Annie Elise

And it was like these very like techie, techie type of people, kind of like, you know, a little bit of nerd alert stuff, if I'm being totally honest with you.

But pretty much it's kind of like the type of content where maybe you or I would see it and we'd be like, wow, that's really intense.

Scroll past that, want to get to my mom talk video or want to get to some prank on TikTok, things like that, where we don't really think too many people like dive into it and just become immersed in it.

However, some people who ended up reading these posts didn't just move on like I would or maybe even you would have.

But instead, they started taking what they were consuming very, very seriously.

And then, over time, this group of mostly online strangers, they started seeing themselves as the only ones who could truly understand how broken the world is.

And they thought that they were the only ones who could fix it.

So with that, it led them to some very dark places, and it ended with six different deaths across multiple states.

So buckle up, because this is the story of how a bunch of online philosophers turned into one of the strangest, one of the deadliest, and one of the most vegan cults that you've probably ever heard of.

So this is the story of the Zizians.

And today's case starts in Anchorage, Alaska, which maybe not exactly where you would expect, like, the seed of an online cult to really be planted and spark into fruition, but that's where the person at the center of all of this got their start.

And that person was Jack Lasoda, a transgender woman who now goes by Ziz, a name that kind of started out as her online alias.

Now Jack grew up in Alaska and was by all accounts incredibly smart.

I mean, think studying computer science at the University of Alaska, doing research on computer processors, even interning at NASA.

And Ziz had the kind of brainpower that you would expect to land someone in like Silicon Valley working for Apple or some sort of tech thing or maybe even SpaceX, who the heck knows.

But after college, Ziz started grad school but didn't stick with it.

Instead, she dropped out and she moved to the Bay Area around 2016.

And once she settled there, Ziz really struggled to hold down a job and even hold down stable housing.

She also started a pretty strange blog.

It discussed everything from, you know, vampires to how your brain is capable of having two separate identities to a type of Harry Potter fan fiction that uses the actual Harry Potter universe to explain philosophy and science.