboat. We investigate how a 1,500-mile voyage from Alaska to San Francisco became a closed-loop psychological experiment. Isolated at sea without a working bathroom, the fledgling "Rat Fleet" began rewiring their brains with esoteric hemispheric sleep tech, drawing a dangerous binary line between the enlightened "doublegoods" and a corrupt outside world.

From illegal harborside box trucks to a masked, tactical blockade at a Sonoma County academic retreat, Episode 1 uncovers the exact moment an intellectual movement began to curdle into something far more militant.

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