Gwen Danielson Talks About the So-Called Zizians For the First Time

G
wen Danielson has eyes like a pair of blue marbles, cheekbones that could cut glass, and an unruly mess of brown hair cut asymmetrically: short and mopish on one side, curls that hang past their shoulders on the other, with bangs they sweep anxiously across their forehead. Danielson paces when they are thinking, or fidgets with a short length of stainless-steel chain — a parrot toy — while searching for the most precise words to try to communicate their perspective on the series of unthinkable events that have transpired over the past several years.

How does one attempt to explain that you are not a member of the “cult” with which you have been widely reported to be associated? Or your skepticism that it is a cult at all? Or that the person identified as the leader of this group — who you once counted as your closest friend — you only remember as a soft-spoken, cautious, highly intelligent individual who risked her life for you more than once? 

And how do you square your memory of that person with the string of killings that seemed to trail in her wake in the years since you parted ways? 

“I am not a public speaker,” Danielson says, apologetically. “I’m an eccentric researcher with social trauma.”

Many stories have been written about Danielson’s friend Ziz LaSota and the “Zizians” since they were first linked to a trio of killings on opposites ends of the country 15 months ago, but none of the nine individuals publicly linked to the group have spoken outside of court appearances, until now. Over two days in New York City in April, Danielson sat down to talk for the first time about LaSota, the Rationalist community, and the protest that set a now-infamous series of events into motion.

Last January, Danielson was living in a small town in the Northeast (they would rather not disclose which to preserve the possibility of moving back there someday) when their face and their birth name were, all at once, all over the news. 

That month, Danielson’s friend, an 82-year-old man named Curtis Lind, was stabbed to death in Vallejo, California. His death came shortly before he was set to testify against a pair of former tenants — also onetime friends of Danielson — who’d been accused of attempting to murder him years earlier. Days after Lind’s slaying, a Border Patrol officer was shot and killed while conducting an immigration check on a stretch of highway in rural Vermont. (The car’s passenger, one of two people who drew guns on the officer, was also killed in the firefight.)

The alleged assailants charged in those killings, who’d filed for a marriage license a month earlier, were connected to three other individuals — Jamie Zajko, Daniel Blank, and LaSota — who had themselves been questioned in the double homicide of an elderly couple, Zajko’s parents, in Pennsylvania in 2024. 

Danielson is not accused of being involved in any of these crimes, but their photograph — a mugshot taken after they were arrested during a nonviolent protest in 2019 — was published in stories about the string of murders, where they were linked to the group that perpetrated them.

The name “the Zizians” was coined years earlier by the pseudonymous author of a website warning members of the Bay Area’s insular and esoteric Rationalist scene about LaSota, a young computer programmer and a onetime acolyte — before becoming an outspoken critic — of the community’s most prominent figure: the AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Yudkowsky gained a cult following of his own over the decades he spent issuing increasingly dire warnings about the threat posed to humanity by artificial intelligence. His apocalyptic proclamations earned him the support of tech titans — Peter Thiel and Elon Musk both donated to his nonprofit, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), and Sam Altman credited him with sparking his interest in AGI — and his writing inspired legions of young readers, LaSota and Danielson among them, to come to the Bay Area and join his effort to save the world from the kind of extinction-level event that he believes superhuman AI capable of wreaking.

LaSota and Danielson were both MIRI summer fellows, and attended self-improvement workshops run by its sister organization, the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), also co-founded by Yudkowsky under the assumption that if people were trained to think in a more rational fashion in general, they would take the threat of artificial intelligence, in particular, more seriously.

Within years of arriving in the Bay Area, LaSota and Danielson had become disillusioned with MIRI, CFAR, and the leadership of the two organizations. They sought to air their criticisms at a gathering for CFAR alumni in the fall of 2019. But what Danielson says was intended as a symbolic protest escalated dramatically amid paranoid fantasies, prosaic miscommunications, and the false report of a gun. 

Deputies from the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department, along with a SWAT team, a bomb squad, and a helicopter were deployed to subdue four mostly unarmed transfemmes (one carried pepper spray) who were handing out flyers dressed in masks and robes. 

Danielson, once missing and suspected dead, resolved the only lingering criminal charges against them on Friday, pleading no contest to four misdemeanors (including trespassing and wearing a mask for an unlawful purpose) related to the 2019 protest that first catapulted this small band of vegan, gender-non-conforming AI doomers into the public consciousness. 

“We made some mistakes,” says Danielson, who was sentenced to 150 days under house arrest. “I still do not think that we actually did anything illegal. But I do regret how we did things.… It all came out of inexperience.”

Danielson, now 32, is relieved the case is over with. It has been “hanging over my head, and constraining what I can do, and impacting what everyone thinks about me … keeping me unable to fully and openly talk about a number of events in my life … because of the potential legal consequences … for six goddamn years — almost half of my adult life.”

With the case finally settled, Danielson is eager to resume their research on AI safety, reintroduce themself to the Rationalist community — a community they were cast out of after the protest, and which they would like to be a part of once more — and reassert their identity as an individual, distinct from the ill-fated social circle to which they once belonged. 

“Almost every friend that I had for several years is either dead or in jail,” Danielson says. “Emma is dead. Curt is dead. Somni is in jail. Ziz is in jail… Silver-and-Ivory is in jail. That’s most of the friend group that I had for a long time.”

DANIELSON EXCELLED ACADEMICALLY AS A CHILD. As a middle schooler in Spokane, Washington, they scored high enough on the SAT to receive an award from the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth; their junior year, they attended the Research Science Institute at MIT, a program described as catering to the “100 of the world’s most accomplished high school students.”

They were eventually offered a full ride to Rice University, where they took classes in bioengineering, neuroscience, and math for two years, before becoming consumed by the idea of AGI, or artificial intelligence that could meet or exceed the intelligence of human beings. 

Danielson stopped attending classes and earned straight F’s for an entire semester as they experimented with a friend on AGI development. (Danielson declines to share exactly what that experimentation entailed: “In the interest of not giving anybody any ideas, just in case my approach is different enough from other people’s that it inspires them. That could be dangerous.”) 

It was during this period that Danielson started reading Yudkowsky’s writing — The Sequences and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality — and their hyperfixation on AGI transformed into an obsession with AI safety instead. The pursuit of AI safety eventually brought Danielson to the Bay Area, where at a meetup for the online community LessWrong held in the Berkeley-based offices of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, they encountered LaSota for the first time. 

She went by the name Ziz — a reference to a character from Worm, a web fiction popular with Rationalists — and wore black robes: thin, cotton, three layers (“The ones that are only a single-layer look like cheap Halloween costumes,” Danielson says). The Ziz character, Danielson explains, has “the ability to subtly influence psychology in a way that makes people act in line with her interests — and her interests in this case are not good ones.”

The pair bonded immediately through an insatiable intellectual exchange — conversations that formed the basis of many of LaSota’s future blog posts — as well as their experiences navigating their respective gender transitions. “She was trans, but … more calm with herself? I don’t know how to say it. She lacked the sort of desperation around transition that I had,” Danielson says. “She didn’t feel that she had to prove it to anyone because she knew this truth about herself and that was the important thing.”

LaSota, Danielson says, was “always trying to understand people, particularly why people make the choices that they do, really analyzing people’s social expression to try to understand what moves them, what drives them.”

Shortly after they met, LaSota moved onto the Islander, the small sailboat where Danielson was living to avoid paying an exorbitant Bay Area rent. Together, LaSota and Danielson hatched a plan to convince other Rationalists to live together on boats too, with the idea of minimizing their collective living expenses in order to make more room in their lives for intellectual work — work on AI safety in particular. They managed to acquire several vessels for their “Rationalist Fleet.” The largest was a decommissioned Navy tugboat, Caleb, which they purchased in Ketchikan, Alaska, and piloted to Pillar Point Harbor in Half Moon Bay in the summer of 2017.  

Danielson first met Curtis Lind pulling Caleb into the harbor one day to refuel a couple of months after they arrived at the harbor. Danielson remembers Lind, an affable old mariner then in his seventies, complimenting them on their docking skills, and introducing himself as the owner of the Robert Gray, a 125-foot Army Corps of Engineers research vessel built in 1936. It was the first of many conversations. 

Lind, who’d owned a succession of boats over his lifetime — most recently a German-built cruise ship that served as the inspiration for the TV show The Love Boat — shared the knowledge he’d cultivated with Danielson, instructing them, for example, on how to install zinc anodes on the outside of the tugboat so the steel hull wouldn’t corrode as quickly in the saltwater. 

“You have to prepare them in a certain way: Cut off the steel bits, cover that up with epoxy, put a hole through them, bolt it to a really thick welding cable,” Danielson explains. “I just picked things like that up from him. I talked with him about Rationalist concepts — things that I was thinking about, ideas I was running with.”

When the Caleb dragged its anchor, drifting into buoys and tangling anchor lines, Lind brought Danielson out to a lot he owned in Vallejo to pick out a new one. “He had a yard full of miscellaneous odds and ends, which included five different anchors all the way up to cruise-ship size,” Danielson recalls. One was heavy enough to secure the tugboat; Lind sold it to Danielson for the price of the raw iron.

After a series of misadventures aboard Caleb, LaSota was offered a job at Google in early 2018; she moved off the boat into a modified box truck that she parked closer to the office. Danielson was struggling as Caleb’s sole caretaker, anchored in Pillar Point’s outer harbor to avoid paying fees. “We had run out of gas to run the generator, so I was out there in the dark,” they say. “It wasn’t a great situation.” 

When Lind offered to let Danielson live on the Robert Gray with him and another tenant, a gardener who worked in San Francisco, Danielson jumped at the chance, and remained there for most of 2018. 

“The boat was beautiful — much more beautiful than Caleb, because it was much better maintained,” Danielson says. The company was good, too: Lind shared stories about playing the violin as a young man, about the time a hoax call led to FBI agents breaking down the Robert Gray’s solid teak doors, about the lighthouse tender Fir he once owned, and about dashed plans to transform the M.S. Aurora — the Love Boat ship — into a floating restaurant.

Lind, Danielson says, “was an older man that had been through a series of adventures over the course of his life, and was still sort of an adventurous person. He was someone that I could hold a good conversation with, and I did hold a lot of conversations with him. He was interested in my experiences… Even though I was young, I had been through a lot of adventures and done a lot of strange things, and encountered interesting philosophies, and I talked to him about that.”

BY THE FALL OF 2019, Danielson had followed LaSota’s lead, moving off the Robert Gray and into their own retrofitted vehicle, while planning “a series of talks” they intended to deliver at an upcoming reunion of CFAR alumni in Sonoma County. Danielson and LaSota hoped their talks would spark a dialogue about whether deficiencies they identified in MIRI and CFAR’s leadership were putting the entire AI-safety movement at risk of failing to meet a critical moment.

Danielson says they arrived at the Sonoma County retreat center prepared to mount a symbolic protest, but also to share their planned remarks: They had packed a canopy and whiteboards, and retrieved cushions from their boats with the intention of setting up a comfortable spot for anyone who wished to listen to their lectures. Two other, more recent acquaintances — Somni Leatham and Emma Borhanian — transfemmes whom LaSota connected with over Discord, planned to give talks of their own about problems they saw in MIRI, CFAR, and the broader Rationalist community.

The talks never happened: A representative for CFAR told LaSota and Danielson by email they were not welcome at the reunion. LaSota’s writing, her behavior, the way she dressed had, by that point, begun to unnerve some individuals within the organization, including one who described being “viscerally terrified” by LaSota “in a way that I’ve never been viscerally terrified of anybody before or since.” 

That fear was compounded by an ominous email that LaSota sent to the entire CFAR mailing list ahead of the reunion. “MIRI and CFAR started out as SIAI, an organization once functional enough to halt and pivot to AI alignment from accelerationism. They rotted,” LaSota wrote. “If you do not want to die with this plague consuming our world, then turn your hopes back to the hard-to-define things that generated these institutions that no longer deserve them.”

If the email felt threatening, Danielson says, it was not intended to be. Neither, Danielson maintains, was their choice to wear Guy Fawkes masks meant to be menacing. The masks were chosen as an homage to the vegan activist group Anonymous for the Voiceless, who wear them while demonstrating against factory-farming practices, not to Fawkes the historic figure, mastermind of a failed terrorist attack. “People really read things into that that I wasn’t intending,” Danielson says. “So that was definitely unfortunate.”

Of the protest, Danielson insists, “We were trying to do it by the book, and trying to do things correctly.” 

Nothing went as planned: Shortly after the four of them arrived at Westminster Woods, the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department began fielding calls from the retreat center about the strange individuals dressed in black robes and masks, who they said had barricaded the retreat center’s entrances and exits with their vehicles. (“We just wanted them to walk past,” Danielson says. “There was plenty of parking room … outside the venue.”) 

One caller even claimed one of the figures was carrying a gun. 

The reports from the retreat center were disturbing enough that the sheriff’s department mobilized its entire arsenal: a helicopter was deployed, a SWAT team, an armored vehicle — used to escort a school group that had been completing a ropes course on the property — a bomb squad, and a K9 unit. 

Danielson remembers seeing a police officer approaching from behind a parked car, his own gun drawn, ordering them on to the ground. “I’m just like, ‘What the fuck?’ … Because we weren’t fucking doing anything — I mean, we were doing a thing, but we certainly didn’t have a gun, which is what had brought them there.”

LaSota, Danielson, Leatham, and Borhanian were forced to the ground, handcuffed, and booked into the local jail, a place Danielson describes as “the most biohazardous place I have ever been in my life — there was blood and shit and hair and dust.” The four of them would later file a lawsuit, alleging that during their detention they were intentionally deprived of food, water, and medication, as well as “stripped naked, and mocked, and ridiculed for being transgender.” (Their lawyer later withdrew from that case.)

Neither Danielson nor LaSota knew Leatham or Borhanian well prior to the protest. If it had gone as planned, Danielson says, “we would have gone separate ways afterwards.” Instead, the four of them — LaSota and Danielson, Borhanian and Leatham — “were sort of thrust together by being charged in the case.”

The foursome were, at first, staying together in a succession of Airbnbs near the Sonoma County Courthouse — accommodations mostly covered by Borhanian and LaSota with money they saved during their time working at Google — before Borhanian was banned from the platform. A host, having read about their arrests in a local newspaper, reported it to the company. 

“We had to find another place to stay,” Danielson says. “That’s how we ended up on the lot — on Curt’s lot.”

IT WAS THE SAME DUSTY LOT at the end of a residential cul-de-sac in Vallejo where Lind had brought Danielson to pick out a new anchor in 2017. By the time Danielson approached Lind looking for a place to stay two years later, Lind had purchased the adjacent property and doubled the parcel’s size. 

One half was still cluttered with Lind’s anchors, cranes, “a lot of beautiful machinery,” Danielson says. On the other half, Lind had put down gravel and installed empty shipping containers and trailers suitable for potential tenants. 

Danielson and LaSota didn’t need a place to live — just somewhere to park. Over the preceding year, since the Rationalist Fleet’s ignominious end, they had been iterating on a new idea to contend with the Bay Area’s astronomical cost of living: box trucks retrofitted for permanent living that they called “slackmobiles.” They agreed to pay Lind $1,000 a month for space that would accommodate four trucks. 

“I didn’t want us to stay there for very long,” Danielson says. “I wanted us to arrive there, get box trucks for Emma and Somni, outfit those box trucks, and then get out. That’s what I wanted, and that’s what I kept trying to push for.”

The foursome had been on the lot for a few months when the pandemic struck in March 2020. That same month, the price of Bitcoin — in which most of Borhanian’s life savings was invested, money that was covering much of the group’s expenses at that time — cratered. Soon after, the four of them stopped paying rent to Lind altogether. 

LaSota, in particular, Danielson says, took the pandemic and the risk of Covid infection extremely seriously. When anyone left the lot, whether for court appearances or errands, they wore full-body dust suits and full-face respirators, the kind that resemble a gas mask. When they returned, they would sanitize their suits, gloves, masks, and shoes — anything that had been exposed — using UV lights and sanitizer, Danielson says. “If one of us messed up the containment process, which I think I did once, then I was in quarantine from the rest of them for a few weeks.”

Danielson says, “We took it very seriously because if any one of us got sick then all the rest of us could have gotten sick, and that could lead to permanent degradation of the ability to think, and the ability to work on problems that were important.”

While Danielson was responsible for logistics — work that included outfitting the group’s trucks and getting groceries — and Ziz was taking responsibility for dealing with the legal fallout from the protest. Leatham and Borhanian, Danielson says, weren’t doing much at all. 

“We were talking about philosophy a lot,” Danielson recalls. Increasingly, the person driving the group’s philosophical discussions — and driving them in a direction Danielson was becoming uncomfortable with — was Borhanian, whom Danielson describes as “the most intelligent person that I’ve ever met — for good and bad.” 

“Emma accelerated philosophies towards violence,” Danielson says. She was an edgelord, prone to taking “a philosophy out to its limits — scenarios where that philosophy might, as stated, compel violence, or might seem to justify it.”

“Exploring the limits of a philosophy is a way to poke holes in it, and that is how some philosophical advances happen, but it’s also a way to get people to accidentally make commitments to things that they wouldn’t have made,” Danielson says. “It was a challenge because Emma would introduce some interesting concepts that were entangled with these violent attitudes in a way that took work to disentangle  — and it took a special work because Emma was really intelligent.”

Danielson believes Borhanian exerted particular sway over LaSota, with whom LaSota, Danielson says, had begun a romantic relationship. 

By spring of 2022, Danielson was deteriorating mentally — to the point where they were considering suicide. “I was not liking the direction things were going in terms of Emma’s philosophy holding weight in the group. The fact that we were still there [on Lind’s lot] and everything was stagnant, nothing was moving… I was just constantly dealing with sirens going off, metaphorically speaking. Like, standing on the bridge of an aircraft and all the alarms are all going off, all the time. That had been the state things were in.” 

In March, they wrote a note to LaSota, telling her they were leaving all of their belongings, including their truck, to the group. Then Danielson walked off the property on foot. 

Danielson says they spent the first couple of nights sleeping by the tracks in Vallejo, then in a park in Benicia. “I was holding myself ready to commit suicide while I paused to think through my philosophy on the matter, consider whether there were other alternatives,” Danielson says. “I eventually came to the conclusion that there was an alternative.”

Danielson says they made their way to East Bay, where they slept in a homeless encampment in Berkeley at night, and picked up enough work as a day laborer to pay for a cross-country bus ticket. “The Bay Area was not a good place for me to heal,” Danielson says. “I traveled to the other side of the country… Frankly, the place that I found was a very, very good choice.”

That place, Danielson says, is where they were living in the fall of 2022, when Curtis Lind sought and obtained a court judgement ordering Danielson, LaSota, Borhanian, and 19 other individuals — names, Danielson believes, Leatham used for Amazon deliveries that arrived at the Vallejo lot — to pay more him than $60,000 in back rent. (Danielson says they were not aware of the judgement or the fact that they were named in it.)

Lind had already initiated eviction proceedings against the remaining tenants when, early on the morning of November 13, 2022, he was allegedly attacked by Borhanian, Leatham, and a third person, identified in court documents by the name Suri Dao, whom Danielson knew by their Discord handle, Silver-and-Ivory.

Lind — despite being stabbed in the eye and impaled with a samurai sword — managed to survive the attack. Borhanian, whom Lind shot, did not. Leatham and Dao, arrested at the scene, were charged with both Borhanian’s murder and the attempted murder of Lind. 

LaSota, who was handcuffed at the scene and brought to police headquarters for questioning, was never charged in the incident. Police say Lind did not identify her as one of his attackers.

Danielson was not on the scene the day of Lind’s attack, Vallejo police confirm, but several days afterward, someone who gave police Danielson’s name was detained at the Vallejo property, according to public records. Danielson denies they have been back to the property, and they shared personal records with Rolling Stone that indicate they were in another state at the time; they believe it was LaSota who gave their name to police. (A lawyer representing LaSota declined to comment for this story.)

Two months later, LaSota resurfaced in Pennsylvania, where state police, investigating the murder of the parents of a Rationalist named Jamie Zajko, found her in a hotel room rented to Zajko’s housemate, Daniel Blank.

DANIELSON SAYS THEY LEARNED OF THE first attack on Curtis Lind through an internet search in early 2024, more than a year after the fact. They had plugged LaSota, Borhanian, and Leatham’s names into DuckDuckGo, curious if the trio had resolved the legal problems stemming from the 2019 protest. 

“It wouldn’t have surprised me terribly if they just stopped showing up to court, or if they’d done some silly thing in court and got some kind of contempt order — these are things that I could easily have expected to see in the news,” Danielson says. “I did not expect what happened and I was confused by it… It was an enormous shock to my system… I was horrified and sad.”

Danielson was only slightly heartened to note that LaSota was not arrested in connection with the attack on Lind. Maybe, they thought, the incident served as a wake-up call. “I had hope that Ziz saw that and was like, ‘Holy fuck,’ and went her own way — kind of like I did. I hoped that she had done that, but that isn’t what happened,” Danielson says ruefully.

In February 2025 — a few weeks after Lind was attacked a second time, fatally, by an admirer of LaSota’s named Maximilian Snyder — LaSota was arrested, along with Zajko and Blank, in Maryland. The three of them face felony charges related to weapons possession and possession of drugs with intent to distribute, as well as a number of misdemeanors, including trespassing. All three have pleaded not guilty and requested a joint trial, which is tentatively scheduled to begin in June. (Blank was released on bail in February.)

LaSota faces a separate case in federal court, where she is charged with being a fugitive from justice in possession of firearms and ammunition. She pleaded not guilty and is currently in federal custody, awaiting an assessment of whether she is mentally competent to stand trial.

Danielson says they are still struggling to process everything that has happened. “I believe Ziz has made some mistakes, and our philosophy has diverged, but I don’t think the mistakes she’s made were bad enough or of quite the right sort to be the direct cause of what happened… What I can imagine is her hanging around people who misinterpret her philosophy, for whom the mistakes in it channel their own mental issues in a bad way.” 

Despite everything that has been reported, they still miss LaSota. “We were good friends,” Danielson says. “She risked her life on my behalf, multiple times — sometimes just for my mere material interests… She led me to becoming a better person, and then also kind of contributed to me becoming a worse person, from which I healed, but still that former part does exist.”

“She is, still to this point, the one that I compare my other relationships to,” Danielson adds. “I don’t know how to say it, but, yeah, I miss her, and… I hope for a resolution to this where she gets to heal. But, at the moment at least, I may be the only person in the world really meaningfully pursuing that objective.”

Danielson’s own healing process has been a slow one. It started, simply, with making a friend, then beginning to talk with a person they call their “not-formally-a-therapist,” then joining Dungeons and Dragons games, and talking anonymously in Rationalist Discord servers. Those things helped Danielson restore their “foundations for social interaction.” The harder part of that process came later: “It was about being able to trust myself,” Danielson says.

Finally, Danielson says, they are feeling ready to return to their work on AI alignment. “For a lot of years, the idea of paying attention to what’s happening in the field of AI was too scary… Just a concept I wasn’t ready to handle in its totality,” Danielson says. “I had to put certain parts of myself back together before I could deal with that.”

It’s something Danielson wants for LaSota one day, too — even as that feels somewhat foolhardy today. “There aren’t a lot of people that I put any degree of faith in into being capable of solving alignment — or solving anything that really contributes to or creates the environment in which a solution to alignment can arise. Eliezer is one of them, myself is another. Ziz is someone that I also had some of that hope in — and reading what happened kind of dashed a lot of that hope.”