Human Experiments and Murder Sprees: Andy Ngo on Why America’s Tech Oligarchs Are Joining This Cult

Andy, thank you for doing this. This is one of the this is one of the most remarkable stories I uh I've ever heard. And so I'd love to just start at the beginning. Congrats on the book. Uh who are the Zizians? >> The Zizians are a cult that has its origins in Silicon Valley, California. I first started paying attention to what I then learned were parts of the story um in January 2025. There that was inauguration day. On inauguration day, I saw in the headlines that a US Border Patrol agent had been shot dead >> in Vermont. >> In Vermont, right by the Canadian border, very close to Canadian border. Of course, with it being inauguration day, all of the international and national media coverage was on what was happening in DC, so it didn't get very much attention. >> It was actually not far from that border crossing that day, weirdly >> in Vermont, um, which is not far from here. So, >> it's a very rural area in the middle of nowhere. It was icy, cold, super freezing. And two people were dead. One the one being one of the alleged shooters. um another alleged shooter was injured but survived and then the border patrol agent um David Christopher Mullen was ambushed and killed there. So when I looked into that I there were >> you were just reading about this in >> yeah there were very very few details but then once I found out the names and I started digging further and this is in the context of where I've learned that we should come to expect media malpractice when it comes to a lot of details about criminal matters >> particularly involving >> gender and France. So you can no longer take for many years now take even names and details such as sex at face value when it's being reported. I learned this unfortunately through my reporting through on on leftist violence over the years is that the media will use preferred names, preferred pronouns, preferred aliases for individuals they report on and oftentimes even on criminal matters. And so you can have all these stories where there are trans killers involved in violent cases and read reporting um and come out not even knowing that this woman who did this sex crime or did this brutal killing or did these acts of violence is not a woman but actually a man. So with the name and I just kept digging further um initially there was a lot of stuff going on um in DC and I found out that oh huh the surviving alleged attempted murderer in that shooting was had a uh applied for a marriage license in the Seattle area with a man in Seattle who had just been arrested for attempted murder. somebody who was an elderly key witness for a attempted murder trial in Salano County, California, which is in the Bay Area. And then I looked up, oh, that elderly man several years earlier has survived a brutal attack by trans suspects. He was impaled dozens of times. He had his eye gouged out in the attack. Uh, and after surviving that, he was assassinated by somebody now who has a connection to this person in Vermont. And with all these things coming close um coming together, I was like, there's way more to the story. >> Yes. >> And it's not just a simple case of an isolated homicide incident, but rather there appears to be a group involved here. And that was the start of my investigation. But I I want to back up a little bit. You know, I I have so much gratitude to you because 5 years ago, you provided a book blurb for my first book, Unmasked, Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy democracy. and my path from reporting on Antifa to writing about trans violence now um on the surface might not seem like there's a connection but it completely was the logical path. Um at that time in 2020 2021 when there were so many riots going on after George Floyd died, one of my big projects was documenting those who were getting arrested uh in Portland where I was living at the time I every night through public records got the booking photos, got the names and looked them up systematically and I was seeing that there was a very odd pattern emerging at that time which is uh disproportionately the suspects were trans in some way like they could identify as male to female, female to male or non-binary or some type of neo pronouns. This was 6 years ago and I I just put that thought in the back of my head and it was a question I was like this is kind of weird. Um, and you might recall that in 2019 I was brutally beaten in downtown Portland reporting on Antifa. And a lot of people are familiar with that case. I suffered a subacoid brain hemorrhage from that. And the people who did it were dressed in black block with their faces covered. And the Portland police closed the case without arresting anybody. But I pursued a civil case against individuals I had alleged that were party to that attack and or a attack that happened also in 2021. I was attacked repeatedly in Portland, which is also part of the reason why I've been uh in exile abroad living in England now for all these years. The individuals I was able to identify in my civil lawsuit um with the help of Harit Dylan is uh three of the six individuals are trans identifying. So at that time there was like this other half exactly another point of like what's going on with like all this trans violence and in the years since we've had atrocity after atrocity shooting after shooting not just in the United States but other western countries where the shooters are trans and so it was within this context now you see now that I explain it why when I initially found out the names of the individuals who are alleged to have been involved in that ambush shooting in the Vermont border police officer. I was like, this is I'm not taking it at face value that it was just a man and a woman who were allegedly involved. Uh everything requires further digging. And once I found some of the uh puzzle pieces, I realized this is material for a book, not just an article. cuz there was so much I then learned about this is a cult now who has its roots in effective altruism, rationalism. But then they as they became radicalized they pulled in bits and pieces of other beliefs like trans ideology, transhumanism, leftist anarchist politics and they were a cult that recruited in the Bay Area and they are alleged to have been linked now to eight violent deaths in the United States and also in another country. So, there's a trail of bodies and the Zizians is a two-year investigation, a year and a half investigation. The Zizians is a year and a half investigation into what I discovered the secrets of the group, the ideology. And the more I kept digging in, it became more and more gruesome and disturbing. And I've seen a lot of very ugly, horrific things in my times reporting on the violent far-left. I've experienced it myself. I've seen people who have been maimed. I unfortunately was around deadly violence in Portland in 2020. So, I thought I was prepared for what I would find. But this cult used human experimentation. They had hideouts across the US. Um they made their own labs um in sort of like medical environments in the hideouts where they had they administered their own hormones and medication. So, the Zizians is really a story of what happens when rampant cross- sex hormone use, radical ideology, protection from media and institutions, all these things merging together then allowed a cult to allegedly carry out deadly violence over a course of nearly a decade. Now, >> most people don't like thinking about life insurance. It's one of those topics you tend to kind of put off. But if you're married, you've got kids, you've got people who depend on you, you probably should think about what would happen if you weren't around. And that's why we've partnered with Ethos. They've made getting life insurance super easy. You can do the whole thing online. You don't have to sit down with an agent or go through a medical exam. You get a quote in seconds. Apply in just a few minutes. And in some cases, you get coverage the same day. You just answer a couple of simple health questions. You get up to $3 million in coverage. Some policies can be yours for as little as 30 bucks a month. So, it's a good deal. If you've been putting off life insurance because you thought it would be a very complicated, expensive process, you should probably check out Ethos. Take a couple of minutes, get your free quote online at ethos.com/tucker. Ethos is ethos.com/tucker. Application times obviously vary as do rates, but we think it's pretty good. >> Where does it begin? and who led the cult. >> I'll start with the person that ended up being the leader. So on the cover, this picture is from the mugsh shot of Jack Amdus Loda. He was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, raised in a very liberal family. His father was involved in was and is involved in Democrat politics. Um but he otherwise had a somewhat normal upbringing. He had two younger sisters. He was very smart growing up and had an interest in Dungeons and Dragons and geeky stuff, Star Trek. Um, he was very good at computer science. That's what he excelled at in school. and he studied at the uh University of Alaska Fairbanks and graduated magna kumlad and then was accepted into a graduate program at University of Illinois Urbana Champagne for their prestigious um engineering program there. Jack like many of the people who ended up joining the Sizians are they can be described essentially as geniuses or very brilliant people and who come from STEM educated backgrounds andor careers. Um those with degree degrees um in engineering and biioinformatics. um they include on their resumes work stance at NASA and at Google. Some of them were making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in quantitative trading. So this was a highly selective small group of people and ended up joining the Zizians. But back to Ziz or I should say Jack Loda as he was known when he was a student he became interested in rationalism effective altruism. We're hearing about that a lot now. Um these are somewhat niche communities that are quite active in Silicon Valley. Rationalism is just a modern philosophical movement. It has its origins from centuries ago from European thinkers. But in the modern form it's about to simplify using logic, reason, evidence um in the course of seeking and finding truth. And then a related movement within that is effective altruism which is using rationalist thinking to maximize good. So in the Bay Area, a lot of the people um who work in tech and AI programming uh are involved in rationalism and effective altruism. They are atheists and they believe that and they're highly educated. They believe that we can find the best ways to um maximize good in society. But their whole moral system is different than it's um in opposition to let's say traditional Christian values or religious morals. So a lot of their debates were really kind of nonsensical in a way with some of the effective altruists. For example, they spent and still spend a lot of time talking about the welfare of shrimp prawns. You know, they're thinking that if, for example, if, let's say, 10% of them have some type of sentience, we're talking about billions and billions of shrimps that are being farmed and they're needlessly suffering. You know, these aren't Christians. So, they view the life of an animal as equal to a human. So, these are type of a lot of these weird debates that were happening in the EA and rationalist community. they were very active online. A lot of them are autistic. A lot of them have Asperger syndrome. There's a lot of research showing that um for those who have Asperers um there's a it does correlate um at the tail end with really high intelligence as well. So for Jack Lot, his original research interest when he was at university was studying um corona expulsions from the sun. That was the type of research that he was doing at NASA. But he became involved in these online forums and about rational rationalism and effective altruism and he was reading it a lot like a lot of people. uh less wrong is one of the main forums where there's a large community of people discussing all these things I just talked about debating them endlessly and coming up with mathematical algorithms and models for how this could be the best outcome that could be the best outcome and so he dropped out of his engineering program and moved to Silicon Valley and became uh involved in the rationalist community there. There were hundreds of them about around 2015, thousands that had moved there specifically so that they could get involved in the rationalist community. And in that backdrop, he met other rationalists who are also very intelligent and he convinced at least one of them that that person was trans and he started recruiting people to his particular beliefs. So eventually Ziz's ideology was more than just mainstream rationalism in effective altruism. He started pulling in things like aspects of trans ideology. He in fact he kept a very active blog online called sin seriously a port manto of sin and um seriously and on there he wrote about extensively about how he believed that trans people particularly trans women have special cognitive abilities and we're hearing a lot about EA now because there are um the AI engineers and researchers who worked for open AI or anthropic who have spoken out quite recently and done a lot of media about existential risk AI existential risk. So even though the public now is just hearing about this, this has been a debate that's been going on for over a decade in Silicon Valley. those who believe that AI is going to become a super intelligent being and if it's unaligned to human interests is going to destroy the world kill everybody. So Jack later Ziz winds up in Silicon Valley. He's dropped out of school. He's moved there in order to commune with other rationalists and effective altruists and while there gets caught up in the debate about AI risk. >> Yeah, there um the Bay Area has a long history of weird people going there and in fact the Zizians are compared a lot to the Charles Manson cult and decades ago. Charles Manson also had his journey moving to the Bay Area and his start in California before he >> gathered members to form a cult that murdered nine people. And Charles Manson himself and we learned through the trials long time ago that he didn't do the actual killing of of anybody, but he influenced other members within his group to carry out these type of attacks. So if the allegations ultimately are true about Jack Lotto, also known as Ziz, that's also similar to what he did. So he went through lot quite a big transformation once he moved to the Bay Area. He transitioned, started taking cross- sex hormones and testosterones suppress suppressors, met other trans people, and there were a lot of weird people. And there was also an aspect. >> Can I ask you a question? Do we know why he did that? That's a big step >> within the Zizian ideology based on his writings on his blog. He believed that trans women in particular had certain special cognitive abilities and he believed that there all of the world was at an existential risk from AI destroying everything and that he thought he could be part of the vanguard of those who would save the world. That was his world. That was his words. >> And he'd be more effective living as a woman doing that. >> Yes. But he also had this, this is where the trans ideology comes in. In his writings, he believed that he was also born that way, that trans people were were born that way within the brain. So he misqued and misused certain research on his blogs um about trans brains if and I write about in this book where the research on it actually doesn't show that trans brains on average are different because some of the research that was done which did actually measure some average differences was looking at people who males who were samesex attracted and I believe that's potentially what was being tracked. in the differences that was being noted, very minor ones on average, rather than the fact that these were trans people, trans so-called trans women. >> Was he gay before he became trans? >> He wrote about experiences that he had sexually with another man on his blog, but otherwise he described himself in quite asexual terms. He described how he viewed his penis as like a alien appendage that and that >> I'm going to stop you right there Andy and say that's not a healthy worldview. >> No, no, not at all. And he believed also that and this is what he wrote about that going through puberty was like part of his soul dying. So you can see how there are elements within some of the statements that are kind of repeated in mainstream trans ideology being born in the wrong body being born this way. um if you prevent if you allow for example a gender confused boy or girl to go through puberty that you're setting that child up to a life of suffering because they're developing into a body that doesn't align with their gender ideology. Ziz named himself after Zizz uh a fictional monster creature from an online fictional serial. And in that story, the monster influences people to become essentially walking time bombs that are destructive later. Looking back now, I mean, he picked Lotto picked the name almost a decade ago. I wonder um with the people that ended up dying around the group that he formed if that name was actually quite intentional or not. Imagine it's 3:00 a.m. You're dead asleep. 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After you purchase, feel free to say that you heard about it right here on this show. So, he starts living as a woman. Does he take hormones? >> He wrote about taking cross sex hormones and testosterone suppressors. and he met other trans people. There was an element also in the Bay Area then and now within some in Silicon Valley of um trans social trans as a social contagion of like where just suddenly a whole bunch of people began transitioning at the same time uh amongst similar social and friendly circles. So he was developing his own ideology in parallel and ultimately in opposition to a very well well-known rationalist and effective altruist thinker elite sir Yudosski and Yudoski is really seen as like one of the big um forefathers for um modern-day contemporary rationalism. He has a very large following. Many people move to the Bay Area particularly because he has established several non two nonprofits MIR machine uh Intelligence Research Institute and um Sefar to to research AI safety and rationalism and he's for many many years most well known as one of the big AI doomers. Earlier this year he met with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and others. So he's been very influential in his career. Ziz was a follower of Yudoski but eventually believed that Yudoski wasn't doing enough to save the world. So Ziz then met another person who he recruited to his cause Jasper Danielson who used the name Gwen and that was his first recruit. From there, the two of them really established sort of the groundwork of the Sizians. And it's very big and complicated and hard to explain, but to summarize, their main theory is that the brain's two hemispheres correspond to different identities. One can be male, one can be female. The it can be different sexes, it can be in opposition to one another. and one could and they could be good or evil. Ziz in his writings described himself as being female in the brain and that both of his hemispheres were good that he was one of the exceptionally rare people in the world born with this gift of being double good. So he had like a whole vocabulary around it. And then his goal then was to find and recruit people to his ideology and cause who he believed had at least one good core of the brain. And so in their ideology because the two hemispheres of the brain are linked, they believed that they needed to be separated and that they could do it through experimentations. And this is like the early formings of the cultlike elements of the group. So people that they were recruiting trans so-called trans women men who identify as women they would introduce them to the ideology let them know how they can be part of this worldsaving mission and being part of this vanguard but you need to go through these experimentations you need to jailbreak yourselves. So Ziz particularly sought out other rationalists who are trans and then from there the the line of inquiry would be to try to find out if they were open to these type of experimentations. And so I document >> would they separate the two hemispheres of your brain? >> Yes. And the Zizians believe that they could do it through sleep deprivation. And Ziz very intentionally kept the details of how these experimentations were done secretive. uh he alluded to some of the steps in his writings but never outlined it. And I believe that was part of sort of the intrigue with with the group was it would get people curious to inquire with him and some did reading through some of the correspondence that I was able to gather as part of my investigation for this book. The experimentations was various kinds of sleep deprivation and and and manipulating members into essentially a state of psychosis where they could be more easily manipulated through the extended sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation has been used by a lot of cults by the way. >> Of course, and governments. >> Exactly. So part of what makes like the story quite unbelievable was the the journey of the Sizians from Silicon Valley and then ultimately many many years later being arrested in February 2025 in Alageney County rural Maryland in Appalachia Maryland. the Sizians incorporated in leftist anarchist politics. So they did not want to submit themselves to the capitalist system and part of that included then coming up with really bizarre arrangements for how to live their life as essentially a commune. So, one of the first projects was establishing a rat fleet, rationalist fleet, literally buying old boats, and the go the idea was to live on them so they didn't have to pay rent. And there's lots of really crazy stuff that happened. For example, they bought a uh an old World War II tugboat from Alaska and rode it all the way drove it all the way down to the Bay Area, but they didn't have any of the permits to be able to park at a dock um in uh Half Moon Bay, but they they were allowed to go there on humanitarian grounds because they claimed that they were running into difficulty. And then they became squatters for years and years. They stayed there. They recruited people. They bought more boats and there were people then eventually who left the group. And >> do we have any idea where their money was coming from? >> Yes. So Ziz himself was bouncing from programming job to programming job and some of the other members were doing various other type of part-time employment things as well. So they were pouring in their own money into these projects. They really thought that they could create this fleet of rationalists who would end up saving the world and eventually as you can imagine that whole type of arrangement ended up collapsing. It's unrealistic. And so they moved after gathering several members including one who was a Google engineer um Amir Bohanian who used the name Emma. Um in 2020 they at the end of um 2019 they moved to Vallejo, California. There was a a plot of land from an elderly man that they befriended um when they were in Half Moon Bay by the water. He was very kind to them. He helped them a lot uh Curtis Lint. and they lived on his law. And how they repay his kindness was they used the laws um under California Governor Gavin Newsome related to the pandemic to not pay rent for years. So they squatted on his land and it was there that they did more of these experimentations. They live in these box trucks. So they lived a really weird lifestyle that was completely isolated from mainstream society. And in the meantime, two of the members who had joined their group and then left didn't actually end up escaping the group's influence and they killed themselves in very brutal ways. Um the first victim jumped off a building in Poland and then the other person um ended his life very violently in Colorado and oh a shotgun through the mouth. >> Yeah. So even early on in the rationalist community at that time, this was before there were actually any murders with these deaths, there were rumors that this Ziz and his group there's something odd about it. 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And eventually he took steps to try to evict them. They didn't pay rent for years. They originally offered pay $2,000 to rent a very large part of this law to park all their vans where they were living out of. And they were creating like so-called tiny homes out of these vans which they called slack mobiles. So they would put um solar panels on them and try to make it like completely autonomous living. They rejected everything about society. So they they thought they could really um live auton autonomously completely. But he took steps to evict them finally after years of non-payment. And in 2022, November, se