Vegan Siths: The Rise and Fall of the Zizians

Chapter 1: Origin Story

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:32:11 -0700

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

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

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

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

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Chapter 2: The Landlord

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 17:32:15 -0700

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

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

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

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

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Chapter 3: The Playroom

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:15:37 -0700

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

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

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

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