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Deep Inside the Trans Death Cult Known as the Zizians, with Andy Ngo · The Alex Marlow Show

0:06
Speaker 1: All right, this week, I've been ripping through the book
0:08
Speaker 1: Zizians by the great Andy Ngo, one of the best
0:12
Speaker 1: journalists around, period, who's known for his fearless reporting in Antifa,
0:16
Speaker 1: where they physically made his brain bleed because they were
0:19
Speaker 1: so offended by the truth that he was telling.
0:22
Speaker 2: He was in the field. And this book is just sensational.
0:25
Speaker 2: It's out now.
0:25
Speaker 1: Everyone should get it. And this is a group that
0:28
Speaker 1: is a cult. It's a death cult, a trans death cult.
0:31
Speaker 1: If that doesn't entice you, then I don't know what will.
0:34
Speaker 1: It's an unbelievable story. And I was shocked at how
0:36
Speaker 1: little I knew about this. I felt actually mildly embarrassed
0:39
Speaker 1: going through it. I learned so much through the book.
0:42
Speaker 1: It's the perfect thing to have as your narrative for
0:46
Speaker 1: a book. Andy is with me now. Andy, let's just
0:48
Speaker 1: get into it from the top. Who are the Zizians?
0:54
Speaker 1: The Zizians are a cult group.
0:57
Speaker 3: With origins of Silicon Valley, they recruited members who are
1:01
Speaker 3: primarily trans-identifying. And through the course of nearly a decade,
1:06
Speaker 3: if the accusations from prosecutors are true, as well as
1:11
Speaker 3: if what I found about them turn out to be,
1:14
Speaker 3: in terms of the criminal conduct, they're linked to at
1:19
Speaker 3: least eight deaths and suicides across the United States and abroad.
1:25
Speaker 3: The story really does have all of the elements that
1:29
Speaker 3: would make the media go crazy.
1:31
Speaker 4: There's a cult, there's murders, suicide, revenge, money, cover-ups, faked deaths.
1:42
Speaker 3: And yet, I'm not surprised to hear from a lot
1:45
Speaker 3: of people, including people who are well-informed about news events,
1:48
Speaker 3: that they know almost nothing or nothing about the Zizians,
1:53
Speaker 3: that they really have heard nothing. And I think one
1:56
Speaker 3: of the big kryptonites for the media in the story
2:00
Speaker 3: is the fact that trans ideology was very central to
2:04
Speaker 3: this cult. And in terms of their recruitment process, who
2:08
Speaker 3: they sought out, and also how they framed their grievances
2:12
Speaker 3: that turned into alleged deadly violence.
2:17
Speaker 2: That is... Exactly right. And I was aware of it.
2:21
Speaker 1: Of course, we covered a little bit at Breitbart, but
2:24
Speaker 1: the details are so unbelievable that you have to read
2:27
Speaker 1: it to believe it. It really is Manson family-esque and
2:30
Speaker 1: you make some comparisons to it. And I do feel
2:32
Speaker 1: like this is sort of the most compelling cult crime
2:35
Speaker 1: narrative that I've seen, but it does have a lot
2:37
Speaker 1: of elements of it that would really turn off modern journalists,
2:40
Speaker 1: which is the bad guys are trance. And that is
2:43
Speaker 1: across the board. But let's just start from the top. Ziz,
2:47
Speaker 1: who is Ziz?
2:50
Speaker 3: CIS is the adopted trans alias of a biological male
2:55
Speaker 3: named Jack Lasota, who was born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska.
3:00
Speaker 3: And he ended up moving to the Bay Area around
3:04
Speaker 3: 2016 and building the groundwork for what would ultimately be
3:10
Speaker 3: the environment where he would recruit people into his cult.
3:14
Speaker 3: We're hearing a lot now about effective altruism and rationality
3:18
Speaker 3: from engineers who had worked for Anthropic or Open AI,
3:24
Speaker 3: and they are ringing the alarms about the threat to
3:27
Speaker 3: humanity from AI. But this type of debate has been
3:31
Speaker 3: going on for over a decade in Silicon Valley, and
3:34
Speaker 3: a lot of the ideas are really extreme, radical, and weird.
3:38
Speaker 3: For people who are unaware, a lot of the people
3:40
Speaker 3: who are part of the tech culture and part of
3:44
Speaker 3: these rationalists and EA groups are in PolyQ relationships. Sam
3:51
Speaker 3: Bankman Freed is probably one of the most well-known effective altruists.
3:55
Speaker 3: And he was, in recent years, convicted of one of
3:58
Speaker 3: the biggest financial scams and frauds in American history through FTX,
4:05
Speaker 3: where billions of dollars ended up being lost. And he
4:10
Speaker 3: donated a lot of money to Democrats. And EA, Effective Altruists,
4:15
Speaker 3: they have this belief that they can use mathematical models
4:20
Speaker 3: and rationality to map out the best ways to quote-unquote
4:26
Speaker 3: maximize good. But their worldviews and values are divorced from religion,
4:34
Speaker 3: divorced from Christianity. They draw their own beliefs for what
4:39
Speaker 3: is good.
4:40
Speaker 1: And so.
4:42
Speaker 3: In these communities in the Bay Area, what ended up
4:45
Speaker 3: happening was, for example, was a lot of them spent
4:47
Speaker 3: endless amount of capital and time discussing how to improve
4:53
Speaker 3: the welfare of shrimps that are being harvested, for example,
4:57
Speaker 3: or how to improve the welfare of insects and wild
5:00
Speaker 3: animals that suffer when they are killed by other animals.
5:05
Speaker 4: These are the types of questions they're asking.
5:07
Speaker 3: And when they're saying we want to maximize good, they're
5:09
Speaker 3: talking about that type of doing good.
5:12
Speaker 4: And so they don't view human.
5:14
Speaker 3: Life, um, with the primacy that if you have a
5:19
Speaker 3: Christian worldview, for example, that you would. So in this
5:23
Speaker 3: type of environment, that's where Ziz and the future Zizians
5:29
Speaker 3: were drawn to. And Ziz eventually felt like the rationalists,
5:36
Speaker 3: mainstream rationalists and EA communities were not doing enough to
5:40
Speaker 3: address the issues of a super intelligent AI that's going
5:45
Speaker 3: to destroy the world. So he started to form his
5:49
Speaker 3: own beliefs where he pulled in different aspects.
5:52
Speaker 1: Andy, let me just set up one thing which is
5:54
Speaker 1: super important because I just gave a big speech on
5:56
Speaker 1: effective altruism and I didn't make this connection. I should
6:00
Speaker 1: have made it, which is this is the whole nature
6:02
Speaker 1: of this cult. It starts with basically an extension of
6:06
Speaker 1: effective altruism and we talk about it and none of
6:08
Speaker 1: us like the idea of effective altruism. People are familiar
6:10
Speaker 1: with it. If you're in my audience, I assume most
6:12
Speaker 1: of your audience is as well. But this is a
6:14
Speaker 1: real extreme extension of it, which is you get into
6:18
Speaker 1: a just reappraisal of morality so that a lot of
6:21
Speaker 1: the morality that these Zizians have, it's kind of predetermined
6:25
Speaker 1: based off of the hemispheres of your brain, which is
6:29
Speaker 1: you get into what they perceive as scientists, the science
6:33
Speaker 1: of this. If you look at the Wikipedia summary of Zizians,
6:38
Speaker 1: they call them rationalists. All this is completely irrational and anti-science.
6:42
Speaker 1: and they formed this cult around it. So tell me,
6:44
Speaker 1: what is Ziz saying that is so compelling to these people?
6:50
Speaker 3: So when Ziz started forming his own beliefs and ideology,
6:53
Speaker 3: he and some of the early members he recruited developed
6:57
Speaker 3: hypotheses about the hemispheres of the brain. So the brain
7:01
Speaker 3: is made up of two hemispheres. They're linked through the
7:05
Speaker 3: corpus calcum, and they believe that each hemisphere of the
7:10
Speaker 3: brain in a human actually corresponds to a different identity.
7:14
Speaker 3: And this is, it also then has elements that are
7:17
Speaker 3: familiar with trans people who say you're born in the
7:20
Speaker 3: wrong body. So you can have a male body, for example,
7:23
Speaker 3: but have one side of the brain be female or
7:25
Speaker 3: both sides be female or one male and one female.
7:30
Speaker 3: Attached to that, he had this belief that a brain,
7:33
Speaker 3: a hemisphere of a human brain would be good or evil.
7:38
Speaker 3: And Coincidentally, he was one of the very, very few
7:42
Speaker 3: people ever born in the world who were gifted, who
7:46
Speaker 3: was gifted with two good hemispheres and two female hemispheres.
7:52
Speaker 3: And so through the early people that he recruited, they
7:57
Speaker 3: would put one another through these human experimentation where they
8:02
Speaker 3: had developed hypotheses of how they could use sleep deprivation
8:06
Speaker 3: techniques to make these recruits enter into a stage of
8:11
Speaker 3: psychosis where they could be controlled and manipulated and they
8:14
Speaker 3: believed that through these tests and experiments that they were
8:17
Speaker 3: doing in Silicon Valley that they could separate the two
8:20
Speaker 3: hemispheres so if for example one side of your brain
8:23
Speaker 3: was quote-unquote evil well they could separate it so that
8:26
Speaker 3: the good side is the one that you are able
8:29
Speaker 3: to get into control and they pulled in a lot
8:32
Speaker 3: about trans ideology they particularly believed that trans women were
8:38
Speaker 3: gifted with special cognitive abilities. And so they thought that
8:43
Speaker 3: they could form a trans vanguard of people who could,
8:47
Speaker 3: quote unquote, save the world. But their saving the world
8:51
Speaker 3: is not how you and I might think of it.
8:53
Speaker 3: In fact, they had this, they used algorithms to calculate
8:59
Speaker 3: how to make their decisions and to really put it
9:03
Speaker 3: in very simple terms. If killing one person, 100 people,
9:08
Speaker 3: a million people, most of humanity meant saving billions of
9:14
Speaker 3: animal life forms in the world, that was worth it.
9:18
Speaker 3: So their legacy now, in the course of a decade,
9:21
Speaker 3: has ended up with several of the members, seven of them,
9:25
Speaker 3: arrested in three different states. Nobody's been convicted yet, but
9:29
Speaker 3: they are facing state and federal charges, and there's just
9:32
Speaker 3: a trail of bodies.
9:34
Speaker 4: Behind them.
9:35
Speaker 3: And some of the alleged victims who had crossed paths
9:37
Speaker 3: with them were killed in very, very brutal ways.
9:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely.
9:43
Speaker 1: And you go through some of the detail on that.
9:45
Speaker 1: There's one character in the book who was their landlord
9:49
Speaker 1: at one point, who they stabbed many times and gouged
9:53
Speaker 1: his eye out, and then he survived. And then the, well,
9:57
Speaker 1: not to give a spoiler, but they do ultimately stalk
9:59
Speaker 1: him and finish him off in the end. It's just
10:01
Speaker 1: completely brutal. It's completely Manson family-esque. You mentioned the sleep deprivation, Andy.
10:06
Speaker 1: One of the things that comes up in the book
10:08
Speaker 1: is that you did reporting where you went to one
10:10
Speaker 1: of their facilities And you noticed all of the mattresses
10:13
Speaker 1: were propped up against the wall and the beds were
10:15
Speaker 1: propped up against the wall. And it crossed your mind
10:17
Speaker 1: that maybe they sleep standing up or maybe they're not
10:21
Speaker 1: sleeping at all.
10:22
Speaker 2: Crazy stuff.
10:24
Speaker 3: There's a lot of mystery and secrets about how their
10:26
Speaker 3: outdoor experimentations were done. But I was the only journalist
10:29
Speaker 3: who ever entered their last known secret compound hideout when
10:34
Speaker 3: they were fugitives and on the run. And that was
10:36
Speaker 3: in North Carolina. And I detail in the book what
10:39
Speaker 3: I witnessed. One thing that I write about in the
10:42
Speaker 3: book that I haven't disclosed yet until this writing is that,
10:47
Speaker 3: perhaps unsurprisingly, the political material that I saw in this
10:52
Speaker 3: compound hideout was material in support of the Kamala Harris-Tim
10:58
Speaker 3: Walz presidential campaign from 2024.
11:00
Speaker 4: Wow.
11:01
Speaker 3: The Zizians themselves are not overtly involved in left and
11:07
Speaker 3: right-wing politics, although they pulled in huge aspects of leftist
11:11
Speaker 3: anarchist politics. So in some ways I have referred to
11:15
Speaker 3: them as a Trantifa cult in that aspect. But where
11:19
Speaker 3: they have written about political matters and their members were
11:24
Speaker 3: big bloggers, they would use many of the talking points
11:28
Speaker 3: that we hear from leftists. For example, things about a
11:32
Speaker 3: trans genocide, trans persecution, and how right-wingers and Christofascists, those
11:40
Speaker 3: were the words they used to refer to Christians, were
11:42
Speaker 3: persecuting people like them for identifying as trans and queer.
11:47
Speaker 4: So politically, they were on the left. And Who knows?
11:53
Speaker 3: Maybe they were possibly campaigning for the Harris-Waltz campaign based
11:57
Speaker 3: on some of the stuff I found.
11:59
Speaker 2: Amazing.
11:59
Speaker 1: You found literal campaign material in one of their crazed
12:03
Speaker 1: cult compounds. The Zizians is the book. Andy Ngo is
12:07
Speaker 1: the author. And inside a trans death cult, incredible subtitle
12:11
Speaker 1: as well.
12:12
Speaker 2: And that's what it is.
12:13
Speaker 1: And I want to talk about some commonalities, it seems like,
12:16
Speaker 1: amongst the people in the cult. Some of these are
12:19
Speaker 1: pretty scary, but one of the things is they seem
12:21
Speaker 1: to be highly intelligent. It seems like, on average, we're
12:24
Speaker 1: talking about people who are high on the IQ spectrum
12:27
Speaker 1: in general, and there's just something inherently scary about evil geniuses.
12:33
Speaker 3: So there are lots of comparisons between Jack, Ziz, Lasota,
12:38
Speaker 3: and Charles Manson in these two groups. Both of them
12:41
Speaker 3: have their starts in the Bay Area, California, obviously different decades,
12:45
Speaker 3: and they were able to.
12:49
Speaker 3: Influenced people, and in the case of the Zizians, allegedly
12:53
Speaker 3: influenced people to carry out acts of murder. Charles Manson
12:58
Speaker 3: himself was, after being convicted for the murder of nine
13:01
Speaker 3: people at separate trials, he himself never actually did the
13:06
Speaker 3: shooting or the stabbings, but he was able to influence
13:10
Speaker 3: members of this cult to do that. I think there
13:12
Speaker 3: are many similarities between the two, but you can think
13:16
Speaker 3: of if Charles Manson's members were, instead of being about
13:25
Speaker 3: psychedelic drug use and hippie counterculture and communal sex, and
13:31
Speaker 3: instead were pulled in from having backgrounds of elite educational
13:37
Speaker 3: institutions such as the University of Oxford, UC Berkeley, UCLA,
13:42
Speaker 3: former associations with NASA, quantum trading career. That's what the
13:48
Speaker 3: Zizians were. So the people who joined the Zizians were autistic.
13:54
Speaker 3: They were on the spectrum. And many of them came
13:57
Speaker 3: from extremely well-to-do backgrounds and top elite educational careers and.
14:06
Speaker 4: Professional backgrounds.
14:09
Speaker 2: Interesting.
14:10
Speaker 1: Other things or maybe something different from the Mansons is
14:12
Speaker 1: they eschewed sex. It seemed like there's a lot of asexuality.
14:16
Speaker 1: It feels like Ziz himself, who's a trans person, resents
14:20
Speaker 1: his penis a lot.
14:22
Speaker 2: It feels like that's a factor in it.
14:24
Speaker 1: And it does seem like there's some of the members
14:28
Speaker 1: of the cult, I think, normalized abhorrent sexual behavior with children.
14:33
Speaker 1: I think they excuse that. But for the most part,
14:35
Speaker 1: it seemed very asexual, which is interesting because Others have
14:39
Speaker 1: that autogynephilia, and they talk about how they get aroused
14:43
Speaker 1: from dressing as the opposite sex or behaving as the
14:44
Speaker 1: opposite sex. But very complex picture of where they're at sexually.
14:50
Speaker 1: But I'll tell you one thing that is common is
14:52
Speaker 1: that there's nothing common. It's all very obscure forms of sexuality.
14:58
Speaker 3: So the image that Ziz and the Zizines gave off
15:02
Speaker 3: to the rationalist community is that they were an hysteric,
15:08
Speaker 3: asexual group of people whose only interest was in saving
15:13
Speaker 3: the world, and that's all they would do, that they
15:15
Speaker 3: had given up on all the carnal interests of the body. However,
15:20
Speaker 3: in my investigation research, as I disclose in the book,
15:24
Speaker 3: that was likely untrue. There's a lot of evidence that's
15:27
Speaker 3: left behind that Ziz was in a romantic relationship with
15:32
Speaker 3: one of the members of Two of the members that
15:36
Speaker 3: entered the group towards the end and now are accused
15:39
Speaker 3: of murder entered as a couple as well. And the
15:43
Speaker 3: wider rationalist EA community in Silicon Valley, almost everybody is
15:49
Speaker 3: involved in polyamory and poly-Q type of things.
15:55
Speaker 2: Relationships.
15:56
Speaker 1: And that came up in a lot of the effective altruists,
15:59
Speaker 1: where a lot of them were living in these communal
16:02
Speaker 1: homes where they were all having sex with one another,
16:04
Speaker 1: and that was sort of the origin of it, and
16:06
Speaker 1: this could be similar.
16:07
Speaker 3: And Ziz, about his own body, also used language that
16:11
Speaker 3: kind of echoes a lot of what we hear from
16:13
Speaker 3: mainstream trans activists, that They view, for example, their own
16:19
Speaker 3: body parts as like a foreign, something that's foreign to them.
16:23
Speaker 3: Ziz used the word, he described it like an alien parasite,
16:27
Speaker 3: and he described going through puberty as something like part
16:31
Speaker 3: of his soul dying. So for the Zizians, in their
16:35
Speaker 3: understanding of their gender confusion was entirely in line with
16:42
Speaker 3: what we hear from mainstream trans organizations. who are backed
16:47
Speaker 3: by big money and many big money coming from transhumanists.
16:52
Speaker 3: The Zizians were also transhumanists, by the way, this belief
16:56
Speaker 3: that you could actually change what it means to be
17:00
Speaker 3: human through technology or some other, through other ways.
17:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is the key part of it is they
17:08
Speaker 1: were very much believers in the singularity that eventually man
17:12
Speaker 1: was going to forge with machine or it's already happening.
17:15
Speaker 2: Give us some detail on that.
17:17
Speaker 3: So the singularity is the belief that it's to describe
17:22
Speaker 3: when AI becomes superintelligent, meaning smarter than humans, smarter than
17:30
Speaker 3: all humans. That's the singularity. And this is a time
17:35
Speaker 3: that causes big anxiety for many people who are involved
17:40
Speaker 3: in AI research and programming in Silicon Valley.
17:43
Speaker 2: It's not a.
17:45
Speaker 3: It sounds in many ways like what we've seen decades
17:48
Speaker 3: ago in sci-fi films and stories of where technology becomes
17:53
Speaker 3: so smart that it becomes out of control and kills
17:55
Speaker 3: people or causes great harm. But there is these realities
17:59
Speaker 3: and scenarios we can see now that's not far-fetched of
18:02
Speaker 3: where now that we're in the 21st century where everything
18:06
Speaker 3: is connected through computers and online, that a rogue AI
18:10
Speaker 3: type of technology being could hack these type of systems
18:16
Speaker 3: and cause immense damage and disruption at the very least.
18:20
Speaker 3: So this is a very real issue, and it's something
18:23
Speaker 3: that effective altruists and rationalists have been discussing for many,
18:28
Speaker 3: many years.
18:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so this is, I'm just, I want to
18:33
Speaker 1: go back to how Ziz preyed on people and how
18:36
Speaker 1: he was able to get people to join up, because
18:39
Speaker 1: Did he have any accomplishments? He seemed kind of mediocre
18:42
Speaker 1: until he was able to get an online, be a
18:46
Speaker 1: very persuasive, charismatic person online. But even the way you
18:49
Speaker 1: describe him in his personal life, the large individual would
18:54
Speaker 1: dress like a Sith Lord, which is a, I don't,
18:58
Speaker 1: who's impressed by that in our modern moment? And it
19:01
Speaker 1: didn't seem like, I got a little confused how he
19:05
Speaker 1: was able to captivate people to literally be murderous.
19:12
Speaker 4: He had a very bright start to his young adulthood.
19:16
Speaker 3: When he was an undergraduate student, he was selected to
19:19
Speaker 3: repeatedly do internships at NASA, for example. And then he
19:23
Speaker 3: applied and was accepted into the very competitive engineering graduate
19:29
Speaker 3: program at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which he went there
19:33
Speaker 3: and started. It was there that he reframed his life
19:38
Speaker 3: goals and dedicated himself to going to the Bay Area
19:42
Speaker 3: to join those rationalist communities to come up with ways
19:46
Speaker 3: that they thought that the world could be saved.
19:49
Speaker 4: And so he dropped out.
19:51
Speaker 3: And then once he moved to the Bay Area, he
19:53
Speaker 3: bumped from job to job and he was unable to
19:58
Speaker 3: hold down steady employment. One of the jobs he did
20:01
Speaker 3: end up getting was working at Google and one of
20:04
Speaker 3: the other Zizi members worked at.
20:06
Speaker 4: Google as well.
20:07
Speaker 3: There are those who had met him that I interviewed
20:11
Speaker 3: at various rationalist meetups about nearly a decade ago now.
20:16
Speaker 3: And some of them described him in their initial encounters
20:19
Speaker 3: as not really standing out initially.
20:23
Speaker 4: But Ziz's.
20:26
Speaker 3: Allure really comes through his blogging essence, which he wrote
20:32
Speaker 3: on his site called Sin Seriously, a portmanteau of sin
20:37
Speaker 3: and seriously. And it was on there that, for example,
20:42
Speaker 3: amongst many, I mean, there was hundreds of thousands of words,
20:45
Speaker 3: but he would write about give up all of morality
20:50
Speaker 3: and essentially encourage people to embrace evilness. And so, again,
20:56
Speaker 3: the worldview of Ziz and the Zizians was in terms
21:02
Speaker 3: of saving the world had nothing to do with actually
21:04
Speaker 3: how most people think of what is ethical morality.
21:08
Speaker 4: What is moral.
21:09
Speaker 3: For them, they had very specific algorithm-like calculations. And they
21:15
Speaker 3: viewed themselves and described themselves almost as computers, like jailbreaking yourself,
21:20
Speaker 3: improving your mental tech, improving and upgrading your software, for example.
21:25
Speaker 3: That's how they referred to their language. And as the
21:29
Speaker 3: ideology of the group developed, it became more and more
21:32
Speaker 3: extreme of where they were pulling these other types of
21:36
Speaker 3: decision theories that were being debated by rationalists. And for
21:41
Speaker 3: one of them, they believed that because they were going
21:45
Speaker 3: to provide modeling to this super intelligent future AI, they
21:52
Speaker 3: therefore had to make the same decision all the time.
21:56
Speaker 3: So that may explain why they ended up doing things like,
22:01
Speaker 3: for example, if the allegations are true, killing people that
22:06
Speaker 3: barely crossed paths with them or actually did good things
22:08
Speaker 3: for them but they had in their own views like
22:11
Speaker 3: a machine we're on this path of making choices and
22:15
Speaker 3: if the choice is to kill people who get in
22:18
Speaker 3: our way it doesn't matter if that slight that they
22:22
Speaker 3: did is small or big we have to make the
22:24
Speaker 3: same decision over and over and over.
22:26
Speaker 1: And this comes back to the hemispheres of the brain
22:30
Speaker 1: where the Ziz wrote that the hemispheres are typically at war,
22:34
Speaker 1: but a select few of the double good state. But
22:38
Speaker 1: not everyone in the cult had the double good state.
22:40
Speaker 1: So how do you, what if you're not a double
22:42
Speaker 1: good person by nature, then what role do you play
22:46
Speaker 1: in the cult?
22:49
Speaker 3: If you are a single good, and that's the term
22:52
Speaker 3: that Zizines used to describe where one hemisphere of the
22:56
Speaker 3: brain is quote unquote good, then you are in a
22:59
Speaker 3: subordinate role to Ziz. There's been very little video footage
23:03
Speaker 3: that has emerged of him, but in the little that
23:05
Speaker 3: has come out, for example, when he was walking to
23:08
Speaker 3: the courthouse in Maryland, shackled with some of the co-defendants,
23:15
Speaker 3: it was very clear who was the leader. He went
23:18
Speaker 3: out first, he spoke first to the camera, and only
23:22
Speaker 3: he spoke. The other two came out silent and followed
23:26
Speaker 3: him into the courthouse. And if I also write sort
23:29
Speaker 3: of what happens from the court transcripts. Again, it was
23:33
Speaker 3: his speaking first and only once he essentially gave permission
23:37
Speaker 3: to the other two that they speak.
23:38
Speaker 4: So he was truly this type of cult leader.
23:42
Speaker 3: They would have to follow his choices and decisions because
23:45
Speaker 3: he was one of the few quote-unquote double good people.
23:49
Speaker 1: Really, really important to cover this ground because this is
23:54
Speaker 1: a huge warning on I think where a lot of
23:57
Speaker 1: the violent Trantifa movement has gone. You do a nice
24:01
Speaker 1: job compiling examples of trans violence in recent years towards
24:06
Speaker 1: the end of the book, which goes back years. It
24:09
Speaker 1: goes back quite a ways.
24:10
Speaker 2: You do that as well, Andy.
24:12
Speaker 1: One thing that I want to make another point here
24:17
Speaker 1: that is really, I think, relevant is that they're all vegans, too,
24:20
Speaker 1: and very committed to their veganism. So there's a real
24:22
Speaker 1: anti-human element of it. How do you feel like the
24:26
Speaker 1: veganism plays in? Because they really, really adhere to this carefully.
24:33
Speaker 3: So that's probably in what the Zizians would say is
24:37
Speaker 3: the most important part of their ideology. In terms of
24:40
Speaker 3: the recruitment process, the first thing is that that person
24:43
Speaker 3: has to be vegan. And in their arguments, they say that, well,
24:49
Speaker 3: this super intelligent AI in the future is going to
24:52
Speaker 3: model its decisions of human behavior. And if we wanted
24:56
Speaker 3: to model it off the vanguard of those who are
25:00
Speaker 3: good and will be able to save the world, well,
25:04
Speaker 3: we have to be vegan because in their views, the
25:09
Speaker 3: super intelligent AI, if it sees that, well, humans can
25:14
Speaker 3: consume and kill lower life forms for food or for resources,
25:18
Speaker 3: and well, now that it's a super intelligent AI, it's
25:22
Speaker 3: above humans, and therefore it can kill everything else.
25:25
Speaker 4: That was their particular worldview.
25:27
Speaker 3: But really, at the end of the day, even though
25:30
Speaker 3: it's sort of in the Zizian's own propaganda rhetoric, framed
25:36
Speaker 3: as we want to do good and minimize harm, their
25:42
Speaker 3: calculations for who needed to be eliminated was completely, literally amoral.
25:49
Speaker 3: So they wrote about how they described meat eaters. They
25:51
Speaker 3: would call them carnists. And there's evidence that is viewed
25:57
Speaker 3: carnists as worthy of being tortured and killed. Some of
26:02
Speaker 3: the Zizines wrote about how there needed to be mass
26:05
Speaker 3: trials and punishment for humanity for eating meat. So they
26:10
Speaker 3: held this really extreme view of veganism.
26:16
Speaker 1: Very extreme, and also just notes what a disconnect I
26:20
Speaker 1: think they have to any sort of modern conservative who
26:22
Speaker 1: might be listening to any of this.
26:25
Speaker 2: There's so many highlights in the book.
26:27
Speaker 1: The Zizians think they're not subject to the law because
26:31
Speaker 1: we stole it from Native Americans.
26:32
Speaker 2: That's amazing.
26:33
Speaker 1: There's amazing episodes of faking death and escaping from prison,
26:37
Speaker 1: which are just just unreal. And they even took advantage
26:41
Speaker 1: of COVID era protections for tenants and stopped paying rent,
26:44
Speaker 1: which led to a very bloody conclusion. That's a, I think,
26:47
Speaker 1: a really fascinating and horrifying anecdote in the book. Let
26:51
Speaker 1: me ask you about some of the fan fiction. They're
26:53
Speaker 1: really into these other subcultures as well, like Harry Potter
26:56
Speaker 1: fan fiction and Star Wars fan fiction. And of course,
26:59
Speaker 1: the furry movement, there's some overlap there as well. What
27:02
Speaker 1: do you think is in the psychological makeup of that
27:06
Speaker 1: would perhaps, and no disrespect to Harry Potter, we're a
27:09
Speaker 1: family where Harry Potter's red in my house. I don't
27:11
Speaker 1: have objections to Harry Potter. It's just very odd that
27:14
Speaker 1: there's that overlap. Did you make sense of that, Andy?
27:17
Speaker 1: They were geeks and nerds. They were into, yes, they
27:21
Speaker 1: loved Dungeons and Dragons. They loved Star Trek. They were
27:25
Speaker 1: big into fantasy.
27:26
Speaker 3: In fact, in one of the violent attacks on one
27:32
Speaker 3: of the victims, the weapons they used were swords. And
27:36
Speaker 3: I looked on the product description for the swords because
27:40
Speaker 3: they bought many of them.
27:41
Speaker 4: This was in Vallejo, California.
27:44
Speaker 3: The product was marketed like, the wording around it was like,
27:48
Speaker 3: you are a warrior fighting to.
27:53
Speaker 4: Be a savior.
27:54
Speaker 3: So they viewed themselves as characters in fantasy almost, except
27:59
Speaker 3: they carried out really extreme brutal acts of violence on
28:06
Speaker 3: people but they were i mean it was like them
28:09
Speaker 3: living out their fantasy into real life and it led
28:12
Speaker 3: to catastrophic consequences for anybody who was around them and
28:18
Speaker 3: i i do want to emphasize by the way that
28:20
Speaker 3: the zizians are a extreme example of extremist and extremist
28:27
Speaker 3: violent um ideology they do fit into.
28:31
Speaker 4: A pattern that.
28:34
Speaker 3: We're all seeing now a rising trans violence.
28:37
Speaker 1: Yes.
28:37
Speaker 3: So the book, yes, is mostly true crime about this cult,
28:42
Speaker 3: its origins, who the members are, autobiographical details about the
28:48
Speaker 3: members and the timeline and what happened in court, how
28:51
Speaker 3: they were able to fake their deaths, how they were
28:53
Speaker 3: able to move from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. But I fit
28:56
Speaker 3: that within this larger story of what we're seeing of
29:00
Speaker 3: atrocity after atrocity being committed by trans-identifying people. I mean,
29:06
Speaker 3: now it's every day or every week that there are
29:10
Speaker 3: examples happening just in America. I mean, speaking to you
29:14
Speaker 3: as last week, federal prosecutors had charged a trans-identifying man
29:21
Speaker 3: in Washington state for allegedly providing money and support for
29:26
Speaker 3: the trans mass shooter that killed eight women and children
29:30
Speaker 3: in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, back in February. And if
29:33
Speaker 3: you look at some of the court documents that were
29:35
Speaker 3: released by American officials, because the Canadian officials covered this up,
29:39
Speaker 3: the gun that were used in that attack were decorated
29:43
Speaker 3: with trans pride symbols. So the people that were literally
29:47
Speaker 3: slaughtered by the barrel of trans pride, you don't get
29:50
Speaker 3: this coverage from media. And unfortunately, even if authorities and
29:55
Speaker 3: officials in Canada covered it up, Three other people were
30:01
Speaker 3: federally charged in Huntsville, Alabama, also last week, part of
30:05
Speaker 3: a Tarantifa cell for stockpiling firearms, 3D printing guns for
30:12
Speaker 3: allegedly a plot to kill federal ICE agents. I'm just
30:16
Speaker 3: talking about something from last week. I can go back
30:19
Speaker 3: a couple weeks before, the month before, month before. There's
30:21
Speaker 3: so many. The Nashville Covenant School, killing of children in
30:28
Speaker 3: administration by Audrey Hale, a female mass shooter who identified
30:34
Speaker 3: as a boy, and she left behind a manifesto, the
30:38
Speaker 3: Annunciation Catholic School and a church shooting by a trans-identifying
30:43
Speaker 3: individual in Minneapolis. That person left behind a manifesto. And
30:47
Speaker 3: in these manifestos, you can see how their apparent psychosis
30:52
Speaker 3: had a lot to do with them being driven crazy
30:56
Speaker 3: by their gender confusion and inability to accept reality about
31:01
Speaker 3: who they are and what they are.
31:03
Speaker 4: And so for this book, by the way.
31:06
Speaker 3: Every Zizian, every Zizian associate is identified by their legal
31:11
Speaker 3: birth name and their true sex. And That was actually
31:16
Speaker 3: very difficult for a number of the Zizian associates, people
31:20
Speaker 3: who took immense steps to cover up their true identities. So,
31:25
Speaker 3: you know, this book has been the most challenging project
31:30
Speaker 3: of my life. It was very scary to go out
31:33
Speaker 3: and research this group on the ground when they were
31:36
Speaker 3: still active fugitives last year.
31:39
Speaker 1: Right. And this is where I definitely want to take
31:41
Speaker 1: the conversation. And it really is a real achievement in
31:45
Speaker 1: journalism to put all this together. And it's very substantial
31:48
Speaker 1: and well-reported, a lot of original stuff, a lot of
31:50
Speaker 1: doc connecting, great narrative as well with the true crime elements.
31:54
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's one of the more questions I can
31:56
Speaker 1: ask is what's the status of the cult now?
31:57
Speaker 2: Where is it? Are they still among us?
32:02
Speaker 3: The outcome is actually quite tragic in the sense that
32:05
Speaker 3: there's still no outcome yet years and years on, and
32:07
Speaker 3: this has not come without consequence. For example, in 2022,
32:12
Speaker 3: Curtis Lent, who at that time was 79 years old,
32:16
Speaker 3: survived a brutal sword attack. He was impaled literally with
32:20
Speaker 3: the sword through the chest, and he had a firearm
32:23
Speaker 3: for self-defense, and he was able to save himself. The
32:27
Speaker 3: trial kept getting moved later and later and later. The
32:31
Speaker 3: Zizians in custody were very good, at filing various motions
32:37
Speaker 3: and presenting themselves as incompetent and dragging the case out
32:41
Speaker 3: for years. And then Curtis Lynn, last year at 82
32:45
Speaker 3: years old, was ambushed and assassinated.
32:49
Speaker 4: And he died.
32:51
Speaker 3: And the person who's been arrested over that is a
32:55
Speaker 3: member of the Zizian group. And to date, that trial
32:59
Speaker 3: still has not happened. There's been other issues regarding Zizine
33:03
Speaker 3: members refusing to eat, refusing to drink or take medication
33:07
Speaker 3: and causing health issues for themselves, therefore delaying the trials.
33:11
Speaker 3: Before that, there's still an open felony case out of
33:14
Speaker 3: Sonoma County, California, involving Zizine members where they were able
33:19
Speaker 3: to delay that for years through frivolous motions about transphobic
33:24
Speaker 3: discrimination from the judge, from law enforcement officers, from the courts.
33:29
Speaker 3: And in California, they entertained that, and the Zizians were
33:32
Speaker 3: able to fake their deaths and then go into hiding
33:34
Speaker 3: and flee to different states. And when they were arrested
33:38
Speaker 3: on the East Coast, their tactics were again the same. So,
33:44
Speaker 3: in addition to the story of the violence of the Zizians,
33:48
Speaker 3: there's also an indictment against American society and institutions and
33:52
Speaker 3: culture that legitimize the ways that violent criminals in extremists
34:00
Speaker 3: can exploit sensibilities about inclusivity and support for trans people
34:06
Speaker 3: to get away and get away over and over and
34:08
Speaker 3: over until in the end you have eight people who
34:11
Speaker 3: are dead.
34:11
Speaker 4: Yeah.
34:13
Speaker 1: And these, I was going to ask you about this
34:15
Speaker 1: because there were three Zizi and connected death just last
34:19
Speaker 1: year as you're having this conversation. I mean, so you,
34:21
Speaker 1: you were probably well underway with the book and there's
34:23
Speaker 1: killing is still going on. Um, that's, truly is something.
34:28
Speaker 1: And also, the book does end up in a spot
34:31
Speaker 1: where it's very clear that you are calling out the
34:35
Speaker 1: entirety of American media, whether directly or indirectly, Andy, for
34:38
Speaker 1: not taking trans violence seriously and continue to make excuses
34:41
Speaker 1: for it when this stuff is literally going on in
34:43
Speaker 1: our own backyard. What was it like for people who
34:47
Speaker 1: lived near the compounds where the cult was operating? Because
34:51
Speaker 1: it seems like these people were incredibly strange and maintained
34:55
Speaker 1: a presence that was almost not like any of us
34:58
Speaker 1: would live in a normal way.
35:00
Speaker 2: I mean, did you have any reporting on that?
35:03
Speaker 4: They were so terrified to speak on record.
35:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, I believe it.
35:07
Speaker 3: To a woman who saw several decisions when they were
35:11
Speaker 3: living in Half Moon Bay on a boat compound at
35:15
Speaker 3: that point. Now she was speaking with me, her husband
35:18
Speaker 3: pulled into the parking lot, like rushed over and he
35:21
Speaker 3: was like, did you give him your name? Did you
35:22
Speaker 3: give him your name? He was completely freaked out. She hadn't,
35:25
Speaker 3: by the way. And I wouldn't report it out if
35:28
Speaker 3: they wouldn't want me to. But that was like emblematic
35:31
Speaker 3: of like one example. There were so many other people
35:34
Speaker 3: who had things to say and then just were too
35:39
Speaker 3: afraid to be interviewed. In fact, when I was going
35:44
Speaker 3: to one of their secret hideouts, it was also to
35:47
Speaker 3: meet with the person who literally lived in the same building,
35:50
Speaker 3: but in the other complex.
35:54
Speaker 4: So they were separated only by a wall.
35:56
Speaker 3: And literally during the flight at that time from California
36:02
Speaker 3: to North Carolina, during those hours that I was in
36:05
Speaker 3: the air, by the time I got to the ground,
36:07
Speaker 3: I called that number. It was completely disconnected. So I
36:11
Speaker 3: didn't get to meet with that source ultimately in the end.
36:14
Speaker 3: But I was able to put together a story with
36:16
Speaker 3: people who were able to go on record or to
36:19
Speaker 3: provide information on background. And it's the most comprehensive telling
36:25
Speaker 3: of decisions. And regarding the media, there's been some reporting
36:30
Speaker 3: on this, yes, in places like New York Times and
36:32
Speaker 3: Washington Post and Seattle Times. However, what they all have
36:38
Speaker 3: in common is that they don't talk about how trans
36:43
Speaker 3: ideology influenced this group. So all of those homicides in
36:49
Speaker 3: their reporting are treated essentially as isolated cases of killing
36:54
Speaker 3: by an extremist group or a group accused of extremism.
37:01
Speaker 3: And if that's all you say in the story, that's
37:04
Speaker 3: not the complete story. In fact, it's a complete misreading
37:07
Speaker 3: of everything that we know about them based on their
37:10
Speaker 3: own writings.
37:14
Speaker 2: So, Andy, where do you want this to end up?
37:17
Speaker 1: What do you want the takeaways for the audience, people
37:21
Speaker 1: who pick up this book, who understand the intensity of
37:24
Speaker 1: this cult and Really, this effort for groups of people
37:30
Speaker 1: to remove themselves from reality, to remove themselves from science,
37:33
Speaker 1: to enter some sort of an artificial world based off
37:37
Speaker 1: of just nothing, really. I mean, just things that are
37:40
Speaker 1: all theoretical. It's a frightening thing when these things capture
37:44
Speaker 1: the imagination. So where do you want this to go?
37:46
Speaker 1: What kind of effect do you want this reporting to have?
37:49
Speaker 3: I dedicated this book to the victims of the Zizines
37:53
Speaker 3: who to.
37:54
Speaker 4: Date still haven't received justice.
37:56
Speaker 3: And I hope that people who get this book, read it,
37:59
Speaker 3: get a better understanding of the threat that we are
38:02
Speaker 3: facing from trans extremism. This wasn't what I thought would
38:07
Speaker 3: be the path that I would go in my reporting,
38:09
Speaker 3: but it literally hit me in the face through my
38:13
Speaker 3: reporting on Antifa. You and your viewers and listeners know
38:17
Speaker 3: of my many years of reporting on Antifa, and I've
38:21
Speaker 3: been attacked by them and nearly killed several times. And
38:26
Speaker 3: in my pursuit for justice in the civil courts, those
38:29
Speaker 3: that I sued for attacking me, half of them identify
38:34
Speaker 3: as trans. And when I saw that, it was just like,
38:37
Speaker 3: there's something going on. And then I was continuing to
38:40
Speaker 3: gather all of the names and mugshots of those who
38:44
Speaker 3: were getting arrested at the 2020 BLM Antifa riots. And disproportionately,
38:49
Speaker 3: those people were trans-identifying as well. And then in that time,
38:53
Speaker 3: since every year there's been mass shooting after mass shooting,
38:58
Speaker 3: killings after killings, parasite, that's the killing of one's parents,
39:02
Speaker 3: by people who are trans, and for the ones who
39:05
Speaker 3: don't kill themselves or who aren't killed in the process,
39:08
Speaker 3: when they give interviews to law enforcement, talk about how
39:12
Speaker 3: they took action because they were victims of transphobia by
39:17
Speaker 3: their parents or by this person or that person. And
39:20
Speaker 3: so my book documents all of these cases and makes
39:26
Speaker 3: the wider argument that we are really living through a
39:31
Speaker 3: feedback loop in America where institutions, governments, medicine, all that
39:37
Speaker 3: are providing all the variables for certain communities to radicalize
39:42
Speaker 3: into deadly violence.
39:45
Speaker 2: Remarkable stuff.
39:45
Speaker 1: The Zizians Inside, a trans death cult. The author, Andy Ngo,
39:49
Speaker 1: anything he does is worthwhile. This in particular, a big
39:54
Speaker 1: compliment to you on putting this together.
39:55
Speaker 4: It is riveting.
39:57
Speaker 2: It's horrifying.
39:59
Speaker 1: It's a great book for the spooky season.
40:01
Speaker 2: I mean, it's literally just some of the murder scenes
40:03
Speaker 2: are just beyond belief.
40:04
Speaker 1: So, Andy, I hope best of luck with the promotion
40:07
Speaker 1: of this because this is a story that does need
40:09
Speaker 1: to be told.
40:09
Speaker 2: So thanks for doing it.
40:11
Speaker 4: Thank you very much for having me on.