The Zizian Cult & Spirit of Mac Dre: 5CAST with Andrew Callaghan (#1) Feat. Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman

Summary

5CAST w/ Andrew Callaghan: The Zizian Cult & Spirit of Mac Dre

Episode Overview: In the inaugural episode of "5CAST" hosted by Andrew Callaghan, the discussion delves into the emergence and activities of a California-based cult known as the Zizians. Featuring Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Jacob Hurwitz Goodman, the episode explores the cult's origins, its connections to the Rationalist movement, and their involvement in recent violent incidents.

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1. Government Suppression and Media Manipulation ([00:00] - [04:30])

Andrew Callahan opens the episode by drawing parallels between current government actions and those of the late 1960s, highlighting concerns about extrajudicial suppression of dissent. He criticizes media conglomerates for diverting public attention through cultural wars, ultimately consolidating power among the wealthy elite. Callahan remarks:

“With no incentive but capital, they've perfected their algorithms to radicalize the gullible, pleasing shareholders as they monetize human outrage through clicks and ad revenue.” ([00:45])

He expresses apprehension about the potential formation of a permanent oligarchy, fueled by two converging "deep states"—one aligned with Democrat-controlled media and another with Trumpian grassroots movements. This convergence, he argues, threatens absolute power in the hands of a few.

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2. Introduction to the Zizians and Documentary Focus ([04:31] - [11:20])

Callaghan shifts the conversation to the central topic of the episode: the Zizians. He introduces Jacob Hurwitz Goodman, a documentary filmmaker with extensive experience covering subcultural movements. Callaghan provides background on the Zizians, noting their recent implication in homicides, including the death of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont. He emphasizes the significance of Jacobs' insights:

“Jacob has been on the story for, as the kids say, hella long Brody. So I figured why not bring the big guns in to break this shit all the way down.” ([10:15])

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3. The Rationalist Movement and AI Alignment ([11:21] - [24:22])

Jacob Hurwitz Goodman elaborates on the Rationalist movement's core beliefs, particularly the fear of artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence and the existential threat it poses. He explains concepts like the "Paperclip Maximizer," a thought experiment illustrating how an AI's rigid goal-setting could lead to catastrophic outcomes:

“...if my instruction is literally just to make the most paperclips possible, it'll turn the entire planet Earth into paperclips basically.” ([15:37])

Goodman traces the movement's roots to transhumanism and extropianism, highlighting key figures like Eliezer Yudkowski, who pivoted from techno-optimism to advocating for AI alignment to prevent human extinction.

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4. Emergence of the Zizians as a Splinter Group ([24:23] - [40:04])

The discourse transitions to how the Zizians originated from the Rationalist community. Goodman describes Ziz, a central figure in the group, and her transformation from a software engineer intrigued by AI alignment to a leader advocating for anarchistic approaches to prevent AI domination. He details their relocation to the Bay Area, living on houseboats to minimize expenses, and their increasing radicalization through psychedelic experimentation and intensified interpersonal dynamics.

“They believe in total animal liberation and equate the act of harming an animal as the same, if not worse, than hurting a person.” ([29:00])

Goodman underscores the ideological divergences that led the Zizians to adopt more militant stances compared to mainstream Rationalists.

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5. Key Incidents Involving the Zizians ([40:05] - [72:00])

a. Camp Meeker Protest (2019-2022): Goodman recounts the pivotal protest at Camp Meeker where Zizians confronted Rationalist organizers, leading to federal detentions of several activists. The situation escalated when a SWAT team intervened, resulting in accusations of police brutality against the predominantly transgender group members.

“They’re given the wrong kind of food and they're, according to them, sexually harassed and physically assaulted during this time.” ([36:14])

b. Disappearance and Relaunch in Vallejo (2022): Post-protest, Ziz and her core members vanished, faking their deaths before resurfacing in Vallejo, California. An altercation with their landlord, Curtis Lind, culminated in violent clashes, including stabbing and shootings. The ensuing chaos led to multiple arrests and ongoing legal battles.

c. Border Patrol Incident (2025): The episode details a harrowing event in Vermont where Zizians in tactical gear ambushed a Border Patrol agent, resulting in his death and the deaths of two others. This incident significantly amplified media attention on the Zizians, propelling them into the national spotlight.

“Ophelia Baucold, this quant trader who is a German citizen...she was like, you know what? I'm going to become a vegan anarchist outlaw in rural Vermont.” ([67:20])

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6. Documentary Insights and Filmmaker’s Perspective ([72:01] - [84:35])

During the interview, Goodman's experiences as a filmmaker provide deeper insights into the complexity of the Zizians. He discusses the challenges of documenting such a secretive and volatile group, the ethical dilemmas faced, and the intricacies of building trust with sources involved in high-stakes activism.

“This story is in some ways like a reflection of the society that's consuming it. So, yeah, there's a billion different angles...” ([72:44])

Goodman also touches upon the broader implications of AI in society, the intersection of technology and subcultures, and the evolving nature of true crime media.

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7. Concluding Remarks and Future Directions ([84:36] - [85:58])

As the episode nears its end, Callaghan and Goodman reflect on the ongoing investigation and the anticipation surrounding the upcoming documentary. They acknowledge the multifaceted nature of the Zizians' story, intertwining elements of activism, technology, and violence.

“They have the language a little bit. I know the sort of like foundational texts of a lot of this stuff.” ([78:52])

The conversation concludes with a brief discussion on the challenges of producing timely documentaries amidst rapidly evolving narratives.

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Notable Quotes:

• Andrew Callahan ([00:45]):

  “With no incentive but capital, they've perfected their algorithms to radicalize the gullible, pleasing shareholders as they monetize human outrage through clicks and ad revenue.”

• Jacob Hurwitz Goodman ([15:37]):

  “...if my instruction is literally just to make the most paperclips possible, it'll turn the entire planet Earth into paperclips basically.”

• Andrew Callahan ([29:00]):

  “They believe in total animal liberation and equate the act of harming an animal as the same, if not worse, than hurting a person.”

• Jacob Hurwitz Goodman ([36:14]):

  “They’re given the wrong kind of food and they're, according to them, sexually harassed and physically assaulted during this time.”

• Jacob Hurwitz Goodman ([67:20]):

  “Ophelia Baucold, this quant trader who is a German citizen...she was like, you know what? I'm going to become a vegan anarchist outlaw in rural Vermont.”

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Conclusion:

The first episode of "5CAST" offers a compelling exploration of the Zizians, intertwining elements of technological paranoia, radical activism, and the dark fringes of subcultural movements. Through Jacob Hurwitz Goodman’s investigative lens, listeners gain a nuanced understanding of how extremist ideologies can emerge from intellectual communities and escalate into real-world violence. The episode sets the stage for deeper investigations into the intersection of AI fears and anarchistic endeavors in modern society.

Transcript

[Andrew Callahan]

Alright guys, breaking news. There's something happening now that is similar to what happened in the late 1960s. As far as the government operating extrajudicially to suppress dissenting opinions, particularly those who are critical of our government and the actions of corporate billionaires and war profiteers, the media conglomerates who serve as their lapdogs have worked overtime since the Occupy movement of 2012 to deploy potent cultural war distractions and keep the voting public evenly divided on almost meaningless issues while they tighten their grip on wealth and information. Somehow, someway, they've tricked the right into worshiping the wealthy while scapegoating the vulnerable. And tricked the left into destroying itself through infighting and a system of social exile that rules through fear and cancellation. Simultaneously, social media platforms have bent to the will of the machine. With no incentive but capital, they've perfected their algorithms to radicalize the gullible, pleasing shareholders as they monetize human outrage through clicks and ad revenue. As informational literacy dwindles and unaffordability continues, rise to the distraction of poverty allows our government to do what they're doing right now, which is the mass federal detention of activists, students, union leaders and progressives who disagree with the agenda of this current government. One is Alfredo Zefferino, the leader of a migrant farm workers union in my home state of Washington. Another is Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student who led a pro Palestine protest. Another is Tufts PhD student Ramesa Osterk. Every day the list grows and grows under the dubious notion of immigration enforcement. But the US government has been doing this for a long time, particularly in the late 60s with an FBI counterintelligence program aimed at maintaining political and social order. But back then, the FBI had tact to smear and disempower environmentalists, desegregationists, and powerful thinkers like Fred Hampton, James Baldwin, and for some reason, Ernest Hemingway. It took a decade of careful surveillance, organizational infiltration and legal harassment to make the collapse of people's movements look natural. But. But nowadays they don't need tact or finesse to carry out the agenda. Under algorithmic hypnosis, the public can easily be conned into supporting government overreach through the deployment of micro traumatic digital media. Or that can be made to not notice at all with a TikTok dance or some shit. Anyways, a total formation of a permanent oligarchy is more possible now than any other time in American history that I know of. And that's precisely because the two power structures, let's call them the two deep states, have combined the first, most obvious deep State is connected to the Democrat, the cabal of anti left centrists who control Hollywood and three quarters of the mainstream press through a web of blackmail deliverables that are maintained by intelligence agencies. These folks are real, but they have no sway over the youth. They create horrible art and are aging into oblivion. Now the second deep state, which ironically campaigned on the platform of banishing the first, is distinctly Trumpian, representing a separate pillar of influence, and is much more grassroots. Due to its lack of representation outside of Fox News in the mainstream, it's been able to posture itself as countercultural and launder the reputations of sweatshop owners, billionaire landlords and business bullies through a network of podcasts and alternative media channels. Today and more than ever, these two deep states are becoming one. As the political influence of Democrat lawmakers becomes obsolete, their former billionaire backers like Zuckerberg and Bezos are jumping ship in fear of retaliation and are now cooperating with the very machine they pretended to be at odds with. Very soon, absolute power will be in the hands of the few. So stay vigilant and keep it 55th street ladies and gentlemen, my name is Andrew Callahan and you're watching Five Cast, our weekly news segment here at Channel 5, the largest independent, crowdfunded newsroom in the world. We actually do this broadcast twice a week, once on Tuesdays and today on Sundays. So if you want to see our Tuesday show and support the mission while doing it, subscribe to our [e-mail]. channel 5 subscriptions cost 5 bucks a month with an additional $10 tier that gives you access to our private Discord server. So either way it's not free. But neither is making the show. Anyways, I am very excited for today's broadcast. We're going to be discussing a very notable California based cult called the Zizians, who have been implicated in several homicides over the past couple months. We're going to sit down with our first ever real life human guest, Emmy Award winning Detroit native and documentary filmmaker Jacob Hurwitz Goodman, who despite having one LinkedIn connection, has turned heads from Bangkok to Baghdad. So there's been a lot of talk about the Zizians lately, especially after their alleged murder spree resulted in the death of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont about a month or so ago. But Jacob has been on the story for, as the kids say, hella long Brody. So I figured why not bring the big guns in to break this shit all the way down. But before we get into cults. I want to share some positive news. Too often in this digital media hellscape, there's a vector of negativity, but there's still positive happenings occurring all around us every day, all the time, with almost no media exposure. So let's get into two positive stories. Courtesy of goodnewsnetwork.org Fresh out of Louisville, Kentucky this morning, a heroic bus driver has warmed the heart of a young child through a selfless act of kindness. That's right, part time correctional officer and bus driver Mr. Larry Farish Jr. Spotted a third grader named Levi crying on the back of the bus with his knees up on the seat in front of him, bawling in shame. Levi was emotional because it was wear your pajamas to school day at Engelhardt elementary school on First street and Levi forgot to wear his PJs. So Larry Farris Jr. Had to think fast. Immediately after dropping the kids off at school, he threw the bus in park and dashed across the street to Family Dollar, bolting to the pajama section and grabbed the first child sized set of PJs he could find. Before Levi could even get to his first P period class, he felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Mr. Larry who was quoted as saying, I know you were hurting this morning young man, but I got you these and presented the young boy with an all star set of fantastic jammies. Levi apparently cried of happiness almost instantly and had a great rest of his day. Mr. Larry Farish Jr. Before we proceed, I just want to tell you thank you so much sir. It's people like you that make the world go around. Not cult leaders or even journalists, but people like you, Larry. Moving to some positive news across the Pacific in Australia, the land of Nangs, Victoria, Betas in Sitkatz, where I once used to live, an endangered marsupial called the Greater Glider that was once on the verge of extinction after Australia's horrific 2019 wildfires is back and has seen a 45% increase in population just this year alone in what ecologists describe as an absolute fucking miracle. So if you don't know, Greater gliders are these cute little bastards that can glide the distance of a football field using a long skin membrane that stretches between their arms and legs, giving them the appearance of an airborne stingray. RIP Steve Irwin, we love you. The Greater Glider diet consists of eucalyptus leaves and they live inside of natural tree hollows. So the wildfires, as well as wide scale logging in Australia's Blue Mountains has caused significant habitat destruction that left only a few brave gliders in the field. But now there's tens of thousands of these gorgeous devils back in the field. And much of that is because of the great work done by a nonprofit called Banyaz to Bora, who planted trees and installed hundreds of artificial nets nest boxes in the Greater Glider hotspot. So if you work for that nonprofit, shout out to you guys. And if you're looking for someone to adopt one of those little bastards, look no further. I just hope they don't mind a wiener dog and a girlfriend that orders Uber eats three times every day. Alright, moving on to the thing you've all been waiting for. The Zizians. I wanted to vaccinate my audience with positivity before we get into this dark headspace. I don't want to spoil too much before Jacob breaks it all down, but the newest update we have on these Crest side Clowns is that they're mostly all in jail and Max Snyder, who's charged in stabbing a landlord to death, has pled not guilty. FYI, if you're a Zizzian watching when I called you Crest side clowns, that's a reference to the late and great Mac Drizzay, who's also from the itty bitty city by the water, Vallejo, California, where you guys got, you know, charged with homicide. But I'm not calling you a clown. So if you see this, please don't kill me. I support my entire family. So they're called the Zizians because they're de facto leader. A vegan trans woman once known as Jack Lasota changed her name to Ziz while they were all living together, which is pretty typical non binary roommate behavior. These one syllable names like Beef, Sock, cup and Ziz are sort of a social currency in post gentrified spaces. But this group of friends was very different from most East Bay Polycules. For one, they're heavily armed, and secondly, they're down to catch bodies for the cause. And that cause is called rationalism, which from my introductory research has a few basic tenets. Rigorous logic, altruism and optimized decision making, with a particular emphasis on controlling the boundaries of artificial intelligence in a way that benefits humanity as a whole. Their community was formed in online chat rooms and forums that are still active to this day. Notably less wrong and Slate Star Codex, where rationalists discuss things ranging from preventing aging to strategies on how to slow down the AI arms race between the US and China. There's an incredibly wide range of political diversity within the rational community, and I find it Kind of interesting that tech moguls like Elon Musk and Sam Altman were early posters on these forums. So the Zizian faction would be considered like the alt left rationalists. They're anarchists, which means no gods, no cops, no masters. And they reject traditional societal structures like the nuclear family and white picket fence. They believe in the violent dismantling of all state authority, which I hope begins with the LA parking enforcement and the Department of Motor Vehicles. But most importantly, they believe in total animal liberation and equate the act of harming an animal as the same, if not worse, than hurting a person. And I can kind of understand that. I'd probably rather chill with an actual murderer who acted within reason, like Christopher Dorner, than a dog killer shout out to the pups out there. But I should note the Zizian philosophy doesn't make any distinction between the life of a pet species like a dog or a cat, and a livestock animal like a pig or a chicken. To them, it doesn't matter if the chicken is free range and grass fed or, you know, forced to fight to the death in the Mexican countryside with razor blades attached to their spurs for money. It's murder all the same. By the way, I just referenced our newest not safe for work documentary called Mexico Cockfighting, which is also available in its uncut form on our Patreon Right now. Here's a preview. Latin America, back to the Zizians. As I mentioned, I know a little, but not a lot about them. So without further ado, here is the interview with our guest, Jacob Hurwitz Goodman. Hope you guys enjoy. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Five Cast. We got the first ever IRL in real life. Guest in the building right now. Jacob, tell us what's going on.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Man. You know, the world is a crazy place and it has a lot of really interesting rabbit holes in it. That's what's going on.

[Andrew Callahan]

And you're in a very unique position that I've been in a couple times where you're doing a story for like two years, you got the scoop, you're deep in the subcultural niches of American life and all of a sudden that story breaks the number one headline and you got all this footage and it's kind of bittersweet because you're like, okay, this is tight. More people are going to care about it now. But all of a sudden I'm not the guy who knows about this really, really niche thing.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah, it has its ups and downs for sure. Yeah. So for the past two and a Half years me and my producers have been working on a documentary project about the AI alignment and rationalist world, which includes this smaller kind of like splinter group from them called the Zizians. And we've been tracking all these people, making relationships, shooting stuff, getting in there with really deep. And you know, I had to get used to explaining to like my mom and you know, my family, friends and even my own friends just like, what, what the hell all this stuff is. And then all of a sudden, at the beginning of this year, about a month ago, a month and a half ago, there's like a bunch of very high profile murders. And all of a sudden everybody knows what this is. And now they're coming up to me and they're being like, dude, have you heard of the Zizians? And it's just. Yeah, it's like a whole. The script is flipped.

[Andrew Callahan]

And how does that make you feel? Are you like more stoked or bummed or are you somewhere in between?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

It's a little stressful because it's hard to make, you know, it' to make a film. It's hard to be the ones to kind of like forge this territory. And then all of a sudden you're competing with a ton of other kind of like slick industry level Hollywood production companies who are all trying to do the exact same thing that I've been working on forever. And they don't understand the deeper story.

[Andrew Callahan]

Wait, wait. So as soon as the news story broke, some of the Hollywood fat cats were like, I've got an idea. And it's actually your idea?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah. All the fat cats.

[Andrew Callahan]

That's unbelievable. So you mentioned your mom. How would you explain what the Zizians are to your own mom?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

To understand who the Zizians are, you have to understand who the Rationalists are. The Rationalists are a group of people based in the Bay Area and, you know, around the San Francisco area in Northern California. And they believe that there are a bunch of AI and computer researchers who believe that artificial intelligence, once it becomes smarter than human beings, the first thing that it's going to most likely want to do is eliminate us from the face of the Earth.

[Andrew Callahan]

And this, does this mean everybody?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Everybody.

[Andrew Callahan]

So rationalists believe that there's gonna be a total robot takeover? Not even the robot operators will remain?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah, I mean, once a computer is smarter than a human, what does it need an operator for? That's their argument. You know, it's sort of like, think of the way that we treat other species. Think of the way that we treat the land. You Know, the way that we treat the planet, even the way that we've treated each other in the past, the way that humans have operated for millennia is that if you have more intelligence and you have more power, you have the right to kind of like dominate things and do whatever you want with anybody else. And so imagine so this kind of like alien life form that we are creating with this super high powered, you know, hardware and software combo. And we're not only creating these incredibly smart computers, but we're literally putting them into weapons. We're literally putting them into, you know, instruments of war. And what's going to happen when it becomes smarter than us? I mean, what they argue is that the natural thing is a, either it's going to see us as a threat and get us out of the way because they don't want people around trying to like unplug their, you know, unplug the switch or whatever, or it's just going to turn us into, it's going to just kind of, kind of like bulldoze us in whatever its bigger goal is. So they have this thought experiment called the Paperclip Maximizer, which is, imagine a paperclip factory that has a super intelligent AI sort of like, and it's been given the instruction figure out how to make the most paperclips the most efficient way possible. Well, once it becomes smart enough to do it, it's gonna figure out, wait a minute, humans have stuff, we have stuff inside our bodies, we humans do, that could be made into paperclips. So like, if my instruction is literally just to make the most paperclips possible, it'll turn the entire planet Earth into paperclips basically. So you've either got this like sort of malevolent Matrix style Terminator situation where it sees us as a threat or competition and it eliminates us easily, or it's kind of a dumb smart situation where it has a goal and it's so set on that goal that it just gets rid of all humans.

[Andrew Callahan]

Interesting. So it sounds like the psychological underpinning and philosophical underpinning of all this is like an idea that in the late stage capitalist post industrial society, human beings are just bad. We destroy everything, we're going to destroy the environment and that we're heading toward mutual self destruction and AI is going to be the main vessel to take us there.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

I don't know if the people in the rationalist world who are largely bought in on Silicon Valley and technology and kind of techno optimism, other than for this one thing, I don't think that they would use the term late stage capitalism. I think that they're very much. It's an extremely libertarian situation. They're very kind of like into capital, techno capital, and kind of like the lessening of big government, except they have this one fear. But yes, I think sort of like the subtext of it might be, yeah, like whatever we are capable of doing, we see in this technology a kind of mirror of our worst nightmares about ourselves or our worst fears about ourselves.

[Andrew Callahan]

So the rationalists think that AI is cool, but what they want to do is create a system of checks and balances that prevents this disaster scenario.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

The rationalists think that AI is going to be the saving grace of our society.

[Andrew Callahan]

Holy shit.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Okay, if we can make it friendly.

[Andrew Callahan]

Interesting. Okay, okay, okay. Now I'm definitely getting it.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah. So they come out of a tradition called transhumanism or extropianism, which is this pretty radical and extreme subculture of people from the 80s and 90s who moved to the Bay Area. And they were all just like, we're ready, let's go. The singularity is coming. We want to turn into computers. We want to blast into space. We want to defeat death and freeze our bodies and come back and get our minds uploaded into the computer. Kind of like that big AI, the big Internet boom of the early 90s. This was kind of like the most hardcore accelerationist wing of that, the Rationalists. And Eliezer Yudkowski, who kind of was considered. He's a guy who's considered to be the godfather of the present day Rationalists. He was this orthodox Jewish kid living in Chicago who found these people, the Extropians, on the Internet. He was all in. He was like, let's go. Fucking human, robot, cyborg, spaceship, everything. It's sort of like sci fi fantasy. Moved to the San Francisco Bay area, joined them, and then had this dark revelation in the early 2000s where he saw in his mind's eye the AI system that was going to eat all biological life on Earth as soon as it came about. And he was like, hold on, we gotta slow down. We want this. We want to defeat death. We want to become immortal cyborgs. But first we have to do the really, really hard work of aligning something that is smarter and more powerful than us with our values and our interests. So that's where the rationalist movement came from.

[Andrew Callahan]

Interesting. So the idea of being an immortal cyborg, I'm assuming, is you take your consciousness, you put it on sort of the cloud, or you put it in some Sort of digital storage and then you exist perpetually through a robotic entity that's connected to that digital consciousness system.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah, I don't know if they've worked out exactly what the mechanics of it are going to be, but I think a lot of this is deeply informed by some of the of like hard, hard tech sci fi that was being written in the mid century through the.

[Andrew Callahan]

80S and 90s, like Isaac Asimov and stuff like that.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, a guy named Ian M. Banks is really influential in this community. Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

So obviously in the past five or six years there's been a major ramp up in AI technology. Even me as like a non tech world, just consumer. I feel like AI has bled into much more of the digital content sphere where you see just like mindless repetition of sound bites in the digital media world where it's like Instagram sucks now doom scrolling and reels have taken over. So we see. And then we also see self serve kiosks taking the social experience out of places like Dunkin Donuts at the Phoenix airport. So I think that in recent times, past five or six years, the average person has been more in touch with the negative side effects of AI. And has that. Has the rationalist movement existed far before that or did they really come to fruition around the COVID 2019 era?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

They existed far before it, they called it. They've existed since like 2000, 2001, something like that. Way before most people had even heard the term AI unless they had seen Steven Spielberg's great film AI from around that time. But no, the rationalists called it. I mean they anticipated that AI was going to come and that it was going to disrupt things just because the trend was moving in that direction. By the early 2000s computers were becoming small enough where you could start to envision things like a computer in your phone. You had laptops, you had WI fi sort of starting to pop up around then. So. So I mean the trends were definitely moving in that direction. And I think one of the strange and great ironies of this community, the rationalist community, is that to a certain extent consumer AI, the stuff you were just describing, especially the kind of generative like LLM or image generation stuff on social media exists because of the rationalist movement that OpenAI who is kind of, they were like leading the frontier of this over the past five years or so. They came out of the rationalist milieu. This was Sam Altman and Elon Musk who were hanging out at these rationalist AI alignment, effective altruist conferences in the mid-20s, 2010s, mid 2010s into the teens. They met each other there. They were kind of like introduced into this movement. They were fully bought in on this idea that we have to align artificial intelligence with human values to save our species. And that is where OpenAI came from. Was it kind of like it rose out of that yeast, out of that world? And then Microsoft infused them with billions of dollars and OpenAI kind of like took off in its own commercial direction. And so now you have the rationalists grappling in, say, 2016, 2017, when they first started to hear that this was happening. They're starting to grapple with the fact that they have created their own worst nightmare situation in OpenAI.

[Andrew Callahan]

And what was Microsoft's incentive in subsidizing Sam Altman brainchild?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

I mean, I'm not privy to what was going on inside of those conversations, but I imagine if you are presented with a company like OpenAI that's claiming that it has a breakthrough or a potential for a breakthrough technology for a thinking computer, the first ever aware computer, then you're going to want a big piece of that action because you can imagine all of the subsequent uses for something like that.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, I'm glad that you made the distinction between generative creator and consumer AI and the real AI, because there's kind of two different things that I want to really talk about here and separate these two. Because, for example, I was at the the DNC and I was out there and I met this kid who was super into AI. Like, he was like, this is the future. It's going to help us beat China in some way. Not sure how, but he's like, we're going to defeat China with this stuff. And he goes, check out this dope song that I just made last night. And it was an acoustic guitar riff. And this, it was generated by AI about an undocumented Central American immigrant being converted into a Trump supporter by a Joe Rogan podcast. And I'm gonna show you this later. And it was genuinely one of the worst songs I've ever heard in my life. What are some of the lyrics in that song? Somewhere in America, there's a young Latino man, no job, no education, not a single long term plan. He listens to Joe Rogan and thinks our country's gone to shit. He blames his problems on China and wants Trump to deal with it. And so my first thoughts are like, all right, a human being couldn't even make something as tone deaf as AI. So do you See like human creativity as something that's irreplaceable, or is that just wishful thinking on my part?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Oh, man, you're getting into some, you're getting into the big, deep philosophical questions. I don't know. I think about this a lot. I mean, to be completely honest, I hear a lot of debate around this question about human creativity and whether or not computers are going to be able to replace us and whether there's something special about human creativity. And what I see when I hear people debating that question is a bit of a distraction from what's really going on, which is artificial intelligence. You know, the arts are one thing and it'll work itself out in one way or another. I think artists will learn how to work with AI to do weird, interesting, crazy, horrifying and beautiful things with artificial intelligence, no matter what. But what's really going on is that the material control and power of society is shifting further and further into fewer and fewer hands. And AI can be, and it's looking like might be a vessel to accelerate that trend. So, yeah, when you're talking about being able to eliminate entire workforces and kind of automate everything and get rid of middlemen and human decision makers and put AI in charge of kind of like, like bureaucracies and systems and customer service centers and whatever, that I think is what's really interesting to look at.

[Andrew Callahan]

With that technology, it's arguably causing people to take up arms. If you look at the Luigi Mangioni situation and he allegedly assassinated Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare CEO. His company UnitedHealthcare, had recently applied an AI software to basically deny 60% of claims that were coming in because it was easier to deny people that way. It's easier to do psychopathic things like deny people's health care claims. If you can have a robot do it, it takes away the awkwardness of a human being delivering that axe.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Absolutely. There's no human being who even has to know that that decision was ever made when you have AI.

[Andrew Callahan]

Exactly.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

And you know, you see that even taken to its furthest extreme in literal warfare, where you have AI drone targeting systems that exist in the world and we're using those. I don't know.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh, they exist.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

They exist for sure. I don't have the research in front of me in terms of who's using.

[Andrew Callahan]

It, but it's not our enemies, right?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah. I mean, probably every well funded military at this point is working with AI to some extent or another.

[Andrew Callahan]

Okay. So I feel like we've developed a good understanding of the Rationalist movement here, at least the Cliff Notes. Now let's get into the Zizians, because I know they were an offshoot of the Rationalist movement that had some sort of internal splintering on the subcultural fault lines of this movement. So how would you explain how Ziz and how Zizians came to be?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah, so the Rationalists, one of the big things that you have to know about them is that it's not. They're not just like a philosophical movement. They exist as a social scene in the Bay Area. That there's rationalist group houses, there's Rationalist parties, there's Rationalist picnics, there's all, you know, all kinds of ways in which people are kind of drawn into this world and basically just hang out with their friends all the time and work on very difficult philosophical and math problems. The way that they see it, the way that one of the beacons that draws people in is this website online forum called Less Wrong that Eliezer Yudkowski started a couple decades ago that is just kind of a forum for argumentation and discussion and publishing essays and just kind of like long form thought and conversation around these big problems. And it draws a lot of people in on the Internet. And so you have especially a lot of young people who are drawn into this. And another thing that draws people in is that Eliezer Yudkowski, the guy who started this movement or is kind of the godfather of it, wrote and published the most popular fan fiction in the history of the Internet, supposedly called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality longer than any of J.K. rowling's Harry Potter books. I myself have dipped my toes in, but never been able to.

[Andrew Callahan]

It's like a thousand pages. Because Deathly Hollows is pretty long.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah, it's insanely long. And it takes all of the kind of canon of Harry Potter and all the characters and uses them as vessels to talk about ways to improve your own rationality, ways to become smarter, to become more rational actors in the world and to get rid of bias, because that's a huge part of this community. One of the kind of like underlying principles is that we all have these biases we're not even aware of. So you use tools like this to sharpen your mind. Anyway, hpmor Harry Potter's and the Methods of Rationality draws in a lot of young people on the Internet. And one of them who gets drawn into this world is a young woman in Alaska named Ziz, who is a software engineer, computer programmer, aspiring, and then sort of learns about the Methods of rationality is like, oh, that's interesting. Learns about this sort of like, wonderful utopian future that we're all gonna have when we can upload our bodies into computers and never die and go off into space and populate the planets. Oh, that's wonderful. And then like so many other people in this community kind of gets one shotted with this idea of, like, but computers are gonna kill us. And that's like, there's like a 99% chance that our computers are gonna kill us once they get smarter than us. And you have to dedicate every waking moment of your life to saving the world. From this to figuring out how to make computers friendly, how to align them to human values, or you and everyone you know will be dead and it'll be your fault. So she, like many and her sort of many other people in this world are kind of like, drawn into this through this pipeline. And she moves to the Bay Area with the intent of forming a startup or getting involved in the startup world and making a lot of money and giving that money directly to the AI Alignment Project and to the rationalists and to Yudkowski to do what they're trying to do to save the world. Has a hard time with it. Interviews at Google for a job, as Google is known to do. Kind of like the interview draws out over months, I think over a year of just like endless interviews. No promises, but keep coming back. Eventually realizes, like, look, I'm paying so much money in rent in the Bay Area and having such a hard time making the income that I want to be able to actually live this life that I'm trying to live and save humanity. What if we moved on houseboats? And so she and a couple other people she met in the rationalist social scene rent out or buy a couple houseboats in the Bay Area. They start living there. They're kind of like saving on rent and living in these incredibly cramped quarters in the Bay and staying up late at night and, you know, experimenting with psychedelic drugs and doing who knows what. And like any people in their 20s hanging out with their friends all night doing drugs. Some pretty crazy ideas start coming up. And Ziz and Ko Ziz and her friends start metastasizing the ideas that will sort of start to then get published online through Ziza's blog, attracting other young people. And they are ideas that are aimed in the same direction as the rationalists to save humanity from AI. But there starts to be divergences in how we're supposed to do it and what the ethics around that look like, et cetera, things kind of come to a head after some. Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how deep to get into this.

[Andrew Callahan]

I mean, I would say go as deep as you want to, because I'm really fascinated as to how the splintering occurred within the Rationalist community that had them even labeled as Zizians, because as you mentioned to me previously, they didn't call themselves Zizians. Ziz is just sort of charismatic leader of the friend group. That label was definitely applied by people in the community who had a bone to pick with them. So I guess let's back all the way up what led up to the forest incident, if you know what I'm talking about.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Right. The camp Meeker protest, 2019 to set the scene. This is shortly after the rumor starts spreading in the rationalist community that OpenAI, the sort of, like, child of rationalism, has artificial intelligence for the first time. There's a computer that can have a conversation with you. It's like a real AI that's being developed in the kind of vaults in the basements of this community, which we.

[Andrew Callahan]

Know is true because it's out now.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Absolutely true, 100% true. Not public yet. Not a commercially known thing yet. There was no media around it. But the rumor is circulating and people are starting to freak out because, remember, they spend all their time on this trying to stop this problem. This is the greatest fear that something like this could escape. Containment could start getting developed too fast, and it will start some kind of, like an arms race of AI. So tensions are really high. Paranoia starts kind of spreading throughout this world. And the Zizians, Ziz and her friends around this time are apparently, according to Ziz, approached by someone in the Rationalist world who asks them, hey, like, look, I know you've heard some things about improprieties. I know you've heard some. Maybe you've heard some things about sexual assault within our community. Maybe you've heard some things about corruption or whatever. I need to know, are you gonna be on our side around this, or are you going to, you know, can we trust you? Basically, that's a whole rabbit hole, a lot of, like, weird stuff going on. This is all. This is all alleged by Zyzz. I don't know whether for sure these conversations took place and what they looked like, but this freaks Ziz out. And all of a sudden her and her friends are like, wait a minute. These people who are supposed to be saving the world and saving humanity are doing all according to them, doing all kinds of Shady shit on the side. And. And we need to protest. We need to let the world know about this. We need to make it. We need to make it known that we're not okay with this.

[Andrew Callahan]

Interesting. So I'm noticing a couple different themes that are happening here in the Bay Area at that time. We have, for one, gentrification is running amok. Obviously, the unaffordability complex of the Bay Area, which was also caused by tech leads Zyzz and co to live in these tiny ass houseboats. I'm assuming they're not in Vallejo yet. They're probably somewhere in the East Bay. They're probably in Oakland. They're probably like objectively living in kind of downtrodden conditions simultaneously. There's some weird stuff going on in the tech world. There's things that are floating around about certain people and then they feel like, fuck that. So you have internal splintering about controversy. All these things happen in the Bay Area every day.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

So now we have those two constant.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Forces and you have OpenAI, like real AI about to bust on the scene and everybody kind of like losing their minds about this, like, high tension.

[Andrew Callahan]

And so you already have high tension. And then whatever Ziz and them were hearing was like the straw that broke the camel's back. And they say, we're gonna show up to these guys, party shindig, and we're going to. From what you said, they wore anonymous masks and Sith robes and surrounded the picnic. I believe it was.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

It was a retreat in the woods in Northern California.

[Andrew Callahan]

How far in the woods are we talking?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

It's at a place called Camp Meeker. I haven't been there physically, so I can't tell you exactly how rural it.

[Andrew Callahan]

Is, but it's rural enough to where if you saw people surrounding you in anonymous masks and Sith robes, you'd think, oh, shit, this is scary. Because it's not like a public park where you'd be like, what are these guys doing?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

No, there's one entrance in and out of this camp. It's a dirt road over a bridge over a little river or creek or whatever. And they blocked it off with their car. And they got out of their car and wearing the anonymous the Guy Fawkes masks and the Sith robes. And the people inside this camp who were there at that point, freak out. Call the sheriff's department. Meanwhile, Ziz and her friends, the Zizians, if you want to call them that are reading out their demands, kind of speaking in unison in this kind of rehearsed way that They've clearly, it's like a performance a little bit. And they're throwing pamphlets with all these accusations printed on them.

[Andrew Callahan]

Are they yelling, like, take accountability or something?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

They're yelling, halt, melt and catch fire.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh, that's even better.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah. I mean, among other things. So somebody at the Campmeeker retreat calls the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department and apparently claims first of all, that they're being surrounded by people in masks and robes, that they blocked the way out, and claims that they're armed, which is very important.

[Andrew Callahan]

Were they armed?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

They were not armed. It turns out not to be true at all.

[Andrew Callahan]

Okay.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

I think one of them maybe had some pepper spray on them or something.

[Andrew Callahan]

Doesn't count. Armed is sword, gun, knife.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah, yeah. So they were unarmed, but the sheriff's department believed that they were armed. And so now all of a sudden the sheriff's department believes that they have a mass shooting situation on their hands. And they send in a SWAT team to arrest this four or five protesters. And the arrest is, you know, as it will be in a situation like that under those circumstances. The arrest is apparently very brutal.

[Andrew Callahan]

I mean, the SWAT team can only do that. Like, you know how people get swatted all the time.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Right.

[Andrew Callahan]

They barely even ask questions. Like, if once the SWAT team is sent and that dispatch call is meant, they're going to just like tie you up, put their knee on your back, like it's bad news. So was it something kind of like that?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

It was high octane SWAT team shit. They came in, you know, guns blazing, they threw them to the ground. The people doing this protest, Ziz and the rest of them, most of them are trans women, identify that way. And you know, that adds another layer of kind of like they get misgendered in their police reports. They get thrown into the wrong prison cells. They're also militant vegans.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh, geez.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

So they're given the wrong kind of food and they're, according to them, sexually harassed and physically assaulted during this time.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, I mean, correctional officers in rural California counties would not be the gender understanding.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

You know, I can't speak to exactly what happened. There are still legal proceedings underway about this. But yes, according to Ziz and their friends, and I think that it is quite a viable thing to say they were mistreated pretty terribly by these officers for sure. So they're charged with child endangerment, reckless child endangerment. Because there were kids. There was like a whole other group at Camp Meeker at the time who was there for a whole different little Retreat, like, you know, doing like ropes courses in the woods or whatever. Yes.

[Andrew Callahan]

Kid stuff.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Students. Yeah. Or camp, whatever. And they happened to be there at the same time as the Rationalist retreat that was going on. So they get a child endangerment charge slapped on, as well as a few other things. And the Zizians countersue and they say, you know, we were suing the sheriff's department, we're suing Sonoma county, and for all the things that I mentioned before. And so now you've got these sort of cross current legal proceedings going on. Covid hits, the world shuts down. All the proceedings go on to Zoom trials and whatever. And that's around the time when me and my team start paying attention and we're like attending these Zoom trials and looking at what's happening.

[Andrew Callahan]

Wow, so you've really been in this for five years now?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah, well, so I got in in 2022, but it was still going on at that point. You know, these legal proceedings take fucking forever.

[Andrew Callahan]

It was a civil court thing.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

There was. There were criminal charges and there were.

[Andrew Callahan]

Civil charges, but they were countersuing in civil court.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

That's right. So things go on and on. These charges, you know, these charges pile up and the lawsuits go back and forth as they will for a couple years, and then in late 2022, they disappear.

[Andrew Callahan]

So something happened in the Zoom trials that made them want to get out of town. What was that?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

We don't know what happened that made them want to get out of town, but for whatever reason, they decided amongst themselves that they were going to go underground, they were going to fake their own deaths.

[Andrew Callahan]

All of them?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

No, just two or three of them.

[Andrew Callahan]

And some were going to be alive and corroborate the death narrative. That's what I would do.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah. I mean, it's a little. All the stuff that happens from this point forward is a bit hazy because the Zizians, for the most part, the people who are involved directly in these actions and these sort of like anarchic happenings, they don't talk about it.

[Andrew Callahan]

How many are there?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

How many are there? How many Zizians total? It's hard to say. New characters keep popping up every time there's a New Zealand.

[Andrew Callahan]

Okay, in 2022, when you first hopped on board, what was the head count?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

There were four people arrested at the Campmeeker protest. There was possibly one other person who got away, although that's not corroborated that group, because a lot of what Ziz was saying on the Internet was circulating pretty widely. Especially because of how crazy and dramatic this protest was, starts attracting more people. So you get converts and people who get sort of brought on board to this philosophy from anywhere else on the Internet. So the group starts kind of growing in a kind of organic way, both physically and virtually. But maybe we should pause and talk a little bit about what the philosophy actually is that's so attractive to people.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, let's talk about that.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

I think that might help frame things a little bit.

[Andrew Callahan]

You're talking about the Zizian form of rationalism.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yes, you might call it Zizianism, although they would deny that title. They would say that it's collaborative, that they're anarchists, that it's anarchists.

[Andrew Callahan]

They can't agree on anything. So that's why it's like.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Right. But in any sense, there is a kind of like different framework for how to save the world that's being developed during all this time. And it goes like this. If you look at the rationalists, Yudkowski, the AI Alignment movement, this extremely well funded movement that's aligned with billionaires in Silicon Valley, very well funded nonprofits, et cetera, their philosophy is, we're going to create something that's smarter than any human has ever been on Earth, possibly orders of magnitude smarter. And this new intelligence, this kind of like alien superintelligence that we're going to create, our biggest job is to control it. Our biggest job is to force it to be friendly, to manipulate it, or bully it, or enslave it, or in some way kind of get it to be what we want it to be. Ziz says that's crazy. You're talking about something that's orders of magnitude smarter than human beings. How are you going to control. It's already outthought you. It has had your ideas and figured out ways around them before you even had your ideas. It's a silly concept. The only thing you can do is negotiate with it or lead by example. How do you negotiate with a super intelligence that's smarter than the entire species? How do you lead by example? Well, if this thing gets created into a world where the rules that it has learned is that if an animal or a species is less intelligent than you, then you're allowed to slaughter them and eat them and use them for resources. That's what it's going to do to us. But if we can change and if we can stop using other animals that way, and if we can stop using other intelligences that way before it gets here, then it's going to understand different Rules and different settings for when it arrives.

[Andrew Callahan]

This is the most terminally online shit I've ever heard in my life. So they think that we to lead by example so that the supercomputer can do the right thing. So the reason they're vegans and the reason they live with those principles is to basically let the robot know, yo, it's all about respect and love over here.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Exactly.

[Andrew Callahan]

Wow, that's so crazy. I mean, are they communicating on regular social media platforms? Because they can't be.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

It's all over. I mean, it's on Twitter, but I think a lot of it is in private Discord servers. A lot of it is on Tumblr. They have, like, very extensive Tumblr blogs.

[Andrew Callahan]

I thought Tumblr was over. I thought, awesome.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Tumblr's not over, man.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh, shit. What is this platform called? Safestarcodex that I was reading about?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Oh, Slate Star Code.

[Andrew Callahan]

Slate Star Codex.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

That's another of the rationalist platforms. It's more of a blog than an open platform. It's run by a guy named Scott Alexander.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah. Because I went on there the other day and there was a blog post called how to Create Super Babies, and it was a bunch of people arguing about what they can do to create the ultimate child with the perfect brain. And they were just debating on things to do during pregnancy. But it was. It was this. It was a very mathematical conversation. It wasn't like, oh, wouldn't it be so cute if our baby was like, you know. Cause Tiger woods parents had him play golf and he became, you know, great at golf. It was like, no, we are going to eat this exact diet and consume these vitamins while the baby's in the womb. And when he's born, he's not. You know, he's gonna.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you're talking about a classic transhumanist conversation right now. Like, how do we use technology and existing knowledge to kind of, like, improve human beings to the sort of, like, optimal way that we can? It's the kind of backbone of the entire rationalist world.

[Andrew Callahan]

Interesting. So going back to 2022, so they disappear. And this is after you'd already kind of been monitoring the story.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

So I'm sure you, as a journalist, you're like, oh, shit, what's going on right now?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Absolutely. We were at the Zoom trial, where Ziz's lawyer was like, your Honor, my client is dead, I think, but no body has been found. And my other client also is dead, but also, we can't find their body. And Then an obituary pops up online saying that Ziz had fallen off of a boat and drowned. And you see comments from, like, her hometown in Fairbanks, Alaska, being like, I'm so sorry. Like, this is horrible. You know, my condolences, whatever. Several months later, all of a sudden, Ziz and company pop up in a trailer park in Vallejo, California, where they've been living in box trucks and kind of like completely living off the grid. The trailer park is owned by an older man named Curtis Lind, who they had met during their boating days because he was involved in the boating and fishing industry in some way. And they pop up and get on everybody's radar because all of a sudden, this old man, Curtis Lind, has been stabbed through the chest with a samurai sword and been stabbed several times in the face and throughout his body. And he has shot two of the Zizians, and the rest of them have disappeared.

[Andrew Callahan]

And he was their landlord.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

He was their landlord. So basically an altercation came up having to do with the fact that he wanted to evict them, the fact that Covid restrictions had stopped him. They had stopped paying rent during COVID when the state of California allowed that to be a thing. And then as soon as those restrictions lifted, this guy Curtis Lynn was like, look, look, you weird people who are living on my property and walking around nude and talking to yourselves and living in box trucks who haven't been paying rent for the past year and a half. It's time for you to go.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

And they were like, no. And he was like, okay. And the tensions just kind of ratcheted up to the point where he bought himself a gun. They armed themselves with knives and a katana blade and things boiled over at a certain point, and he ends up up wandering around with this sword sticking through his body, bleeding all over the place, having shot to death one of them, a young woman named Emma Borhanian, and shot and injured another one. The police show up. Ziz is there. A couple of the other ones are there. The police question them, and for some reason they're allowed to leave, and they just walk off and disappear again. And the two Zizians who were shot and didn't die are then arrested and charged for the murder of the one who the landlord shot and who did.

[Andrew Callahan]

Die under the pretense that, like, you guys triggered Curtis Lind by stabbing him with a samurai sword. And so even though he killed him in self defense, you have to take the murder charge.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Apparently there is a law in California where if you start a fight that ends up in somebody dying, you're responsible for their death, even if you didn't literally kill them.

[Andrew Callahan]

That's so messed up. Because where I'm from, Washington, they have a mutual combat law where you and a male friend. Not a friend, male. And I don't think you can be a female enemy, but you guys can agree to throw down. If someone dies, they throw the case out.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Wait, it's like a dueling. That's a duel type of situation.

[Andrew Callahan]

You can agree in writing to mutual combat in the state of Washington and Oregon, and you guys can meet up on a place that wouldn't cause significant public trauma. You guys can't beat each other to death on the bus or anything, but if you guys met out on public land, maybe out in the boonies, you can do it.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Are you serious? This is still in the books. Do people do this?

[Andrew Callahan]

Mutual combat law?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Did you ever see this happen?

[Andrew Callahan]

I mean, I've seen homeless people fight with melee weapons like Juggalos downtown, and nothing. The cops didn't do anything about it.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Because of the mutual melee laws?

[Andrew Callahan]

No, it's not mutual melee law, but it was mutual combat. I'm not sure if the cops looked the other way because they're like, we don't want to deal with this or get near them, but it could have been a mutual combat situation where the cops like, hey, you guys just like. You guys fighting each other, right? Like, no one's getting attacked here. They're like, nope, we're good.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Okay, well, that's fucked up. They don't have that in California. Somebody gets stabbed with a katana blade and somebody else gets shot, all bets are off.

[Andrew Callahan]

And so I want to learn more about crime scene of this katana blade stabbing, where Curtis Lynn had the samurai sorted through the chest. Did this, like, occur on the property they were renting?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah, it occurred within the bounds of this lot. This kind of, like, trailer park that, you know, outdoor space. There's varying wild, wildly varying accounts about what actually happened on that day. I've heard Curtis Lynn's side of the story from an interview that he gave before he was killed. Spoiler alert.

[Andrew Callahan]

He was killed many years later.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Oh, yeah. So it's important to say he survived this attack. He survived having a sword stuck all the way through his body. He lost an eye to some of the stabbings. He was wearing a patch for a while. He was stabbed all over, and somehow, miraculously, it either didn't puncture any vital organs, or the doctors got to him in time or whatever. So this guy, he Fucking pulled through miraculously from this thing.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

And what he says happened was that basically they tricked him one day to come over to their trailer after he had said, I'm evicting you. And the tensions were super high. They were like, hey, there's like a water leak. Can you come deal with this? And he was like, you know how to deal with it? Just turn the water off. And they were like, no, no, no, please, we don't know anything. We're poor, innocent people. So he goes over there, and as he's bending down to look at this pipe or whatever that's supposedly leaking, he feels a thump on the back of his head. And the next thing he knows, according to him, he wakes up and he's being stabbed. As he wakes up and he kind of like pulls out his. Manages to pull out his gun, starts aiming it at them, and then the sword comes through him, and then he starts shooting. And once Emma dies and the other person is shot, it kind of like diffuses the situation. Everybody else runs off, basically.

[Andrew Callahan]

And where was this when this was happening?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

I don't know.

[Andrew Callahan]

On property?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

We think maybe yes, but it's unconfirmed. It's a very confusing and muddled official account of what actually happened.

[Andrew Callahan]

So the cops show up. Is anybody taken into custody?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yes, the person. Well, so like I said, Emma was killed. There was one other person who was shot, but not killed. She's taken into custody. And then there's one final person named Suri Dow, who is not Chinese and still taken into custody. Okay, so now the cops have two Zizians in custody, and they've been in custody since this time awaiting murder charges for their friend.

[Andrew Callahan]

The first Zizians went into this slammer, as some say, in 2022, and they're still there. So how many Zizians were remaining on the outside once those two went in?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Like I said, the number fluctuates. But we think at that point there might have been three or four other people who kind of, like, either got away from that scene or who were not there in the first place. It's all a bit obscure at this point.

[Andrew Callahan]

One thing I wanted to ask about, too, that I was reading about online, is that apparently at the trailer park compound or just the trailer park, they're living in Vallejo. They were practicing something called uni hemispheric sleep, which is based upon, from what you said, the theory that there are two parts of the brain and there are two parts of. There's really two souls within every person. One is a Primal. Sort of rat bastard. You know, just someone who smashes TVs because the sports team loses the game. The. The ID and the other. Yeah, like someone who sees, you know, like a person who is. You know, someone who harasses people who are small.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Right.

[Andrew Callahan]

Little people.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Huh. Okay.

[Andrew Callahan]

You ever see. I feel like if I was.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

I don't know if they would describe it as the id and then someone who harasses people that are small.

[Andrew Callahan]

When you're. No, I mean, like people who have dwarfism. When you're a child and you see someone who has dwarfism, you exclaim, oh, okay.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

But as you get older, you say, you know what? That's a person just like anybody else.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Right. The ego and the SuperEGO, or the ID and the SuperEGO. Yeah, the kind of, like, layers of, like, the socially trained part of yourself and the more kind of like primal.

[Andrew Callahan]

Reactionary. Reactionary. Primal self.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah, exactly.

[Andrew Callahan]

And so, from what I can tell, uni hemispheric sleep is the idea of activating one part of that brain and shutting the other off. Is that an accurate summation?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah. There's a person in this cohort named Gwen Danielson who supposedly came up with this idea of unihemispheric sleep theory back when they were all in the Bay Area and they were a part of the rationalist world. And in fact, Gwen gave a talk about uni hemispheric sleep at a mainstream rationalist workshop at a certain point, it was part of what they would call mental tech, which is, like, ways of kind of, like, improving or optimizing your brain.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, brain science.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Brain science. Brain pseudoscience, depending on where you stand. Life hacking. Exactly. So, yeah, the idea is that through some form of either hypnosis or sleep deprivation or some combination of that, or meditation, if you want to say you are able to put to sleep, intentionally put to sleep one of the people that live inside your brain so that you can then become familiar with and get to know a lot about the other person without the sleeping one interrupting or whatever.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, it sounds like total bs.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

I don't know. I mean, I've met people who've done it, and they say that it's helped them and been very effective in getting them to know themselves.

[Andrew Callahan]

So I'm assuming you're shutting off the ID and allowing the ascendant map to take over your body.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

That much I don't know. And, you know, even this idea of, like, the ID and the ego, it might be better to put it more in terms of the way that like, we talk about, like, left brain, right brain, of, like, there's like the sort of fuzzy, artistic, creative, fluid side of your brain, and then there's the more math kind of like angular, hard right brain or left brain. So there's like the logical and then the sort of, like, emotional sides of your brain. I think that might be closer to.

[Andrew Callahan]

What they believe got you. And they had some sort of sleep pattern that resulted in what appears to be, according to the filings, extreme sleep deprivation that was happening on the Vallejo property.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

There was probably a lot of that going on. There was probably a lot of use of LSD and possibly other psychedelics, although I don't know that for sure. There was definitely a lot of just intense interpersonal stuff happening with some very intense personalities, like love triangles that I don't know. There has not been, as far as I know, any real allegations of, like, weird sex stuff going on.

[Andrew Callahan]

It doesn't have to be weird. It could just be normal sex stuff. But I'm just saying, a bunch of people walking around butt naked, taking LSD all the time. They got samurai swords, they're trying this brain sleep thing and they hate their landlord. It's possible they, you know, there also could have been some romantic entanglement.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Although you think if you're hanging out all the time and you're kind of like dirt poor and have to live underground, and you're naked all the time and taking drugs, that actually sounds very non sexual. Like, it sounds like you'd eventually lose the sex drive in an environment like that.

[Andrew Callahan]

Especially if you guys are combined to achieve a mutual purpose in a different world. This would have all happened in San Francisco, and someone around them would have been like, yo, like, what are you guys doing? But because it's so expensive, these guys are out in Vallejo. I also got this Mac Dre bobblehead. Not sure if you're familiar with Mac Dream. He was killed in Kansas City in 2006. But he was an artist who founded the Hyphae Movement and he put Vallejo on the map. He's kind of like, when I think of Vallejo, I think of Mac Dre. I also think of the Zodiac Killer, but now I'm forever gonna be thinking about the Zizians. So maybe, you know, if we can get a bobblehead made of one of those folks.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

It sounds like you got a lot to think about when it comes to Vallejo, California.

[Andrew Callahan]

Well, yeah, because it's a place where, like, you know, I always perceived it as being the center of culture. Because Mac Dre is like the king of Vallejo rap or the hyphen movement, then actually go to the Bay Area, and it's extremely far from even the east bay. It's like 10 minutes past Richmond. It might not even be considered the bay by some people's standards. So when I heard about there kind of being like a hyper intellectual, Silicon Valley style cult happening in Vallejo, that was the first thing that struck me. Just geographically wise. Like, you always would think that would happen in San Francisco or the Silicon Valley ecosystem, and now it's even on the furthest edges of the bay.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

So, I mean, if you really want to talk about sort of the like, hyper intellectual kind of like intense radical activity, it is happening in the bay in the rationalist and AI alignment worlds. The kind of like the big sort of like main bubble that this all came out of. The stuff happening in Vallejo, I think, was more just like these people needed a way to go underground and escape and not be known by anybody, including their family, where they were. And they knew this old man from a year or two ago, and they knew that he owns a lot of. With some trucks and some trailers on it. And they were like, hey, can we like, chill out at your place for a few years?

[Andrew Callahan]

I kind of feel bad for him.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

It's a very sad.

[Andrew Callahan]

I know a lot of people are watching this have this, like, anti landlord conditioning. And I'm not here to defend landlords, but not all landlords are, you know, created equal. If you own a trailer park in Vallejo, it's not like you own, you know, a Section 8 apartment building and you're like, kicking people out for noise violations. Guy's probably got like eight trailers. He's trying to make a couple extra bucks. I. I wouldn't put him in the.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Same category as like, yeah, he's an old guy. He's kind of into the bohemian and art scene and the water hanging out on boats in San Francisco. I think he initially at first thought these people were young weirdos, young cool weirdos. And he was like, all right, you need a cheap place to stay, I'll help you out. That's the impression I get.

[Andrew Callahan]

Like artsy bohemians?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah, yeah. Or like techie bohemians or something. I don't know. But that's the milieu that he comes out of. I think think from what I've heard. And yes, I mean, the way, you know, there is something quite intense and tragic about the way that he ended up dying. Again, we're skipping ahead here a little bit. But he survived this crazy thing that happened. I mean, a thing that almost nobody else would survive. Having a group of people fighting with a group of people and being stabbed so many times in the head and throughout his body. Walking around with a sword literally sticking from his back through his chest and living through all of that, he must have thought like, okay, luck and God is on my side. And then in the end, that's not what ended up happening.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, one of the Zizians came back this year, I believe. Took revenge.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

That's right.

[Andrew Callahan]

But we don't want to skip too far ahead right now. We are in 2022. The Zizians just faked their deaths. They pop back up in Vallejo. Curtis Lynd has been stabbed with a katana through the chest. Two of the Zizians are being held where they're still awaiting murder charges. And I'm assuming it's probably gonna go to trial. They didn't plead guilty, did they?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

No, I think it's gonna go to trial. In fact, it was gonna go to trial just last month. And Curtis Lynde was about to testify at that trial, which I think has something to do with the timing of his death.

[Andrew Callahan]

Jeez. Alright, so the next thing that I read is that the Zizians were discovered living in Maryland, including Zyzz herself.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Well, let's back up, okay? Because a month after this stabbing incident in Vallejo, Ziz and a couple of her friends pop back up in suburban Philadelphia. This is at the end of 2022, New Year's Eve. 2022. Right. As 2023 is breaking, an elderly couple is found shot in the head and killed in their home in suburban Philly.

[Andrew Callahan]

And that was in Delaware county, right? North suburbs, Chester Heights, from what I'm. If I remember correctly.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yes.

[Andrew Callahan]

Gotcha.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

And so this elderly couple is Richard and Rita Zadjko. And it turns out that they are the parents of one of the Zizians. One of the people traveling around and sort of being underground at this point with Ziz, a young woman named Jamie Zadjko and Ziz and Jamie and another guy are found within days at a motel near this shooting incident. After the bodies are discovered by neighbors, found by the cops, found by the cops who are tracked at this point. They're like, oh, well, these people have a daughter. Where's the daughter? We don't know. They start tracking her and they end up tracking her to this motel with Ziz and a couple, you know, Zyz and one other person. And the three of Them are arrested, taken into custody. There's some circumstantial evidence that maybe Jamie did buy a gun that was the same type that was used to kill her parents. But for whatever reason, we don't know why all three of them are released. There's not enough evidence to press charges on any of them. And they run free, they walk free away from this on bail. So they're supposed to continue showing up for hearings to kind of like keep looking into this and of course, then just completely disappear again and go unveil.

[Andrew Callahan]

Because they have the California case they're.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Attached to as well at this point. There's a string of, I believe, three different cases, criminal cases that they have walked away from one after the other and completely disappeared.

[Andrew Callahan]

I'm definitely getting some Manson Family vibes at this stage.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

You know, I think I've heard the term Manson Family thrown around when it comes to the Zizians. I don't think it's exactly appropriate, just because I do think that it is a bit more decentralized. It is a little bit. It's not like there's kind of like dear leader that we're gonna follow type of situation. There isn't all that same insane stuff, sex stuff. And at the core of it, even though a lot of this violence is so horrible and so seemingly random, there is a kind of coherent, real philosophy about trying to save the world from a coming technological threat.

[Andrew Callahan]

Right?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

So unlike Charles Manson, who is just a raving lunatic, the Zizians actually have something interesting at the very core of what they're doing.

[Andrew Callahan]

So what threat is being subverted by killing the parents of one of the Philistines?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

That I cannot tell you. I think that they went off base. I think that they lost track of reality and started reacting to things in their immediate vicinity. There's also apparently a part of Zizianism or a part of Ziz's writings on her blog where she talks about the ethical need to take revenge. So if something has been done to you, you have to take revenge for it ethically, for the good of humanity. And Jamie's parents, Richard and Rita Zadjko, according to Jamie's blog, were abusive parents when she was growing up.

[Andrew Callahan]

I mean, when you're dealing with these kinds of people, anarchists, when you say abusive, is that like telling the kid they're never gonna be in the Olympics, or are we talking about, like, real punishment?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

That I can't say.

[Andrew Callahan]

You know what I mean? Because I've met some people in the more anarchist scenes and when they refer to their abusive childhood homes, I understand anything can be traumatic, but they're talking about, like, their parents, not really giving them the validation, which, to me, coming from an Irish Italian background, is unbelievable, because I'm the first person in my entire lineage to not get abused as a child, which is great.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Well, congratulations.

[Andrew Callahan]

Thank you.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

I don't know if this is, like a snowflake type situation or whether it's more serious. I mean, like you said, I mean, of course, people can exaggerate things or build trauma out of any tiny interaction, but also, there are quite a lot of truly abusive households out there. So, yeah, we don't know. That being said, none of this is an excuse to hunt down and kill your parents.

[Andrew Callahan]

I don't know, man. If your parents were on some, like, you know, Catholic Church behavior, I think it's pretty.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

We just have no idea. And hopefully we're gonna find out more as this thing progresses. But we don't know why Richard and Rita were killed ultimately.

[Andrew Callahan]

Okay, so they vanish again. So this is kind of the big through line in the Zizian story is vanishing.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

They're pretty good at it, especially Ziz. She just keeps walking out. So she's in jail for at least a month in Pennsylvania before she posts bail and is able to walk away. The court apparently has guarantees from her family and friends and her lawyer that she's going to stick around and, of course, be responsible. And then, of course, yeah, gone without a trace. So that is 2023. At that point, when she has disappeared and things go dark. People within the rationalist community back in the Bay Area who consider themselves to be the enemies of Ziz at this point, or to be, you know, they're. They're scared. They don't know what's gonna happen. They're waiting for the other shoe to drop. There's a lot of concern about whether there's a hit list or a kill list, because obviously this group of people is capable of murder or of killing people, at least, possibly allegedly. Again, they've never even been charged with murder at this point, except for the ones who are in custody in Vallejo. But there's just a lot of speculation and sort of fear about what's going to happen next. And then nothing happens. 2023 rolls into 2024. Silence. 2024 rolls into 2025. Silence. And then, boom, January 2025, they pop back up on a snowy highway in rural Vermont, and a Border Patrol agent has been killed. And this allegedly happened during a stop on this highway in Vermont, I guess the border patrol near the Canadian bor. Just stop any car they want to for an immigrant inspection.

[Andrew Callahan]

They can do it, I think, within, like, 100 miles of any border here, too. Like, if you were to drive on some routes. For example, if you were to drive from Mexicali up, like, past the Salton Sea, like, if you were to drive from El Centro in Brawley, which is like the Imperial Valley, to Palm Springs, there's like four. There's four stations that, like, scan your car for bodies. They have. Because they're feds, they don't have to Mirandize you. It's really strange. Like, any federal governing body is. Isn't beholden to the same restrictions as police officers. So they don't need probable cause. They don't need it anywhere, nor does ice. Any federal police agency can do whatever they want at any time.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

That's wild. You know, I grew up in Detroit, literally on the Canadian border with Windsor, Canada, and Windsor, Ontario. And I never. You know, we used to roll around the city going to shows and smoking weed before that was legal in Michigan. And we were always scared of cops, but we'd never heard of anybody getting pulled over by border patrol.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah. Is there a lot of cross traffic across that brid ton?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

It's the most. It's the heaviest commercial traffic internationally in the entire country.

[Andrew Callahan]

Damn. I did not know that.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

On a road, I think, you know, that doesn't count the ports of Los Angeles or whatever. Yeah. I mean, until now, maybe. I think things are icing up a little.

[Andrew Callahan]

It's funny, when I was in Detroit, I was asking people, like, y' all ever been to Canada? They were like, no way.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Really?

[Andrew Callahan]

Well, a lot of, like. Like Detroit townies, like, they're just like, we don't give a shit about that.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah. I mean, Windsor is. Yeah, you need a very specific reason if you're going to go to Windsor.

[Andrew Callahan]

And I think also there's, like, a bunch of the French Canadians are pretty heavy in the drug trade. And a lot of them bring, like. Especially with the Hell's Angels in Montreal, they control the trade of meth in the whole country. So I think there's, like, a lot of drugs that get transported from Montreal and Quebec down that highway past where, like, Burlington and Montpellier is. That goes south, and then that feeds Boston, New York, etc. Because the thing about organized crime in Canada, which is so interesting, is that it hasn't been infiltrated by the FBI. The FBI has infiltrated, especially in the 70s, almost all of these like subversive, countercultural organizations. But it's not the case in Canada. Like, bikers and outlaw biker culture in Canada is still scary. I always say in America, you're hard pressed to find a patched biker below 60 years old. You know, if you see most bikers, they're older from those times. Dude, I was in Canada. I was seeing Hell's Angels my age who, like, you could tell, like, you don't want to fuck with those guys. And so I think that that's probably why there's an enhanced border security on the Vermont border. That's just theory. Also, New Hampshire has much stricter laws, and New Hampshire doesn't play around. New Hampshire's like the Arizona of New England. Like, if you get caught with a half ounce of weed driving from upstate New York to Massachusetts and you get pulled over in New Hampshire, you're more likely to face time. So that's just kind of setting the stage. And so they're close to the border, they're driving. Is there anything weird about them in the car? I'm reading they were dressed in tactical gear.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah. So these two in particular have been staying at a motel somewhere nearby. And the motel workers had noticed this couple people, Theresa Youngblood and Ophelia Baukolt, who are two characters that I had never encountered before and again, ostensibly drawn in online through Ziz's writings and kind of like newer Zizians. So it keeps attracting more people over these years. Ophelia Baucold is a German citizen who, by the way, before she was involved in this altercation in Vermont, was a quant trader in New York City. So, like, making six figures working at this, like, quant trading firm.

[Andrew Callahan]

What is quant? Is that cryptocurrency?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Quantitative? It's like using math. I don't know. It's like using algorithms and math to trade on the market, basically. That's awesome. Yeah. So left that life and was like, you know what? I'm going to become a vegan anarchist outlaw in rural Vermont. So the staff at this motel see these people dressed up in tactical gear, carrying around guns, carrying around various odd things that kind of start to freak them out because they're staying there for more than a couple of years nights, and they call local law enforcement. So local law enforcement starts trailing them and kind of like looking into who are these people staying at this motel? We're not sure whether they were pulled over by border patrol because they were being tracked, or whether it was just some random immigrant inspection, but they get pulled over this border Patrol agent named David Mayland pulls them over with his partner, and they're like, hey, can we. Let's get your ideas. Let's get your IDs. Let's look through the them. They find Ophelia Balcolt, this quant trader who is a German citizen with a work visa. They find her id, and they find her work visa to be expired. They go back to the car. They're like, look, your work visa is expired. You both need to get out of this car so we can search the car. The two people get out of the car, and immediately, one of them, we think it was Teresa. The other one opens fire on the Border Patrol agents and kills David Malan, the guy who initiated the stop. There's a ton of crossfire. Ophelia Baucold gets shot and killed, dies on the scene, and Teresa Youngblood is arrested. So this blows up because you have a federal officer who's killed on the highway, a Border Patrol officer, I think, hasn't been killed in 15 years or something like that in this country. So it's big news. And then it's even bigger news when people are like, wait, these people are part of an AI cult that kind of like, trickles through online pretty quickly.

[Andrew Callahan]

It's got all of the buzzwords required to run a pretty hefty news cycle.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Exactly. Yeah. So it's. It explodes. And then a week later after that, Curtis Lind, the old landlord down in Vallejo who survived the Samurai sword stabbing attack and is set to testify the following week in the criminal trial, is approached in public, allegedly by a young man named Max Snyder, who is another sort of newer convert to Zizianism, has been in that community online for several years. But people didn't know that he had gone off the reservation and was trying to actually be a part of this thing physically. And he approaches Curtis Lynde in broad daylight in front of the neighbors, in front of a bunch of people. Witnesses who later describe this horrific scene and just start stabbing him and stabs him a bunch of times. Curtis Lind is laying on the ground bleeding to death. Max Snyder runs away. He then has an idea, comes back, slits his throat to make sure that the job is done, and then walks away and is pretty easily found by police later that day and arrested.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, I don't know about him, but those other two who killed the Border Patrol agent, they're never getting out of jail.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Well, one of them's dead, but the.

[Andrew Callahan]

Other one, I'm just saying, that's like, man, there's no way you can fight that.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

No, no, no. I mean, there's no way. And, you know, there was some speculation early on that it might have been friendly fire that killed the Border patrol agent, that it might have been one of the other agents who actually shot. We don't know.

[Andrew Callahan]

But there was a gunfight. It was mutual.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yes. So, yes, this person is almost certainly gonna stay in prison for a very, very, very long time.

[Andrew Callahan]

And that Border patrol situation is what really, like, triple blew up the whole Ziz story.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

The fact that a cop got killed, and then the fact that it had to do with AI and then the fact that there was this revenge killing of somebody who had already been a part of a previous news cycle a few years ago. All of that was this perfect storm. And it's just been this media flow frenzy ever since then. So, yeah, you've seen articles. Excuse me, you've seen articles all over the place. From Wall Street Journal to Wired to San Francisco Chronicle to NBC, Fox News, everybody's covering this at this point.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, I saw pretty quickly it got picked up by the reactionary right wing Internet ecosystem. You familiar with a guy named Andy Ngo?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

No.

[Andrew Callahan]

Andy Ngo is like the number one back in the Antifa days in 2020, when it was like antifa Proud Boys kind of constant street battles, he was like the number one Proud Boys affiliated reactionary, Twitter talking head. And so, like, pretty much his feed is like, if there's a surveillance video of a person who's gay or black doing a crime anywhere in the world, he's like the first guy to post it. So he's like creating this world of like, reactionary, like, you know, deport immigrants. He's pretty much an Asian white supremacist, if you're familiar with that sort of archetype.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Sure.

[Andrew Callahan]

So he has been reporting heavy almost daily on the ziz. He calls it Tran tv.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Oh, you know what? I have seen this shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[Andrew Callahan]

And he's like, look. Look at antifa escalating their tactics after the Trump victory. So the point is, lots of different groups are taking this story and using it for their own purpose.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Everybody can read something onto this. Just like AI itself, this story is in some ways like a reflection of the society that's consuming it. So, yeah, there's a billion different angles, there's a billion different entry points, a ton of ideas swimming around underneath it. And that's what attracted me to it as a filmmaker. That's why I've been chasing this story for so long, is just how rich it is. But yeah, of course, quite predictably, the right is latching onto the fact that there are a lot of trans people involved in this story and using it to confirm a lot of their own worst fears about that.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, for sure. And then a lot of people, I'm sure, want to know, where is Zyz?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Well, for about a month, that is what a lot of people wanted to know. Ziz, again, no way disappeared, walked away from the this. And then about a month ago now, so mid late February of this year, Ziz and Daniel Blank and Jamie Zadjko, whose parents were killed back in Pennsylvania, are found living in a box truck in deep rural Maryland. And they have some guns on them. And they're arrested and put in custody for trespassing and for possession of firearms, illegal possession of firearms, firearms, and I think resisting arrest or something like that. And so now they're all sitting in jail in Allegheny county, rural Maryland, awaiting trial for these misdemeanors. And the judge is like, I don't think we're gonna let you out on bail this time. Even though these are misdemeanors. Even though these are misdemeanors, you all have to sit here for a while.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, I probably wouldn't either.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah, it seems like a flight risk at this point.

[Andrew Callahan]

So throughout the process of actually filming your document, have you gotten to talk to any dizzians?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yes. I'm not going to name names, but I have been able to have a pretty extensive good, long sit down.

[Andrew Callahan]

How much do you want to say before the movie comes out about some things we were able to learn from those interviews?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

I think that the most important and compelling thing that I learned was really what they believe, which is Zyzz has this blog online called Sincereiously, and she's been publishing it since mid-2010s 2016, 2017, something like that. That is kind of like, seen as, like the bible of this way of thinking. And it's very, very difficult to parse. I don't know if you've seen it or interacted with it at all. It's just incredibly obscure and opaque and filled with references to references and, like, everything is oblique and like everything is like a quote from a video game you've never heard of or like some anime that existed for like one second in a comic book shop in 1997 or something like that.

[Andrew Callahan]

Totally.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

It's all just. Just like extremely layered. It almost seems like nonsense. Unless you're deeply steeped in this kind of like, Tumblr talk that is Very specific to the Zizians.

[Andrew Callahan]

You know what's fascinating about that is Mac Dre also spoke in a very indistinguishable dialect called Thizlamic.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

This lamic.

[Andrew Callahan]

This lamic. Because he would. He would do thiz. So it was ecstasy. It was an ecstasy language. And it was almost like a hybrid between Arabic. So like, he would say, Yar Amin is like. Do you know what I mean?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Okay.

[Andrew Callahan]

And he would say things like, he would call himself. I think it was the Reverend Al Boo Boo. And he would say, the eagle has landed all the time.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

So there's certain stuff, there's speakers here. Does he say anything? Oh, no, no.

[Andrew Callahan]

But he would have if this wasn't like a 15 year old toy.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Okay, well, I might have.

[Andrew Callahan]

And also, you know who also spoke a different language?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Huh?

[Andrew Callahan]

The Zodiac Killer. You know what I mean?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

I think you're coming up with a thesis, a kind of like Vallejo centered occult.

[Andrew Callahan]

Taking the complete, completely wrong take from this interview, I'm just like, so, dude, people in Vallejo are fucking crazy and they speak their own language.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Basically, people in Vallejo come up with their own languages. That's what I discovered from this.

[Andrew Callahan]

So, yo, are you gonna. One thing I wanted to ask you too. Backing up a little bit is like as a documentary filmmaker, you know, who knows what you're doing when you're covering a sensitive subject where there's active cases involved. How do you personally go about building trust with sources who are obviously scared to say the wrong stuff?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

I mean, I came up making films for the past, past decade or so at least. I've been making stuff about deep tech subcultures and ideology. So I made a film called the seasteaders back in 2017. Have you heard of this crew? You'd be interested in them. There's like anarcho capitalist techno libertarians who want to build artificial floating islands in international waters and start their own countries to experiment with different forms of government, basically.

[Andrew Callahan]

Have you heard of the micronation of Icelandia?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yes.

[Andrew Callahan]

Is it connected to that?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

That's. I mean, not directly, but it's like sort of part of the same idea.

[Andrew Callahan]

Because that's a crowdfunded island micronation founded by anarcho capitalists. But I'd more just call them like super adventure pilled people.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Okay, yeah, well, these people are much more. The ones that I was following are much more Silicon Valley based. They get their money from like Milton Friedman, the economist Milton Friedman's grandson, Patrick Friedman. It's kind of just like this incredibly right Libertarian, neo reactionary style of going about trying to build a new society. And actually a lot of these ideas are perpetrating, are sort of like infiltrating the American government right now, but that's a whole different story.

[Andrew Callahan]

Anarcho capitalism is bad news. That's all I'm saying. It's insane.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

And they have a lot of purchase in the tech world. So yeah, I had spent time with them. We made a film for disk art about them that screened at a ton of festivals and, and kind of blew up online a little bit and played it all over the world. And that sort of sent me down this path of just like, okay, this kind of like broader Silicon Valley ecosystem. There's all these different subcultures swimming around there, but they're all kind of like connected to each other through these ideological tendrils and also connected to the stuff that we interact. Like our phones and the shit that we interact with every day is kind of in some way infused with these ideologies. So I got obsessed with. And that's just been my beat. So because I've been making those films for a while now, a little bit now, people within that world know me. I sort of know the language a little bit. I know the sort of like foundational texts of a lot of this stuff.

[Andrew Callahan]

So through your work you've been able to build credibility amongst like the deepest sunken depths of this iceberg to where people are like, this guy's not a reactionary, he's not full of shit. He's not gonna do us dirty.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah, to some extent, I think, I think that's right. But, you know, I mean, you have to build credibility with each new person that you meet. I'm sure you've found this as well. It's not. You don't come into any existing relationship with built in credibility, but because I've been so deep in these sort of like interconnecting worlds for so long, it was somebody from the rationalist community themselves that reached out to me back in 2022 and was like, yeah, you should look into what's going on here. There's some crazy shit going down in this community.

[Andrew Callahan]

Well, shout out to them. That's like the ultimate tip.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah, I know, I know, it's. It's born a lot of fruit, that's for sure. But yeah, we're still in the middle of making this film and it's a long process. This stuff runs deep. And as you shoot, you're sort of like getting funding and finding ways to keep it going and Looking for partners in various places. You know, the game. I mean, it's tough out there.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah. I mean, it really just depends how soon you want to get it out. I think that for you it'd be much more of a timeline concern. Like, obviously I'm not saying that people won't care about the Ziz situation in two years, but there could be a lot of debate developments that happen that you'd want to include, but you can't because the studio has picture locked it and they've scheduled it. Like when I did the project with hbo, we had finished the movie a year and a half before it came out. And so like, I'm basically presenting old news to a new audience, but people actually in the scene were like, dude, this is like old ass shit.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

So it's kind of like. But you also make more money if you do it through a partner, especially if it's a long form documentary.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah. So yeah, these are things we're all weighing. I mean, I'm working with, with some big hitters right now. This Memory Studios is this incredible. You know, they made the film all light everywhere. I don't know if you saw. It's about police surveillance, body cameras. So I'm working with them. They're incredible. And then we got a couple other production companies on board. But yeah, like whether to partner with a big streamer, whether to do it with Hollywood or not, I don't know. We'll see, we'll see how this ends up going.

[Andrew Callahan]

Well, I think that the nature of the documentary, I haven't even seen it, but just with your, with your extensive base of knowledge, they'll love it because they love crime. You know, the streamers right now I feel like I was reading online that true crime has surpassed every single other documentary genre by like two or three times in the past seven years.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

It's crazy. And this did not start off as a true crime story. It just kind of happened recently with all the, with the, with the headlines that have been blowing up.

[Andrew Callahan]

I mean, have you seen some of this shit on Netflix? I was scrolling through the other day and on the top one it said like, it must have been a movie made with a. It said 10 scariest leaders, you know, and it was just like episode one, Genghis Khan, episode two, Hitler, Episode three, Pol Pot. I'm like, this is like. It was literally like. It was AI. It was like a David Attenborough voice clone with stock footage of drone footage of Cambodia and like a zoom in pan shot of a sad picture from the 70s.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

And I was like, who made this?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

You know, there are people who have just found their niche and their. Like, I know how to make. I know how to put scary music over a slow zoom shot. And I know the right DP and I know the right production company and we can get money for it. And this is just like my assembly line, kind of like factory job of making these sort of like scary, ominous, true crime style stuff. I mean, there's a lot of good true crime out there, don't get me wrong.

[Andrew Callahan]

Do you have any recommendations?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Well, I mean, the OG Errol Morris is one of my favorite filmmakers ever. You ever check out his stuff?

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, I mean, it's seen a lot of his son stuff too, but not as much.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Errol Thin Blue Line, is he made that? Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh, that's such a good documentary.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Oh, it's incredible. I mean, it basically kickstarted the entire true crime genre.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

But I also really like Andrew Jarecki's work. You ever see the Jinx?

[Andrew Callahan]

No, I gotta watch more documentaries.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

This guy, this billionaire, Robert Durst, was like killing his wives in Manhattan and became friends with this documentary filmmaker who started trying to out him. It's crazy.

[Andrew Callahan]

Is he the guy who confessed with a lab on when he's taking a piss?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh, dude, that's one of my favorite. I've only seen that clip in particular. They were like trying to pin him for so long, and then he was taking a piss and what did he say?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

He killed them all.

[Andrew Callahan]

He's like, this fucking asshole's never gonna figure this out. Oh, shit. It's a live mic. I would have swallowed my lav. You know, assuming that it was recording into itself.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Right. I think it might have been wirelessly transmitted.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah. Cause I know the Jersey Shore dudes, they would do this thing when they were hanging out, doing coke and stuff, you know? Oh, yeah, because I don't know, the situation was doing coke the whole Jersey shore.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

They'd thump their mic, they would go.

[Andrew Callahan]

Like this, and then they would hold the mic and they'd be like, you know what I mean? So real ones. I'm just saying, if I killed a bunch of people, I would figure out how to get around that.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Well, dude, you gotta watch. I mean, that whole series is amazing. The Jinx, it's on hbo, highly recommend it.

[Andrew Callahan]

I'll definitely check it out.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Best True Crime.

[Andrew Callahan]

And then we can cut this. But this is a real documentary filmmaker question. Where do you find your music from?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

I have a lot. I grew up with musician Friends in Detroit. So I'm like, I came up with all these crazy techno and noise and experimental music people in the metro Detroit area. And a lot of them just built up these incredible libraries and introduced me to other musicians. And I actually also ended up with one of my good friends who's from that scene, making a doc series called Far Off Sounds, which is about, like, weird, crazy musical subcultures around the world. Like musical experiences and subcultures. And so over the years, I've just met all these amazing musicians and. Because I hate dealing with music libraries because their music sucks. And I hate dealing with licensing songs that I love from people I don't know. Cause I. Because it's so expensive, I usually just pull from albums that have been released.

[Andrew Callahan]

By people and you know that they're gonna be chill with it.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

They're always chill. I'll always toss them a little bit of money. Whatever kind of budget we have, we'll fit them in something.

[Andrew Callahan]

But yeah, yeah, we're kind of stuck in this, like, motion array art list loop where we just like, end up using these same ambience ambient songs all the time. Cause you throw ambient on anything and people are like, wow, this is art.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah, it works.

[Andrew Callahan]

Okay, Detroit question. Best techno house bar.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

I don't know. It's been a while. I've been in LA for over 1112 years.

[Andrew Callahan]

Was old Miami open? When you're. When you're there.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Love Old Miami.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh, okay.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

I have a lot of friends who play music at Old Miami. I used to live right down the street from there.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh, you lived in Midtown for a while?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah, I lived in Woodbridge. Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

Some good spots in Hamtramck, too. Hell yeah, dude, I love Detroit.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Detroit's the best. I didn't know that you'd been to Detroit.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh, you still. Yeah, I mean, it's my spot. I like. I like other parts of Michigan.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

I guess you've made some stuff there. You've shot some stuff A little bit.

[Andrew Callahan]

Actually not. I've shot like a couple interviews in Detroit, but, like, I always would go to the Upper Peninsula. Just drive around in the summertime, you know?

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Wait, you said you used to live.

[Andrew Callahan]

Where I used to live in an rv in.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Where in Michigan?

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, sometimes. But like, typically in the summertime, I would do the Minneapolis up through Wisconsin down to Detroit. It's just the best. And it's like the only time to do it.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Hell yeah. I really want to buy property in the up. I think it's the best climate hedge.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh, yeah. And you get to kill wolves and get paid for it. Well, yeah, but if you did that, you probably wouldn't be able to interview Zyzz.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

That's right. I mean, it's important to live in Los Angeles for various professional creative reasons. But I do think, yeah, I mean, the world's getting really hot. I don't like hot summers. So I'm ready to live near water and kind of be in a place that's a little bit more temperate.

[Andrew Callahan]

Respect. Is the Zyzz interview coming? That's gonna be the hard one. Trip.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Zyzz, if you're watching this, please talk to me.

[Andrew Callahan]

I can vouch it's a good idea.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

I know you're in custody right now and your lawyer's probably telling you not to talk to any media. In fact, I know that the case.

[Andrew Callahan]

Don't listen to your lawyer. Listen to reporters.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

That's terrible legal advice, but really good sort of general life advice.

[Andrew Callahan]

Hey man, well, thanks so much for your time, bro. I appreciate you coming on our first IRL guest.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Thanks for being here.

[Andrew Callahan]

That's a wrap.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

That was sick. Channel 5 live worldwide, Hollywood and Vine.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Fuck the authority.

[Andrew Callahan]

Channel 5 news, channel 55. We don't with custers and 5 is the best number. Hey, what's up guys? Ah, shit. Hey man, thanks for that web link. It's really it worth. I don't know if you guys missed the memo, but we just dropped an entire feature film. That's right, a full blown movie at www.dearkellyfilm.com dearkellyfilm.com it's an action packed movie that revolves around the life and times of Kelly Johnson AKA Kelly J. Patriot. Kobe Bryant was assassinated by the Clintons. Come here, Nazi. You're going to Guantanamo. Oh my gosh, what did I do? Am I getting canceled? The Democrats don't like you. They're gonna cancel you. It documents his semi estranged family and their attempt to pull him out of the rabbit hole. Aren't you selling baby parts? You? Yes or no? Don't tread on me. Don't even think about it. I don't want to say too much, but it's a good movie. If you guys want to watch it, it would mean a lot. Www.DearKellyFilm.com it's available for rent and buy. You can rent it for $5.55 or you can buy it for $15.55.

[Jacob Hurwitz Goodman]

Www.DearKellyFilm.com www.DearKellyFilm.comwww.Deardelli.de.