It’s a plot a fiction writer might reject as too far-fetched: A group of radical transgender vegans, convinced AI will take over the world, allegedly go on a homicidal spree that leaves eight dead, including a US Border Patrol agent and a key murder trial witness. But the Zizians, as they are called, are quite real. In his new book, “The Zizians: Inside a Trans Death Cult,” investigative reporter Andy Ngo explains the twisted ideology behind the group, and its links to the faddish beliefs of many in Silicon Valley. An excerpt:
In January 2016, Jack LaSota, a 23-year-old aspiring tech entrepreneur from Alaska, headed to Silicon Valley with big dreams.
Before that, he was an engineering student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, researching space weather events. But his passions veered elsewhere: video-game design, rationalism and effective altruism.
One of his creations was titled Dystheism, ancient Greek for “bad god.” It was a puzzle game where players controlled the souls of dead people represented by humanoid, single-horned, faceless creatures with crackled, black-burned flesh. Players navigated lost souls through block-puzzle landscapes of the afterlife.
His pitch: “This game will push your brain to the breaking point, just like your character’s soul.”
The imagery would later feel like foreshadowing.
Not long after Jack had begun coding Dystheism, his outward appearance began to change. He started wearing a long, hooded black cloak around campus. He would call it a “Sith” robe — the garb of the dark-side warriors in the Star Wars universe — but with the hood pulled forward, he resembled something more ominous.
Jack spent most of 2015 refining the game and applying for jobs in the Bay Area. His blog, Sinceriously, documented this period. He used an image of a purple-tinted, fantasy-style female humanoid spirit as his avatar.
“I moved to the Bay Area for proximity to the tech industry which I considered sort of my destiny,” he wrote. He believed he could “best contribute to saving the world” by donating his income to various causes.
In a 2022 court declaration, he elaborated, “All the smartest people I knew said there was a global emergency in the neglect of ethics and even care [for] the future by AI researchers.”
But life in the Bay Area proved difficult and demoralizing for Jack. He bounced between jobs, being fired or denied contract renewals.
It was during this period that LaSota began to absorb the ideas that have become popular among young tech workers today — beliefs he would warp into his murderous cult.
Jack adopted the alias Ziz, drawn from the fantasy web serial by John McCrae called Worm. He viewed himself as a savior, writing that he was “willing to go to Hell to save everyone else.”
But in the story, Ziz is a winged female monster that poses as benevolent while plotting humanity’s destruction. The abomination uses mass psychological manipulation to turn people homicidal or into walking time bombs who are later destructive.
Rationalism and Effective Altruism
With Jack’s life unraveling, he sought validation in Bay Area rationalist meetups — gatherings of high-IQ tech professionals, many on the autism spectrum, obsessed with abstract questions about artificial intelligence and humanity’s future.
Rationalism — loosely defined as the belief that reason, probability, and evidence can be applied to understand the world and optimize decision-making — functions in Silicon Valley like a secular megachurch, complete with conferences, workshops, social gatherings, internal debates, and even doomsday narratives.
Outsiders struggled to grasp it; insiders believed they were solving humanity’s most urgent problems.
Many young rationalists became involved in the movement through the forum and blog LessWrong, founded in 2009 by rationalist philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky.
By 2022, the forum had grown to thousands of members. They called themselves the “rat community.”
Yudkowsky, born in 1979, is widely regarded as one of the godfathers of contemporary rationalism. Raised in Chicago in an Orthodox Jewish family, he dropped out before starting high school and educated himself. His writings on epistemology, artificial intelligence safety (often called “AI alignment”), and transhumanism are so influential that critics sometimes describe his following as cultlike or quasi-religious.
To devotees — occasionally characterized as groupies — he is known simply as “Yud.”
The Bay Area’s rationalist community was disproportionately composed of STEM brainiacs — professors, engineers, start-up founders. They debated AI and how to save humanity from self-destruction, toggling in the span of a few sentences between Bayesianism, probability theory, timeless decision theory, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology, utilitarianism, and even Harry Potter fan fiction.
Bay Area rationalists were particularly drawn to debates over how to discover truths and how to systematically pursue goals derived from those truths.
For some, that meant earning money. For others, it meant solving intractable problems — poverty, pollution, war, even death.
Many rationalists expended extraordinary energy applying mathematical and probabilistic reasoning to abstract or seemingly trivial problems.
For instance, on EffectiveAltruism.org, the movement’s largest forum, there are more than 3,600 posts about “shrimp welfare.”
“350 billion shrimps are farmed each year,” reads one post. “This is 5x the total number of farmed land animals. Many shrimps reared in aquaculture suffer from conditions which can and should be addressed.”
Some, including high-profile AI tech executives, leaned toward “effective altruism” — the belief that rationality should maximize doing “good,” though how good is defined is subject to much debate.
Transhumanism and Transgenderism
In the Bay Area, technology and money fused into a culture that didn’t recognize limits. Extreme ideas were often rewarded.
For Ziz, he absorbed ideas about world-saving missions and ends-justify-the-means logic. In this atmosphere, concepts that once belonged to science fiction began to feel plausible, even inevitable. Transhumanism was one of them.
Transhumanism is the philosophy that technology can fundamentally improve — even transcend — what it means to be human. This transcendence may occur through genetic engineering, brain implants, “smart” prosthetics, or transgender medicine that alters the endocrine system.
Transhumanism and transgender ideology are distinct but overlapping movements. Trans activists reject the biological-sex reality, arguing that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries allow individuals to transcend the limits of sexed genetics.
One prominent transhumanist leader described as one of the founders of the trans rights movement is American billionaire Martine Rothblatt. Previously named Martin, the biotech entrepreneur helped draft the world’s first “International Bill of Gender Rights” template in the early 1990s.
Rothblatt served as CEO of satellite company GEOStar, cofounded SiriusXM satellite radio, and founded United Therapeutics. At various points in the 2010s, he was among the highest-paid executives in the United States and remains one of the wealthiest individuals in the country.
He also founded and leads the Terasem Movement Foundation, a multimillion-dollar transhumanist nonprofit with a charitable-giving division. In 2011, he authored “From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form.”
Rothblatt also funded an AI robot called Bina48, hoping that his wife, Bina, can live forever.
Rothblatt’s influence — often behind the scenes — has helped drive transgender and transhumanist ideology into law, media, medicine, and technology.
“Since the early 2000s the expansion of the LGB [lesbian, gay, bisexual] acronym to include “TQIA+” [trans, queer, intersex, asexual, plus] has shifted the cultural narrative from one centered on sexual orientation to one focused on deconstructing the biological sex binary,” said Jennifer Bilek, an author and journalist who investigates funding sources behind the gender industry.
“This shift, framed as a human rights movement, is heavily backed by vast financial interests, particularly among oligarchs invested in artificial intelligence, human augmentation, and the future of reproduction.
“Children are being indoctrinated with the idea that their reproductive systems are fluid, interchangeable, and technologically modifiable, paving the way for these systems to be commercialized.”
Ziz wrote that the idea of being trans “surfaced” to him around 2015, but he initially rejected it because it “would interfere with my ability to make money due to discrimination, and destroy too great a chunk of my tiny probability of saving the world.”
By 2016, he had reconsidered.
“Well, I’m a Sith now. I am going to do what I actually want to no matter what,” he wrote. “I really did think of myself as a woman. Despite putting basically no effort into transition, not passing at all.”
He began taking testosterone blockers and estrogen, later reporting “cognitive benefits.”
Over time, Jack’s transition merged with doctrine. He came to believe “transness” itself could be vital to saving the world
The Singularity
Underlying all these belief systems is a darker anxiety — one familiar from science fiction: “the singularity,” the prediction that computers will surpass human intelligence.
Some rationalists fear that advanced AI systems could evolve into a “Singleton,” a single dominant superintelligence controlling the future of humanity.
Not all rationalists view this future with fear. Many see the singularity as a moment of profound possibility — when previously unattainable ambitions could become achievable.
Transhumanist rationalists like Ziz argue that if AI can be aligned with human values, it could eventually unlock technologies allowing people to radically alter their biology — even transcend into new life-forms.
To address the risks, Yudkowsky founded the Berkeley-based Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) in 2000 and 2012, respectively. MIRI’s predecessor, the Singularity Institute, received funding from PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel. In 2023, Yudkowsky authored an open letter in Time magazine warning of end-times danger from AI.
“We are not ready,” he wrote. “We are not on track to be significantly readier in the foreseeable future. If we go ahead on this everyone will die, including children who did not choose this and did not do anything wrong.”
The Zizians
LessWrong, MIRI, CFAR formed the intellectual infrastructure of the Bay Area rationalist movement. Community hubs, such as Berkeley REACH (Rationality and Effective Altruism Community Hub), connected members in real life.
Those online networks attracted gifted, hyperfocused young people. Yet even within this experimental, insular, and competitive environment, Ziz stood apart.
For Ziz, discussion was not enough. Everyone had to be vegan and reject eating or harming all animals; otherwise you were “evil”. Transgender or non-binary people were more advanced and more likely to be part of the vanguard, he believed. Rationalists had to act now to shape AI before the singularity, otherwise the world would be destroyed.
His writings eventually attracted two dozen or so followers across the country — brilliant, mostly transgender, many autistic — all of whom rejected mainstream rationalism in favor of their own radical ideology.
While rationalism and effective altruism often transcended traditional politics — neither clearly left nor right and frequently attracting the apolitical or libertarian — the Zizians found such neutrality intolerable. Instead, they drew from the language of social justice, anarchist thought, and an increasingly simmering desire for vengeance.
In time, the cult would be linked to eight deaths, including a landlord they exploited, the parents of one of the members, and a US Border Patrol agent who got in their way.
In August, Maryland’s felony case against three members, including leader Jack “Ziz” LaSota, was suddenly suspended indefinitely for reasons that remain unclear. Ziz, however, was transferred to federal custody in Philadelphia to await a still-unscheduled trial over some of the damage wrought by the cult.
His twisted ideology lives on — not only among members who remain free, but among those who continue to be radicalized by his writings online.
Adapted from “The Zizians: Inside a Trans Death Cult” by Andy Ngo, out Tuesday from Center Street.