The original looksmaxxer who created our hell world

Who created the strongman hellscape that we’re currently living in? Today, we’re talking about the original looksmaxxer, Zyzz. He got his start online in 2006 with a popular World of Warcraft streaming account, whose earnings he used to join a gym, because he’d “always been obsessed with bodybuilding.” By 2010, he had amassed a huge following among outrageously jacked guys online. He finally figured out how to make money off this — by hawking supplements and other products — but then he passed away in 2011. However, by then he had laid the blueprint that the chads of the future would all follow. What happens next, is the world we live in now. Noah K of Crimes New Roman joins us to talk about the chads of the past, like Bloat Lord, Derb, and FPS Russia, and how these leading musclemen resulted in the big boys of the present, like Androgenic, Clavicular, and Zeta — and how they’ve managed to create a hell world of body dysmorphia for the nation’s young men. Our guest Noah K can be found on YouTube @CrimesNewRoman and you can also see their shitposts (their words) at https://bsky.app/profile/crimesnewroman.bsky.social. Note: This episode was recorded prior to Clavicular’s rape allegations. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonuses & exclusives, and access to our members-only Discord? Sign up for a membership at https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The wheel had roads, electricity had the grid. Innovation needs infrastructure. Plaid makes AI work in finance. Visit plaid.com/ai to learn more.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Workday. Workday is the enterprise AI platform for HR, finance and IT with a deep understanding of your organization's context and guardrails, giving you accuracy to not just get work done, but get it done right. It's a new Workday.

• 0:31Ryan Broderick?

  Before Clavicular, there was the top-ranked Chad of all time, a guy who created the entire nightmarish masculine bodybuilder, strong man hell world that we're currently trapped inside. And that man's name is of course, Ziz. And today, we're going to be talking about the legacy of Ziz and how he made every boy on the internet in the 2000s have severe body dysmorphia and probably, you know, changed the political course of American history.

• 0:57Speaker 03

  You're Myron, bro?

• 0:58Ryan Broderick?

  Come at me, bro.

• 1:03Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so who is your favorite? So to start things off, who's your favorite internet Chad right now?

• 1:09Speaker 03

  Right now, the androgynic guy, however you pronounce his, his name. It's really fascinating because despite being like very interwoven with people like Clavicular, he like gets a little woke on his Instagram sometimes, but then immediately like backs down in weird ways. And it's just really fascinating to try and predict what he's going to do next.

• 1:29Ryan Broderick?

  I too have noticed androgynics wokeness.

• 1:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it seems like he's kind of experimenting with like, how positive he can be about trans people, which is sort of interesting. I, I also get the sense that he's, he's the most sort of willing to go wherever the attention is. Like, I don't get the sense that he's like a hardcore radical as much. Like if, if he discovered that trans people really liked him, I think he would flip and just become like baby no money or like, you know, he would just sort of go full into whatever the audience wants him to be.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  100% like I, I saw a video of his the other day where he basically said something along the lines of like, oh, for a while I thought that the only thing that women worried about were how to get their, their next man or how to like, you know, look pretty. But actually that they worry about getting assaulted all of, all of the time. I was like, wow. Oh, okay. Which is weird because like, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think he's really hung out with people like Sneako or Andrew Tate like Clavicular has.

• 2:41Ryan Broderick?

  So, okay, my understanding of the Clavicular lore and the, no, okay. My understanding of the androgynic lore is that Clavicular was frame mogged in Scottsdale, you remember? Yeah. And after Clavicular was frame mogged by the ASU frat leader in Scottsdale, androgynic flew from Australia to Scottsdale, trying to find Clavicular to also frame mog him or at least frame mog the ASU frat leader. And then I think they finally linked up in Miami and androgynic and him sort of hung out a few times. And androgynic was there when Clavicular overdosed in Miami and was offering him an Adderall as he was having some kind of seizure.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. I remember that.

• 3:25Ryan Broderick?

  Just a guy trying to help. I'm going to say for our listeners, like if, if you're really put off by everything you've heard so far, like it's not really going to get better today.

• 3:34Ryan Broderick?

  But we are sort of going back in time and we're going to be talking about Chad's of a different era. But first, this is Panic World, a show about how the internet works our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. With me as always is my top-ranked Chad, Grant, and our guest today, another top-ranked Chad, someone who has mastered the art of looks maxing. From the YouTube channel Crimes New Roman, Noah K., welcome to the show.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Hello, hello. Thank you for having me on. Super excited to be here and mog both of you.

• 4:04Ryan Broderick?

  I hate to ask this because it's not a very sort of, you know, HR friendly question, but roughly, how old are you?

• 4:10Speaker 03

  I am 33 years old, like just turned 33.

• 4:14Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, we're in the kind of same age cohort. I'm 25, but like, yeah, we're basically sort of the same age. What's your earliest memory of not looks maxing? I think that's what it's called now. But what's your earliest memory of what I, I guess I would call like an internet Chad? Like a, like a big muscle man on the internet?

• 4:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, let's see. This is like a little bit of a weird answer, but like, one of the earliest like weird, tough masculine figures that I can kind of remember is FPS Russia. I don't know. I don't know if you guys know him. Like he does some weird shit happen and then he vanished. But I just like have still these like almost vivid hallucinations of this like Chad guy with like giant guns, just blasting them in the forest in a thick Slavic accent.

• 5:07Ryan Broderick?

  Kyle Lamar Myers, who goes by the name FPS Russ or FPS Kyle. I guess some people thought he died, but I guess, I don't think he, he didn't die, but the co-owner of his like gun fabrication company died or something? Yes, I vaguely remember all this. Okay, interesting, very interesting. We're today talking about the Chad that I remember as being the earliest, which as a spoiler, we're going to be talking today about Ziz. Not the Zizians, which is a cult that has been on our to-do list for this show for a long time, but we're talking about Ziz.

• 5:44Ryan Broderick?

  Before we get to Ziz, I would like to show you, there is a Chad, an internet Chad that I have sort of been obsessed with for a long time, who when I first discovered him, made me laugh so hard, I actually had to leave work for a while. Like I had to go take a walk. Have you, have you ever heard of the Bloat Lord?

• 6:06Speaker 03

  The Bloat Lord?

• 6:08Ryan Broderick?

  Bloat Lord?

• 6:09Speaker 03

  No.

• 6:12Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, hold on. So his real name, I'm going to try my best to pronounce this, is Kyriakos Kapakulak. He is a Greek bodybuilder. No, I would say he counts as a strong man here. Let me share, let me share my screen here.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  Oh, I've seen pictures of this guy.

• 6:32Ryan Broderick?

  He was dubbed the Bloat Lord by 4chan.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:37Ryan Broderick?

  He is insanely funny looking.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 6:41Ryan Broderick?

  I can't find the actual 4chan post that like kicked all of this off. But someone was like, you have to bloat yourself to increase sexual dimorphism between the sexes. And like this is peak male physique. I do think he's some kind of white nationalist.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  No.

• 7:05Ryan Broderick?

  Which would make sense. I mean, he was on 4chan and he's a Greek, he's a Greek muscle man. Um, but he also goes by the Grizzly. And yeah, when I first learned about his existence, I laughed so hard. I had, I had to go like take a walk around the block.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  I've, I've for sure seen pictures of him online and scattered places over the years, but I didn't realize that his moniker was the Bloat Lord. That's, that's insane.

• 7:34Ryan Broderick?

  And one of the earliest sort of like maxing suffix constructions I came across was bloat maxing.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  Bloat maxing. God, that's horrifying.

• 7:43Ryan Broderick?

  This would have been like 2000, uh, let's see. I can, I can tell you exactly when it was because I have the know your meme page for Bloat Lord up right now. He was discovered in 2018 by 4chan users who dubbed him the Bloat Lord. Another question for you, Noah. Are you familiar with the website that ranks Chad's?

• 8:02Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, I am.

• 8:03Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. Um, all right, I'm going to pull up some screenshots from the Chad ranking site and we're going to go through some of it. This is, by the way, listener, listener, this is all on the road towards Ziz, but I want to sort of establish first principles here. So Grant has them pulled up here. This is, this is the number one ranked Chad right now. And he goes by the name Zeta.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  Zeta.

• 8:26Ryan Broderick?

  And, and I'm going to read a bit of his, his bio here.

• 8:30Ryan Broderick?

  They also have tags.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  Genetic apex.

• 8:32Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, he's tagged with hunter eyes as well, which is interesting. I don't know what that means. Maybe like Hunter, Hunter Biden.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  You don't know what it means that he has hunter eyes? Look at his eyes.

• 8:40Ryan Broderick?

  I guess you're right. So, okay, according to, uh, according to top-ranked Chad's, the website that ranks all the Chad's, Zeta is an online personality who is part of the OG looks maxers, known for his perfect hunter eyes, glassy skin and high PSL rating. Uh, I have to remind myself what PSL means. Uh, unless you remember, Noah, do you remember what it means?

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Oh, is that just like the overall score that you have for the quality of your arranged features?

• 9:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Uh, oh, I'm sorry. No, okay. It's actually way more insane than that. It's, uh, it's an acronym for, okay, this is actually a really good way to get into this because.

• 9:25Ryan Broderick?

  All right, we're already moving all over the timeline here. We try to do our best to keep things chronological for simplicity's sake, but so the world that we live in now was created by basically three websites in the late 2000s, early 2010s. One of them was PUahate.com, and this was a message board for men who took pick-up artist classes, and they got mad that they felt like they were ripped off, and they would complain about it. Slut hate, which was sort of an offshoot of PUahate, and Lookism, which was sort of the earliest, like, it was one of the earliest hangouts online for like, men with like, severe body dysmorphia. PSL rating stands for PUahate, Slut Hate, and Lookism.

• 10:09Speaker 03

  Oh, that's what it's gotten, like, the rating is like, an amalgamation of like, everything related to those, basically?

• 10:16Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, because Slut Hate is a rebrand of PUahate. And so this rating is sort of, I mean, honestly, honestly, pretty useful to sort of combine, like, like an umbrella, like, an umbrella rating for like, men on the internet, like, kind of useful. So that's, so Zeta, according to his bio, has a perfect, or a very high PSL rating. I guess people are very conflicted about whether or not he has good genes, or if he had surgery, and people have accused him of mystery-maxing about this.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  Mystery-maxing, which I'm assuming means maintaining a high amount of obfuscation around whether or not he has actually had surgery.

• 10:57Ryan Broderick?

  And everything else in his life. I guess he's like a real, and that's probably why he's number one. You know, he's kind of got like, a tuxedo mask vibe. Kind of, you know, like, you don't really know much about him.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, he almost looks AI-generated, I'm gonna be real.

• 11:11Ryan Broderick?

  He does. This next guy, number two on the Chad ranking site, looks even more AI-generated. His name is V-Mog-Su, who, once again, is apparently very mysterious.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  He's my favorite.

• 11:24Ryan Broderick?

  This is your favorite boy? I think, yeah, I like, well, so, okay, a couple things. If you go over to his bio, he's described as a humble mogger, fascinating. And he also has a tag on it that says "true jester." So he's some sort of, he's like a humble jester.

• 11:42Ryan Broderick?

  And according to his bio, it says, "V-Mog-Su is a mysterious online personality who rose to fame for his amazing looks, but more specifically, his side profile. After being openly accepted in the looks-maxing verse, he started jester-maxing while dancing on camera, truly bringing to life the words 'Chad does what Chad wants.' He made the worst faces or grimaces on camera, and still the online community couldn't deny his greatness."

• 12:05Speaker 03

  I feel like I'm having a stroke trying, like, all of this. And I feel like this guy looks like all of the really, really, like, just like, extremely unhealthy anorexic models that you would see in the 90s. Like, like-

• 12:27Ryan Broderick?

  Dude, he looks like, he looks like a sick dog. He looks like someone's inbred, he looks like your grandmother's old inbred penal. That's what he looks like. Like, the dogs with the crusty eyes.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. I feel like I have seen multiple of this guy at, like, a convalescent house.

• 12:44Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, we got one more, we got one more top-ranked Chad for you. So this is, this next one's name is Derb.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  Derb. Let's fucking go. I'm ready for this.

• 12:54Ryan Broderick?

  And Derb, Derb is number, is the number three top-ranked Chad right now, as of June 11th, 2026. These change all the time. Derb.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  The golden boy? That's his, that's his, like, fucking tag, the golden boy?

• 13:12Ryan Broderick?

  He's the golden boy. So Derb is a social media influencer who is mainly popular on TikTok. He is part of the new gen aesthetics group, as he is often seen with Dorian Saras, Seracy, Sarassi, Hunter Davis, and ASU frat leader Veris. I know him. But fans are worried that he might be ghosting them as he recently met up with Hollow and Romulus, fully embracing his looks-maxer side.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  Say it ain't so.

• 13:40Ryan Broderick?

  So, okay, so he's friends with Hollow. I'm gonna look him up. Oh, okay, interesting. He was recently arrested for possession of child abuse material.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  Oh, good for him.

• 13:54Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, in May, he, he was, he was arrested for, for having child abuse material as to pure, I don't know, like, none of these guys really hold a candle to the bloat lord for me.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, they're, like, they all kind of look the same, to a certain degree, like, which is, which, you know, like, makes sense, because broadly speaking, a lot of, like, the ideal face that all of these guys want, like, if they could have the ideal face, they would basically all look the exact same.

• 14:23Ryan Broderick?

  I'm glad you brought that up, because, you know, we, we started with mentioning Clavicular, just for-

• 14:30Ryan Broderick?

  Hold on, I gotta share my screen. All right, so I was going over, I was going over to the top, the-

• 14:39Speaker 04

  I gotta say, while Ryan's, while Ryan's losing his shit, there's things on our outline that are marked, "Ryan, don't open this until the episode starts," so we get these moments.

• 14:48Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, hold on. Grant, don't share, I'm gonna put my screen in the theater, but don't share it yet, okay? I'll tell you when.

• 14:54Speaker 04

  Yes, top-ranked Chad.

• 14:55Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so, so I wanted to go over to the top-ranked Chad rankings, and, and talk about how, you know, interestingly enough, Clavicular is number, is the number four-ranked Chad. You know, he's never been number one, actually. And what I was curious about, and why I wanted to check, was I, I thought, oh, well, maybe Clavicular's botched nose job may have affected his Chad rankings. And so, okay, Grant, you can share the screen now. I went over to the official Chad rankings, and there's a widget at the top of the page that says, "Breaking news, Clavicular depressed," and it's all about how he went live the other day to talk about his nose job, and how it looks really bad, and how his career as a looks-maxer might be completely over.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  That's insane. I can't believe it. My goat is washed?

• 15:45Ryan Broderick?

  Like, he looks better, because he looks like a human for the first time.

• 15:48Speaker 03

  Oh, no, no, no, no, it's, hold on. The Clavicular nose job has, looks so bad. Oh, I haven't actually seen it. I gotta look that-

• 15:55Ryan Broderick?

  Hold on. Like, he, he realized on camera the other day that, like, he looks terrible. He looks awful.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  Oh, that looks not very good.

• 16:08Ryan Broderick?

  Take my word for me.

• 16:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:10Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, it's not great.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  It does not look good at all. Good lord.

• 16:14Ryan Broderick?

  Well, this is all, if you can believe it, dear listener, this is all set up for where we're going today. We're gonna be talking about the original looks-maxer, a Chad that was taken from us too soon. We're gonna be talking about Ziz. And before we go to a break, I want to get your sort of initial reactions, Noah, about Ziz. Are you familiar with Ziz? Is this ringing any bells?

• 16:35Speaker 03

  I'm not recognizing this guy from anywhere. I don't recognize the name. I think this, like, might be, like, some brand-new Chad that I've just straight-up never heard before, which is fascinating.

• 16:50Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, I'm excited. So, his name is Aziz, or Ziz Shavershian. He's from Australia, and he starts a YouTube account called Ziz, Z-Y-Z-Z, in 2006. And when he turns 18, he ends up selling, which is about a year after that, he sells his World of Warcraft profile for $500.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 17:14Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, if you're curious, he was a level 14 Terran warrior.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  That's pretty beta, but, you know.

• 17:21Ryan Broderick?

  I agree. But he uses that money, crucially, to buy a gym membership. Grant has a before photo for Ziz here. This is what Ziz looked like before he sold his World of Warcraft account to buy a gym membership.

• 17:35Speaker 03

  Damn, I got called gay in middle school all the time by dudes who looked like this.

• 17:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah. This was like, a type of guy. Like, this was absolutely a type of guy in the 2000s. I don't know if it still is. And before we go to the break, I want to read a quote from him about how he got started with bodybuilding and why. He, he said at the time, in an article published in simplyshredded.com, "Throughout high school, I was always an extreme ectomorph. I would eat anything and not put on fat, muscle, or weight, or so I thought. I was always fascinated with bodybuilding but lacked the motivation to start training hard until after I was done with my final year of school and exams were completed. It was time for a lifestyle change. I remember feeling like a little bitch when I was out with girls, walking next to them and clubbing the same size as them. And I started going clubbing every weekend and always noticed whenever a jackdude

• 18:24Ryan Broderick?

  walked by, they had a presence a lot greater than that of a normal person. The guys respect them, and the girls are all over them. And really, who wouldn't want that?" And we're gonna talk about what happens after Ziz fully leaned in to the world of bodybuilding, after a word from our sponsors. Maybe creatine, finally, for Grant? Maybe we finally have a creatine sponsor for this episode? I don't know. Let's see what happens.

• 18:47Speaker 04

  Look, I'm getting smaller. I need your help.

• 18:49Ryan Broderick?

  All of, all of Grant's creatine water weight is going away unless he can refill it with creatine.

• 18:54Speaker 03

  He's wasting away.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  The wheel had roads. Electricity had the grid. Innovation needs infrastructure. Plaid makes AI work in finance. Visit plaid.com/ai to learn more.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Workday. Guessing is for game shows, not your business, especially when your margin for error is zero. Workday is the enterprise AI platform for HR, finance, and IT, with a deep understanding of your organization's context and guardrails, so every AI action is permission-aware, giving you accuracy 24/7, and the ability to not just get work done, but get it done right. It's a new workday.

• 19:44Ryan Broderick?

  Noah, what were you up to on the internet in the 2000s? What was sort of your information diet, your digital ecosystem? What did that look like?

• 19:52Speaker 03

  So I was very much a lonely, lonely, stringy nerd that like had trouble socially. So I was on the internet in a lot of unpleasant places. I was on 4chan a lot eventually. And in my very dark days, I remember frequenting the website Funny Junk. If you guys remember that.

• 20:18Ryan Broderick?

  I remember Funny Junk, yeah.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  And then eventually like got into YouTube. I would say I had maybe like just brushing up the edge of the like early red pill incel type mentality because of like, you know, issues like growing up and home life shit and being bullied or whatever. I don't know, somebody who looks like me being bullied, shocking. And eventually I like kind of grew out of my like edgy 4chan type phase after I slowly realized that women were people and I was bisexual. So, you know.

• 21:00Ryan Broderick?

  That would help a lot, yeah.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  Good things do happen over time to people.

• 21:04Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, you sort of touched on this dynamic, but it's one that I think has actually kind of been forgotten, which is that there were radicalized, you know, toxically masculine spaces on the internet. But there was also sort of a layer that is now almost gone, I think. You know, when I came across pick up artists, I came across it via someone who looked and sounded like me making fun of that stuff.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:31Ryan Broderick?

  Same with bodybuilders, like, but I knew of bodybuilding.com because of the something awful threads making fun of it. That layer, I think, has kind of been demolished because of concerted efforts from the right wing over the last like 15 to 20 years. So you don't have that like slightly more functional nerds making fun of even dumber, weirder nerds kind of thing.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. I feel like now a lot of the time, like when something is being like highlighted or made fun of or mocked, a lot of it is just from like the other side of the aisle, which I think is like part of the broader disintegration of like the center in basically every aspect of culture.

• 22:15Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, there's, there's definitely, there's like a change that happens at some point between Occupy Wall Street and Gamergate, where the, the wider nerd world, let's call it, is sort of bifurcated into Tumblr and 4chan types of communities that don't really have an overlap. And, you know, I think there's a lot of different reasons for why that ends up happening, but it does happen and it kind of creates this world where a guy like Ziz can't really exist anymore. And to prove that, let me read you another quote from Ziz that I think is really hard to imagine someone like Kavikular saying today. So he's asked by, again, by simply shredded.com.

• 22:58Ryan Broderick?

  I should just say, I find extremely muscular men really funny. And like, there's just nothing to me that's like funnier than like an outrageously jacked guy. Like, I think the whole culture is dumb and really funny. And like getting through this episode is really tough for me. There's a Malcolm in the Middle episode where Hal adopts like an army of muscle men. And I think about it all the time. I just think it's so funny.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  Yes, I've seen that, yeah.

• 23:24Ryan Broderick?

  Simply shredded.com says, what's your favorite quote? And Ziz says, obsessed is a word the lazy use to describe the dedicated, which kind of goes hard, actually.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  Based?

• 23:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, what's funny about that?

• 23:37Ryan Broderick?

  No, that's, that's not funny. The idea of like-

• 23:39Speaker 04

  Sounds like a guy who never clocks in.

• 23:40Ryan Broderick?

  An in-depth interview on simply shredded.com is really funny to me.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  I feel like that's something Elon Musk would say.

• 23:49Ryan Broderick?

  I think, yeah, but so you know what? If Elon Musk looked like Ziz, I would feel differently about it, you know?

• 23:54Speaker 03

  True.

• 23:55Ryan Broderick?

  Like, yeah. And that, because Ziz looks like an actual Final Fantasy character, but-

• 24:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. People in Gait Horn.

• 24:03Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, he also looks like, well, yeah, I said Final Fantasy character.

• 24:06Speaker 03

  True.

• 24:08Ryan Broderick?

  So he then goes on to say, my end goal is not to be some masked up freak, but rather to have a physique that can be looked at as art, streamlined, tapered, and universally appealing. And then he's asked, what's your training philosophy? You know, what about your philosophy of life? This is the simply shredded.com asking this.

• 24:32Ryan Broderick?

  Ziz says, definitely. Personally, I'm a very friendly and happy person and believe that people need to lighten up and enjoy life more. Even though I put on a lot of size and to some look intimidating, I'm one of the friendliest people you can meet, which I think is like really lovely and like, and like feels just like very innocent, looking back on it 15 years later, 20 years later.

• 24:55Speaker 03

  Looking in the past and like reading some of like, you know, like early like man influencer texts and ideology, like there's this infamous book called Iron John in the 90s by Robert Bly, which is like kind of the surmounting text of the men's mythopoeic movement. Like, it has a lot of this like really like fluffy, like warrior coded language, but at the core of it, it's just about like being like a kind of a well-rounded, nice person, like being in community with people and engaging in like mentorship, like presented in these really toxic ways. And I feel like over time, probably, at least when I noticed it, I'm glad you brought

• 25:37Speaker 03

  up Gamergate, because that's probably about when I would say, like, that was such a massive cultural moment where so many different things were coalescing, like things were getting more radical. A lot of men were pulled into what was ostensibly this big misogynistic, like borderline proto fascist movement of like being able to be terrible people because you think you have a just cause. And I think a lot of people have like slowly come to believe that like they have a just cause to act like this because it is beneficial to them as society has, you know, slowly

• 26:21Speaker 03

  drawn more and more to collapse. That kind of starting point with Gamergate and then just everything happened after it has like slowly pushed dudes to be more and more just abundantly selfish in how they view the world and like not left room for that kind of empathy. Like, it's why empathy as a concept is like mocked in so many circles. Like in my last big video I did, like I talk about how these dorks online who just harass people for a living, make fun of empathy constantly. It's like a meme. It's crazy.

• 26:51Ryan Broderick?

  You sort of, you sort of triggered this thought in me that I, I have never actually kind of like followed through with, and it's, okay, I'm going to try my best to describe this, because there were a bunch of different kinds of guys. And like the jacked guys and the 4chan guys were largely not the same kind of guys. There was the fit board on 4chan, but it was like, before Gamergate, there was like this sort of self-loathing, like, and you know, you went into those spaces being like, you're watching guys sort of perform self-loathing and it's entertaining and it's funny.

• 27:31Ryan Broderick?

  And post-Gamergate, all of those kinds of guys have sort of found a way to become the same kind of guy.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 27:41Ryan Broderick?

  So like, you know, I'm looking at the comments on Ziz's bodybuilding.com profile. And they're, they're amazing. I mean, so you have this one guy who says, just read through your past threads. You're the fucking king mate, but seriously awesome transformation. Another guy says, your pictures are awesome. Keep up your hard work and keep posting your progress. Another guy says, looking ripped dude, how much do you bench? And then there's this one guy who wrote, hey, man, love that chest pecs and those nipples, dude. You are one hot, well, bit built dude. Ever think about piercing those nipples? I did. It is awesome, man. They are more sensitive and look great. Email me and I'll tell you about the process.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Mike, my fucking goat, holy shit.

• 28:25Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 28:28Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that's awesome. That's so good. All of that, though, is just like- Impossible to imagine now. It gets impossible to imagine people talking to each other this way about something like this. Yeah, there is a change and it doesn't happen immediately. I mean, just for timeline sake, like 4chan creates the fitness board, Fit, in 2008. But that's not when this went away. Like, there's some, there's like something else that happened. And I don't, I don't totally know what it was.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  I feel like one thing I've noticed over time is the shift in, like, basically what I can only describe as like, lolcow-ism, like, the constant desire, like, it almost feels like the shift of a lot of content as a whole. And like, you know, I have made content about people, calling them like weird dork losers. So like, I understand this, like, there is so much desire to listen to somebody not talk about like, themselves and their life or like, things in specifically, have people talk about how terrible or bad somebody else

• 29:36Speaker 03

  is. And I feel like that's what so much content on like, all sides of the spectrum is about. Like, even if it isn't like, an exceedingly negative way, it's so much commentary on other parts of the internet and other people, rather than someone's like autonomous life or journey. Like, it isn't, it isn't a matter of like uplifting people through like positivity, it's about like, basically making yourself feel better by dragging other people down.

• 30:06Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I stumbled across like, some data that I need to sort of look further into, but it's a theory of mine that I can't get out of my head, which is that sort of troll culture is actually an economic byproduct. And I came across like, these reports sort of around the rise of NEETS in Japan. And what everything I was reading was sort of arguing that the not in education, I never remember this acronym, there's like so many takes of me on this, on this show, like, forgetting what it stands for. Not in education, employment or training. And, and I was looking at the history of 2chan, which is sort of

• 30:51Ryan Broderick?

  the precursor to 4chan in Japan. And it was all based around like, that recent story about diner goths. Do you remember this?

• 31:00Speaker 03

  No.

• 31:02Ryan Broderick?

  It was like this big piece from like, some weird right wing mag that appeared out of nowhere, sort of going like, why does everyone in the Midwest have tattoos and look like they go to like anime conventions now? And sort of like gawking at that? And why do they have like, no prospects? And why are they all sort of weird internet freaks now, just in like flyover states? And like, this thing that I kept coming up against was like, if you look at historical moments of like, peak online, let's call it lolcow-ism or troll culture or whatever, it does seem to sort of mirror economic downturns. But that doesn't totally explain why America had such a massive influx of it at the end

• 31:46Ryan Broderick?

  of the Obama administration. Like, you're right, there's like a hatred, or like a bucket of crabs feeling that has like, become only more of a permanent feature of the American social media landscape in the last 15 years. And it doesn't totally line up to the Great Recession, but like, there's something, there must be some other cause. Like, I have to believe that there's some other cause.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I like, I, I, I find that fascinating, because like, I've also like, wondered vaguely, similar things, like, when people are like, in these exceedingly dire economic straits, combined with like, you know, the impending acceleration and rise of fascism in the post Obama era, people lash out because of these, of this like, hyper-liberal, like, individualist, like, indoctrination that we basically all had, that like, we should never like, help, like, it's all on me to like, pull myself up, blah, blah, blah. And if something is wrong, it's somebody else's fault. Like, I am the perfectest, specialist,

• 32:53Speaker 03

  smartest little guy. And I, I'm not doing anything wrong. Like, it's somebody else who's fucking my life over, you know? It's like, the, all the MAGA people who are like, oh, it's the immigrants who were, who were taking, taking my job and taking things, when it's actually the billionaires, the president who are, who are doing that.

• 33:11Ryan Broderick?

  You can kind of see the beginnings of that with Ziz, to bring us back to the muscle man du jour. By 2010, he's built a following on bodybuilding.com and 4chan. The Fit Board is obsessed with him. He, you know, he's on YouTube, doing like memes to the camera, like, for 4chan users. He's like, he's using like, old looks Maxer language, like, you my, his big thing was you Myron, bruh? As in, are you admiring?

• 33:41Speaker 03

  I remember that. Oh, man, that's vintage.

• 33:43Ryan Broderick?

  We should bring that one back. He also is like, answering questions on bodybuilding message boards, like this one I have here, which says, how much attention did you get before working out? And, and this is sort of a deeper look into his psychology here. He says, none. I never hooked up with a girl till after I finished school. Yes, strong loser. Never cared about the way I looked, did my hair, etc. But that's because I had no self-confidence. As soon as I started going to the gym, my confidence skyrocketed, and I have no trouble approaching or talking to any girl. And most of the time, they come up to me, seriously. One thing really stands out to me, and I'm wondering if you noticed this. So like, there's, this is, this is like fairly typical, I think, for how looks

• 34:26Ryan Broderick?

  Maxers talk now, in a lot of ways. But there's no sell. He's not selling anything. So he's able to say like, it got better for me. There's, there's a way to actually escape this. Here's how I did it. But because the internet didn't provide him a way to directly monetize his bodybuilding via live streams, or, you know, Andrew Tate style sex trafficking, or whatever the hell. He's actually just sort of like, even though he's sort of talking like an incel here, he's just earnestly like, yeah, my life got better. And like, there's no, there's no upsell there. Like, I'm not trying to do anything beyond just tell you about it. Which is, like, again, like, impossible to imagine now.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, like, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm sure you've seen clips of Clavicular, like, saying how like, everything he does, like, he feels pointless if he isn't streaming and monetizing, like, every aspect of his life, while, while, like, on camera doing stuff. He has his courses and everything. But like, here we are seeing a time where, you know, it wasn't about selling a course, or linking your dropshipping site, or doing something. Like, this was a legitimate group of, albeit guys with flawed logic, still trying to earnestly, like, improve the lives of themselves and provide encouragement for other people, outside of a purely enrichment vehicle for them.

• 35:51Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. And I should be clear, Ziz was not really a good person, especially to women. Here's an example, I'll pull, I'll pull it up. It's, so this is, these are leaked Facebook messages between him and a woman, where she says, like, when are you taking me out? And he goes, never, Elwell. And he says, I don't take out sluts, I just fuck them. You're a seven out of 10 at best. You're a lucky guy like me, would even put his dick in you. And I don't need to read the rest of this. But it's, that's, like, this is all very typical of the time. He's videotaped a lot, videotaped, that sounds so old, but he's like, filmed a lot at like, music festivals, talking to girls, he's leaking their Facebook messages to him.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:35Ryan Broderick?

  Going through this, you can kind of see the beginnings of this stuff. And it is like, interesting that like, it is getting darker, both with the more attention he's getting from 4chan, and the more handsome he's becoming, and the more popular he's becoming. You get, it is sort of a, kind of a corruption of the soul, sort of process we're watching here.

• 36:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, like, you know, to be clear, I don't think any of these guys like, good people. But I do think there is a level of earnesty, like, that they have in, like, wanting to improve themselves and provide legitimate advice for other people, even if they're like wildly misogynistic and do a bunch of other things on the side.

• 37:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And we, we had talked about the monetization thing. And so while the internet really hadn't picked up with, you know, it wasn't the internet of today, where you could open up a TikTok account, or a Kickstarter, or whatever, you know, or, you know, start hawking peptides. He, he did start to try to monetize this by 2011. He gets popular enough, he, that he, like, he can get, you know, brand deals, he's 22 years old. And so he becomes, he offers like, individual personal training. He has a clothing line, which we couldn't find any pictures of, unfortunately, but I'm sure it's fucking awful. Hold on, I, I, okay, I can't find any official images of Ziz's clothing line. But for our purposes

• 37:54Ryan Broderick?

  today, let's imagine it looks something like this, which is one of my favorite photos of the 2000s.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  Oh, yes. I remember, I remember this. Oh, that's so fire, dude.

• 38:06Ryan Broderick?

  I think, I think this is like, such a, so, okay, for audio only listeners, this is a photo that was taken, like, easily like, 20 years ago. It's four guys in tank tops. One says, and the tank tops all have giant, like, neon block letters written on them. And one says, all I do is fuck and party. The other one says, show me your tits. The other one says, party with sluts. The other one says, let's get fucking weird. And they're wearing little bow ties. And they're wearing like, neon hats that say rage on them. And they all have like, neon shorts.

• 38:34Speaker 03

  I feel like I need to, to cover my drink, just having this on screen right now. Like, it is, it is really, really bad.

• 38:42Ryan Broderick?

  All these guys are vice presidents at JP Morgan right now.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:46Ryan Broderick?

  Look for our next merch drop.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 38:47Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, man, we should do like, neon millennial tank tops.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 38:51Ryan Broderick?

  That'd be really funny. All I do is, all I do is fuck sluts and listen to the world.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  Be so bad.

• 38:58Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, yeah. Okay.

• 38:59Speaker 04

  All I do is.

• 39:00Ryan Broderick?

  All I do is eat creatine and.

• 39:02Speaker 04

  Write, write us, let us know what should be on our, our day glow.

• 39:05Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, our gym, our.

• 39:06Speaker 04

  Panic World shirts.

• 39:07Speaker 03

  You should, you should have a shirt or a hat or something that says, I got mugged on Panic World.

• 39:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that's really good. Okay, a bit of an aside, but kind of appropriate here. I learned the other day that on the Jersey Shore, I guess Mike the Situation, Sorrentino, whatever his name is, admitted this later. When they said gym tan laundry, the laundry was code for cocaine, which is why on the show he would always ask, how many girls are we getting tonight? And then they would give him a number and then he would go, I'm going to go do gym tan laundry. And the laundry, he would take the number of girls they told him and convert that into bags of cocaine.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  That's fire, dude.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  That's some good math. That's actually, that's.

• 39:44Ryan Broderick?

  I think, I think that's legit. I have to do more research on it. I saw that pop up the other day. And so, uh, let's, let's imagine that's real, just in case it isn't. Um, okay. So back to Ziz, he has an ebook out called Ziz's Bodybuilding Bible, which according to Goodreads, has a, oh, almost a, almost a perfect rating, four, 4.18 stars in the top comment.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  How many reviews?

• 40:08Ryan Broderick?

  Um, nine reviews.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 40:11Speaker 04

  Uh, but. All for me. I live by.

• 40:12Ryan Broderick?

  But 50 ratings.

• 40:13Speaker 03

  Oh, 50 ratings. Wow. Okay.

• 40:15Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Uh, the most recent one in 2021, I'm sorry, the top, the top rating right now is from someone named Leif who wrote in 2021, Ziz is a man that needs an introduction and aesthetic god and one of the most influential people in the online culture and community relating to bodybuilding and the aesthetics oriented inside of that took it to new heights, inspired millions to train and live fast and died young. Well, that's a bit of a spoiler for today's episode. In living a life related to partying hard, training hard, and then, and, and taking tren and kicking ass.

• 40:49Ryan Broderick?

  Tren would be steroids, correct? And trenbolone, an anabolic steroid. Yeah. Um, and then he says that this book is a good introduction and primer to bodybuilding, although apparently it is a bit dated. Um, okay. And, uh, then he also, Ziz, Ziz also started selling protein powder called Protein of the Gods, which costs $36, which would be $50 today with inflation for one kilogram. And, uh,

• 41:21Ryan Broderick?

  so I guess we should, we should finish this, uh, now before we go to our next break. Uh, in 2011, Ziz dies.

• 41:28Speaker 03

  Rip.

• 41:29Ryan Broderick?

  He had just figured out how to monetize this. The internet had sort of just caught up to what he was doing. And he suffered a heart attack while on a vacation in Thailand while visiting a spa. I, uh, the, the story I always heard was like, he had a heart attack in like the sauna and he died. Uh, but it wasn't due to taking a shitload of tren and training really hard. It's actually because he had a congenital heart defect he didn't know about.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  How, how old was he at this time?

• 41:53Speaker 04

  22.

• 41:54Ryan Broderick?

  So he was 20, yeah, 22 years old, almost 23.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  That sucks.

• 41:58Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, but because he died so young, um, and kind of like right as he was getting started, he has become something much larger, uh, in sort of the, the consciousness of the, the online bodybuilding world. And we're going to talk about the legacy of Ziz and how it leads to the top ranked chats of today, right after a word from our sponsors, trenbolone, an anabolic steroid that I'm sure is perfectly safe to take in huge doses.

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• 43:11Ryan Broderick?

  Like, what, what do you think that, you know, sort of became of his, uh, his, his legacy?

• 43:15Speaker 03

  Let's see. There's, there's really only like a couple of options. Either he is completely forgotten about and lost time, which I, I don't, I don't necessarily think is the case. Or, um, people have presumably like kind of emblazoned him in their memory and presumably taken a bunch of wild shit he's done, maybe, and maybe like accelerated or amplified it or taken it out of context to, to, to turn him into like some sort of like god or deity, uh, in a way that like exists outside of the actual sphere that he operated in.

• 43:55Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, he, he kind of ended up writing the playbook for everything in a way. Like, you know, the, the earliest, you know, selections from this world that we, we talked about today, they're very innocent. It's a lot of guys online being like, cool gains. I love your nipples. You should pierce them, stuff like that, normal stuff like that. And then it gets, you know, darker, you know, he's, he's using his fame to, you know, brag about, you know, tormenting women and he's just figuring out how to monetize this newfound fame right when he dies. He also has a ton, he has a ton of writing around the web that I think, you know, if you look at it now, you can kind of see that this creates the blueprint for everything that comes after.

• 44:36Ryan Broderick?

  So he's asked in an interview, uh, what his philosophy on nutrition was. And this is going to sound like I pulled it from RFK yesterday. So he says, no fast food, no soft drinks, no sweets or sugar, only fluid you shall drink is water and green tea. I have never counted calories. I just make sure I get a good amount of protein in every meal and have around seven or eight separate meals a day. As this ignites the metabolism, basically to put on meat, you have to eat meat, chicken breast, steak, lamb, kangaroo. He was a, he was Australian. Uh, and if you don't love these already, you will learn to. Then they, he, they asked him, when you're trying to cut down, do you prefer to use, uh, HIIT or just normal cardio? HIIT, I believe is some sort of workout routine. Is that correct?

• 45:19Speaker 04

  High intensity interval training.

• 45:21Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, yeah. Uh, and he says neither. If you have your diet a hundred percent, you don't even have to look at the treadmill, um, which I think is right. I think that's totally right. Um, most.

• 45:30Speaker 04

  Jesus Christ.

• 45:30Ryan Broderick?

  Most like really strong, beautiful men like don't do cardio. Um, and he was also on a like rotating cocktail of steroids that is off, that he would often refer to. Well, okay, he denied, uh, he denied that he was on steroids, but he would often talk about riding bicycles, which is a term for like cycling through a bunch of different steroids. He also had like people close to him admit like he was on a lot of steroids. He becomes this like larger than life figure. There are, uh, we found at least eight different tribute pages to him on Facebook that's, that popped up like the year after he died.

• 46:10Ryan Broderick?

  All of his different fit, like message board posts, basically kind of continued on forever. Like, you know, he, he is the reason you mad and you mad bro became a thing. He also come, came up with come at me, bro. Like he used the term Myron, like that comes from him.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 46:33Ryan Broderick?

  Um, like he was kind of a prolific poster in this really, really fascinating way. I think this comic I have here, I'm gonna share my screen, is kind of the best way to, to process his legacy. So this is, uh, on Tumblr, uh, on Tumblr and it's a comic. Uh, so the first one is like a green text soy jack guy. That's like that feel no GF. And then someone says, you just want to be a sad C word. I'm not Australian, so I'm not gonna say it. Bro, fuck that shit, bro. You're a fucking sick C word if you want to be. And then the soy jack guy is like, you left us. And he starts crying and then it's.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  Oh my God.

• 47:16Ryan Broderick?

  It's a cartoon of Ziz hugging him and he says, we're all gonna make it, brah. Yeah, it's, it's good stuff.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  I've, I've, I swear I've read Yahweh with that exact same panel progression. Like that's crazy.

• 47:31Ryan Broderick?

  Wait, Yowie?

• 47:32Speaker 03

  Yowie.

• 47:33Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. Uh, yeah. I thought you said Yahweh, like, like the Old Testament God.

• 47:38Speaker 03

  No, not the, not, although it would be way more, way more interesting if, if that was, that was an end to Torah or something like that.

• 47:45Ryan Broderick?

  That would be very interesting. Um, and so, yeah, like, like if he had died a little earlier, I don't think he would have had the same impact. Uh, in the same way that I had this theory that like little peep died just too early and then Machine Gun Kelly cannibalized his career and sort of ruined the ascendantness of emo trap in a lot of ways and kind of fucked it all up. Whereas like, like if you, if you die a little too early, your thing kind of dies with you. But Ziz like had just sort of mapped out like everything you could do with this and then died, uh, which I think is really crucial.

• 48:20Speaker 03

  That's, that's a good point. Do you think like, like that's part of the reason why somebody like Juice WRLD? When, when, when he passed away, like he's had a much more enduring legacy than Lil Peep because of, of, of when he died? Yeah, that's.

• 48:35Ryan Broderick?

  I think the same thing with Sophie too.

• 48:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, Sophie, rip the goat.

• 48:39Ryan Broderick?

  Not, not to compare Ziz to Sophie, but like, I think, I think if you are sort of at the fore, I think if you're at the forefront of a cultural or artistic movement and you, if you crack it, if you, if you're like, okay, like this is how you do this. And you die, you kind of become the pinnacle of it and it sort of, you sort of loom over it. And if you don't crack it, like it sort of splinters into a million different directions. Ziz had just figured this out, like you can become a famous strong man on the internet. And then there's an entire industry of like, you know, male improvement shit that you can latch on to.

• 49:21Ryan Broderick?

  And you can post on the internet and people will take it really, really seriously. And that is basically what clavicular and all the rest are doing now. The only, the only real innovation that I've seen in this space is the Andrew Tate sort of like, sex trafficking, like OnlyFans management stuff where like even clavicular is like signing, quote unquote, OnlyFans models. I don't know if people know about this, like he's done live streams where he's like, just signed a new girl and he's making his money from quote unquote managing like seven or eight OnlyFans models. And that's like a passive income source for him, but other than that, everything he's doing is figured out first.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  Like there isn't a lot of innovation because there really isn't like any thing to point to. Like there isn't like a new direction for them to go. It's like the same like hyper individualist, like very capitalist mindset that has basically been the exact same thing for like decades and decades at this point. Like there isn't like a vision for men to point to because they're so busy like trying to basically get to the top of this very limited structure to basically be the guys on top. That's why like there are so many like dog shit, like gendered products that exist like dude wipes

• 50:44Speaker 03

  or gamer subs or man cereal. I don't know if you guys see man cereal, but that shit's fucked crazy.

• 50:49Ryan Broderick?

  Finally, cereal for men.

• 50:52Speaker 03

  Hold on.

• 50:53Ryan Broderick?

  Do you have some?

• 50:54Speaker 04

  Wow, I love this buildup. This is, this rocks.

• 50:57Speaker 03

  I have.

• 50:57Ryan Broderick?

  Is it good?

• 50:58Speaker 03

  It's fucking horrible.

• 51:00Ryan Broderick?

  I bet. I bet it tastes like fucking dog food.

• 51:01Speaker 03

  It's so bad.

• 51:02Speaker 04

  What's the protein count in it though?

• 51:04Speaker 03

  The more important question that I want to ask you guys is how much do you think a box of this is?

• 51:08Ryan Broderick?

  Thirty four ninety nine.

• 51:10Speaker 03

  Honestly, pretty close. A box of this is $20.

• 51:14Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I believe it. I believe it.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  It tastes like garbage and they, they, uh, come on camera, come on camera. But it says sweet, smoky and sigma as the descriptors.

• 51:27Ryan Broderick?

  I don't want smoky cereal. Uh, just, just for the, for the audio only listeners. Noah is holding up a box of cereal that is titled man cereal and it has, it just looks awful.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  I, yeah, this is what the next big video I'm, I'm working on is about a big deconstruction of modern masculinity through man cereal and it's fucking horrible. But I could talk about it for hours. So, so don't.

• 51:52Ryan Broderick?

  How savory is the man cereal?

• 51:54Speaker 03

  So.

• 51:55Ryan Broderick?

  Like, could I, could you put hot sauce on it?

• 51:57Speaker 03

  I don't think any condiment would improve it at all. Like.

• 52:00Ryan Broderick?

  Not even like barbecue sauce?

• 52:01Speaker 03

  The maple bacon is like, it's, it's super weird because it starts out with like a nice little hint of maple, which I was like, ooh, this is actually quite nice. And then the bacon part like hits you like a freight train at the end and it's like you're eating dog food. Like it is so horrible. Like I, I, I wouldn't want to mix it with anything or else I feel like I'd legitimately throw up.

• 52:22Ryan Broderick?

  A year or two ago, I like got really serious about, yeah, like, like nutrition. Cause I was like working from home and I wasn't going to a lot of places and I was like really out of shape. So like, I started like a yoga and calisthenics routine and I tried to like fix up my diet because I was spending a lot on delivery and I was like, I can cook. Like, why not just like learn how to do this? And what I was so, what I continue to be so confused about are the bodybuilders on the internet that don't season their food. Like seasoning has no nutritional value. You could take that chicken breast and absolutely blast the shit out of it with like paprika, salt and pepper at the very least. If you want to get crazy, some garlic powder, some onion powder, just like fucking massage that shit. Let it soak a little bit of like heart healthy olive oil. You can do that, but they don't.

• 53:06Ryan Broderick?

  They like hurt themselves and punish themselves for, and eat dog food. And I don't understand why. Like I just, I can't wrap my head around it.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Like, like in the entire aesthetic of like the ideal man, it is fundamentally like anti whimsy, like anti joy. Cause it's so utilitarian. Like if you look at the like male living space images where it's like an empty room with a TV on the floor and like a chair meant for outside that is in the middle of your, of their living room. Like, like it is a form of like, like they think they're being utilitarian and minimal, like they, they think that like they don't need anything else. This is how the ideal man should live. Very like weird, like stoicism, minimalism vibe.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  But they're just torturing themselves because that's what like, what they think they have to do to perform as a man. Like me as a man, wearing my little, little earrings and having my little stuffed cat and like doing all that shit. Like that is anti man because it's dainty utilitarian and it, I, it just makes me feel bad for these guys.

• 54:15Ryan Broderick?

  It makes me feel really sad. I, I came across a Sam Hyde clip like this morning. He's a failed chud comedian.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  Believe me, I'm very familiar with Sam Hyde.

• 54:26Ryan Broderick?

  Right wing comedian. Um, he's the one that always, for listeners, he's the one that always gets misidentified as school shooters because his fans are as awful as he is. Um, and he has this like viral clip going around. The quote from it is him saying, if you are not always burdened, you are not a man. And he's basically him for like 35 seconds arguing that like feeling any kind of joy or happiness is inherently gay and unmasculine and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it is sort of like.

• 54:54Speaker 04

  And he's a comic? His job is to make people laugh?

• 54:57Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, I mean, he's a, he's not, he started as a comedian with an adult swim show and he got canceled because he kept hiding a bunch of like MAGA 1.0 memes in it. And like, then he got, he got fired from that and he's sort of just like been circling the, the drain of culture ever since. But that is a perfect distillation of what you're talking about Noah, where it's like any form of happiness. It's, it's not that these guys can't be happy. Actually it's that any form of happiness that's not derived from the suffering of others, like makes them uncomfortable because it, there's no power to be taken.

• 55:34Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 55:35Ryan Broderick?

  It's all about power. So it's like, I can, they can feel happy if they're tormenting someone else. But if they can't find a way to feel happy while, while feeling powerful, they would rather feel miserable.

• 55:46Speaker 03

  Yes. It, it goes back to like there, these people's aversion to even the idea of empathy. Cause it's seen as a form of weakness and unnecessary emotion. It like, it, I, I, it was bell, bell hooks. We talked about how like, like men's like anger is a resource essentially. And that is what a lot of these guys are capitalizing on is the anger that all of these guys have from sometimes like legitimately like reasonable things, just from how society is constructed. And then however, they're finding these communities that are instead of teaching them how to like think more broadly

• 56:28Speaker 03

  and distill that anger and like better themselves in, in a, a, a healthy way. That anger is now a currency that they can use to make themselves feel better by the meeting other people.

• 56:42Ryan Broderick?

  I, that's a hundred percent right. And, and to, to finish our story today and sort of like loop it all the way back. I did not realize this. This was actually something that our, our, um, our researcher Adam figured out, which I think is maybe the first time I've seen anyone mention this.

• 57:01Ryan Broderick?

  There's a massive, massive uptick in interest in Ziz, according to Google Trends during the pandemic.

• 57:09Speaker 03

  Huh.

• 57:09Ryan Broderick?

  We don't, we don't have the exact reason why, like we haven't figured out exactly why, but I can, I can definitely make an hypothesis here, which is TikTok weirdly, when it was still run by ByteDance and sort of running on ByteDance's original algorithm,

• 57:25Ryan Broderick?

  kept having this sort of like eternal September problem where like very old internet content would sort of resurface on TikTok as sort of like Gen Z kids sort of shared it. Nikle chicken is like a very good example of this, but there's a lot of these, right? Where it's like an old internet thing and TikTok users sort of just discover it again and then they share it. So it's not totally surprising to me that something like very early internet like Ziz hits TikTok and sort of ignites this, uh, interest in, in bodybuilding and bodybuilding culture. But it from there, uh, like inspires a long form video on YouTube that does quite well.

• 58:11Ryan Broderick?

  A YouTuber, oh, it's this guy, the sunny V2 guy that like.

• 58:15Speaker 03

  That guy.

• 58:15Ryan Broderick?

  He's such a fucking asshole, like the rise and fall guy. Basically everything is like a rise and fall thing with him. But he makes a video titled, "The Beautiful Tragedy of a Legend Ziz", which he released in 2022, which is sort of right at the end of the Ziz revival that we, we discovered. And that did four million views. It leads to a bunch of reaction videos from Asmongold's, XQC. There's like a bunch of subreddits that pop up around Ziz. And I don't think it's an accident that like, right after you get through that, you see an explosion of looks maxing. And that leads us directly to clavicular sort of appearing out of nowhere around two, like clavicular was active

• 58:57Ryan Broderick?

  on the newer looks maxing boards in like 2023, 2024. And then he like gets big on TikTok, uh, the summer of 2025. So like it's all happening because of this uptick in interest around Ziz that happens during the pandemic.

• 59:14Speaker 03

  That's so fascinating. I, I did not realize it. Wow.

• 59:17Ryan Broderick?

  So yeah, I don't know. Like there's something that happened right around Ju- between like February and June 2021 that kicks up a massive amount of interest in Ziz. And then it, it basically ignites an entire wave of looks maxing to come back into fashion.

• 59:33Speaker 03

  Damn, that's crazy. Even in death, he still inspires.

• 59:38Ryan Broderick?

  He's still, he's still Myron from heaven. Um, I, I guess like, you know, final thoughts, like going through this journey to the dark heart of the internet, Chad, like, you know, I, I guess the thing that I'm always sort of curious about when I, whenever I lift up this particular rock and look at all the bugs underneath is like, I do remember having male role models when I was a teenager that like led me down the path to where I am now, which is a podcaster, which I guess isn't much better. But like, better than being clavicular. But I don't know how you like get that back. I don't know how you sort of like deprogram. Uh, men from the path that they're on now. Uh huh.

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  Most of my, my work, like talking about like, you know, weird anti-woke guys and right wing culture and conspiracy and, and all that shit. And like, as I, as I've like read a, like a lot of like man shit for, for this, this man serial video I'm, I'm working on, like, when you read a lot of the things these guys are talking about, they're like, they come from like legitimate places of issue and problem, like a

• 1:00:47Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  lack of mentorship, for example, legitimate economic hardship, like gender dysphoria, like overall social a- alienation that like you don't know how to get around. Like a lot of these things like I grew up with and I, and I, I, um, am still working through. And I didn't become like woke and gay until my like mid twenties because like

• 1:01:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  my upbringing, like I, like I, I grew up in an abusive household. My dad was like very stoic, who worked all the time. I didn't have a lot of like male models. I was raised on the internet, like, like a lot of me stumbling in, into being who I am was like accidental. And then there are like, you know, things you see online with people discussing stuff that I think lack a cer- a certain amount of nuance, uh, and is a bit more reactionary than I would like, which can like serve against public, uh, best public interest for men. Like the whole like thing that happened a year ago of people shitting on like performative men for a while. I don't know if you guys

• 1:01:54Ryan Broderick?

  For like reading in public and stuff.

• 1:01:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's like, like, we're just circling back to hating femininity and doing homophobia at, at that point. Like that isn't like doing anything to like actually help men. And I think like, within reason, I think like that, that there has to be less of a tendency to just like push these guys completely aside. Like you have to have a certain level of like protection for the group that you're in, obviously. But I think when it comes to discussing these things, I think like, you have to try to talk to them or talk about male issues in a way that like, maybe is a little bit uncomfortable.

• 1:02:35Ryan Broderick?

  I agree. This is women's fault entirely.

• 1:02:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:02:38Ryan Broderick?

  No, uh, no, you, I, you're, you're a hundred percent right. And I, I don't have really any patience for like adult men who act this way. I sort of think like up against the wall, like, like we can't really work with you anymore.

• 1:02:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:02:51Ryan Broderick?

  But there, there is this moment, and this is why, this is actually my, this is my optimistic take here, that this is actually maybe all a quirk of history and will kind of be a non-issue soon. Growing up, like as a, as a teenage boy, there's sort of this moment around like 12, 13, 14, where you start to look around the world and sort of start to like take in information and look for things. And when I, I was, I was that age around like 2002, 2003. So there was actually like a lot of men in mass media still who were cool. We've now know that like a lot of them were predators, but like

• 1:03:34Ryan Broderick?

  a lot of them weren't. And so, you know, there were figures like Green Day with American Idiot, or Jon Stewart and the Daily Show, or whatever, like cool guys that I could like, be like, oh, like, that's the kind of cool guy that I want to be. And they're channeling the kind of anger I have into something constructive. And so I'm interested in that. And that takes you down the path that sort of leads me to here into journalism and into playing in punk bands and whatever, right? Technology starts to shift though, about four or five years later. And so there's, the internet's now become more important. But the internet was never a space full of like professional guys. It was full of like weird freaks. But like the newer people coming into an internet world like didn't know

• 1:04:19Ryan Broderick?

  that. And so there's all of these weird freaks that are like, I'm going to say stuff that like a 12 year old or a 13 year old boy is going to be really into, and I'm even going to change my body to look like an action figure. And I'm going to use that power to share my weird fucked up worldview. And by the time you get to like Steve Bannon's Breitbart and the beginnings of the Trump campaign and Gamergate, it's a lot of right wingers who realize what has happened. And they spend a ton of money building Prager University, and they hire Milo Yiannopoulos to write about Gamergate, and they, they, they flood YouTube with Ben Shapiro videos and all the rest of it, because they realize that young people aren't watching MTV anymore. They're not watching Comedy Central. The

• 1:05:04Ryan Broderick?

  young people of the future are on the internet. And they're going to superpower the weird freaks, because they already know this is working. And the problem is like, we are still in this world where like, normal men who are cool and not insane are usually on TV. And all of the weird freaks are now billionaires and have like first movers advantage on the internet. Even like, even right now, like Jon Stewart and Joe Rogan, there's no comparison who's more popular. There's no comparison in what the 2010s created, which was a total monopoly on the media of the future for the teenage boys that are now

• 1:05:48Ryan Broderick?

  adults of that era. And the reason why I'm sort of optimistic about this is because once we can sort of let go of the, oh, like the internet, sort of a secondary space. And it's like, if you can let go of that, then you can start to get the actual good male role models using the internet and finding, okay, there's no good way to say it's finding the 13 year old boys on the internet that they need to, and convincing them not to be total fucking chuds all the time. That's my sort of view on this.

• 1:06:18Speaker 03

  Yes. Use of the internet is like a double edged sword in that way that people like that are, you know, people like fucking Asmongold or XQC, or like a lot of the weird like right ring slash like chud adjacent streamers, like there, there's a level of access there, which young guys are going to get at very like volatile times of their lives. And, you know, a lot of the communities are exceptionally insular. So it can be harder to get out of that. But on the flip side, like, you know, so, so much of like the, the woke mind virus that has been transmitted into my brain is from me like finding other men on the internet

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  or on, on YouTube, for example, who like talk about being a man and masculinity and

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  feminism and like all this shit in like deeper, complex ways to like pull, pull me out of it. Like foreign man is in a, of a foreign land has been like a huge influence on me ever since I, I found this channel like years and years ago. And like, there's people like that. And like, I'm trying to do that myself. And like, I've gotten comments from like people, it's my favorite kind of comment to get, that's like, your video has like helped me like realize some of the like shitty, like toxic things that I was in, in, in engaging with. And, and, and like, that's like, that's, that's just really fucking cool. Like, that's just

• 1:07:52Ryan Broderick?

  It is cool. I don't think it's actually very hard to like, turn the tide on this stuff. Like teenage boys sort of, kind of like the same stuff, no matter what time period you're talking about. They want to break shit and they want to talk to girls or boys and their hormones are like all over the place. And if you like, figure out an aspirational way to channel that weird, like awful teenage energy into something, like it works pretty well. And that could be, I mean, for me, it was like Warped Tour and improv comedy and comic books and all that shit. And I, I think that stuff still exists. And like, the, the right wingers have a monopoly on it because they were quicker to the, to the, the start with the, with the transition to the internet. And once

• 1:08:35Ryan Broderick?

  you fit, once you, once you sort of give it, give in and sort of go like, okay, we're going to meet them where they are. You know, you could start a fucking male feminist league on Roblox if you figure out the right way to do it.

• 1:08:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:47Ryan Broderick?

  You can make conservatives look goofy and lame and old, the way they looked to me when I was 13, listening to the decline by no effect for the first time. And I was like, yeah, Republicans are fucking lame, dude.

• 1:08:59Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:09:00Ryan Broderick?

  The story of Ziz is a really good, a really good way to, uh, to think about it. Where it's like, you could have just shown those kids in 2020, a different kind of guy, and we would have had a different kind of world.

• 1:09:10Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. Like particularly since like so many of these guys are like closeted or like on the spectrum, like, like, clavicular has openly admitted that like he is der- divergent. I'm sure there's like a decent number of like ace men in there who like only have sex with women simply because they believe it is like a necessary thing.

• 1:09:34Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:34Speaker 03

  And like, like broader visibility of like queerness and different ways to embrace sexuality and gender for and around men. Like the more that becomes visible, the earlier like dudes who fall into that spectrum, like, oh, like I'm, oh, maybe I am bisexual. I am agender. I, I, I could be trans, like blah, blah. Like being able to get to those guys early is, in, in my opinion, the most important possible thing. Because I think a lot of the dudes who are in there now, like, you know, we can do our best to like, you know, try to give them access points, but like, they aren't, like, they aren't at all who I focus my content around. And I don't think like people should, like, I

• 1:10:16Speaker 03

  fucking hate when people try to directly speak to like chuds in like hoity toity video essays. Like, what are you doing? You're just grandstanding. You're wasting your fucking time. Like, like you, we, we, we should be going after dudes who are in the middle or early on. Like tho- like those are ripe for the pickings.

• 1:10:35Ryan Broderick?

  Look, we have some parents that listen to the show. If you are the parent of a teenage boy right now, and you're a little freaked out about what you heard today, I need you to sit them down in a safe, quiet place and make them listen to a hundred gecs.

• 1:10:49Ryan Broderick?

  Noah, I want to thank you for coming on the show. This was a fantastic conversation.

• 1:10:54Ryan Broderick?

  If people want to mire you, if they're, if they want to be mirroring to you on the internet, where can they do that? Where can they follow you on the internet?

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for, for having me. I, I run the YouTube channel Crimes New Roman. Uh, I also have a Blue Sky account. If you want to watch me shitpost, uh, every now and then, um, come watch my stuff and hit the subscribe button. And if you don't, you are being homophobic.

• 1:11:19Ryan Broderick?

  That's right.

• 1:11:23Speaker 00

  The wheel had roads. Electricity had the grid. Innovation needs infrastructure. Plaid makes AI work in finance. Visit plaid.com slash AI to learn more.