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You're listening to an Ono Media podcast.

Good morning and thanks for joining me for Rise in Crime, your morning caffeine hit All About Crime.

I'm Mama Jules, and it's time for a cult story.

And I had never heard of this cult, but a listener recommended that I look into the new leads

in several murders that the Zivians

or the Ziz Cold might be connected to. So let's start where I started. Who are these people?

Well, we're in Berkeley, California, and the Zizians leader is Jack Ziz Lasota, a 32-year-old transgender woman, born male, but prefers to be known as

female, and I'm just clarifying. Do not come at me in the comments. I'm making sure everyone's on the

same page. In the story, I will refer to Ziz as a female and by the pronouns she and her. Now the blonde shoulder

length and curly-haired leader was born in Fairbanks, Alaska in 1991. She studied computer

science at the University of Fairbanks before moving to California in 2016. That's when she

told followers that moving was her destiny. Once she landed in

California, she worked for Google for just a short time before taking part in an apprenticeship

at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. It was during this apprenticeship that Ziz

began immersing herself in the rationalist movement.

And I don't expect you to know what that movement is. I didn't. So here's the rationalism for

dummies course. Rationalism has three key components. First, humans can reason their way to certainty. They become the keeper of all knowledge. Not a God, not religion. The human is the one who knows everything. Second, our thoughts determine our existence. We can be alive through thoughts alone. I interpret this as our

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