AI Summary
5 min readIn 2011, a 22-year-old Australian bodybuilder named Ziz died of a heart attack in a Thai spa while on vacation. He had a congenital heart defect he didn’t know about. But in the years since, his death has made him something far larger than he ever was alive: the patron saint of the internet’s modern looksmaxxing, body-dysmorphic, Chad-obsessed hellworld. On this episode of Panic World, host Grant and guest Noah K. (of the YouTube channel Crimes New Roman) trace a direct line from Ziz’s earnest 2006 bodybuilding forum posts to the current landscape of top-ranked Chads, steroid-peddling streamers, and the manosphere’s total monopoly on teenage male attention.
The original blueprint
Ziz (born Aziz Shavershian) started his YouTube channel in 2006. He was a skinny, self-described “extreme ectomorph” who sold his World of Warcraft account for $500 to buy a gym membership. His early presence on bodybuilding.com and 4chan’s “fit” board was strikingly innocent by today’s standards. In interview quotes preserved on Simply Shredded, Ziz spoke about wanting a physique that could be “looked at as art” and described himself as “one of the friendliest people you can meet.” The comments on his progress threads were full of genuine encouragement: “Looking ripped dude, how much do you bench?” One fan wrote, “Love that chest pecs and those nipples, dude. Email me and I’ll tell you abo
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:56) **Introducing Ziz, the Original Looksmaxxer** - The hosts set up the episode’s thesis: before Clavicular, there was Ziz, who created the nightmare bodybuilder world we’re trapped in and changed the course of American history.
- 2 (01:30) **Warm-Up: Ranking Modern Chads and the Bloat Lord** - The hosts and guest Noah K. discuss current internet Chads and share their favorite absurd figures, establishing the modern landscape of looksmaxxing culture.
- 3 (10:29) **The PSL Rating and the Three Founding Websites** - The hosts explain the origin of the "PSL" rating system, connecting it to the late-2000s forums that created the modern looksmaxxing world.
- 4 (16:51) **Meet Ziz: The Original Looksmaxxer's Origin Story** - The hosts pivot to Ziz’s biography, starting with his humble beginnings as a skinny Australian gamer who sold his World of Warcraft account for a gym membership.
- 5 (19:23) **The Vanished Middle Ground: Earnestness vs. Modern Grift** - The conversation shifts to how the internet has changed, with Noah and Ryan lamenting the loss of a space where self-improvement wasn't directly monetized or radicalized.
- 6 (23:30) **Ziz’s Philosophy: "Obsessed is a Word the Lazy Use"** - Ryan reads more quotes from Ziz’s interviews, highlighting his earnest, almost innocent self-improvement mindset that is impossible to imagine from a looksmaxxer today.
- 7 (28:56) **The Old Bodybuilding.com Comments** - The hosts read historical comments on Ziz’s bodybuilding profile, marveling at how friendly, weird, and non-transactional the community was.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
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.
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