Don't emulate influencers and don't do drugs, kids.
Note: This article is in no way intended to belittle the deceased figures mentioned, but to serve as a warning. These were clearly troubled individuals, some of whom died under suspicious circumstances.
I’m by no means the only observer that believes the rise of juiced-up influencers and “looksmaxxers” is not a random organic event, but a stage-managed social conditioning exercise. By their very nature, such social conditioning programs require participants whose sense of self and mental health is, to put it politely, sub-optimal.
Mentally healthy people do not go online and glorify anabolic drug use to young teens and encourage people to hit their own faces with a hammer in order to achieve more pronounced cheek bones.
But what happens when the mentally unstable participants of these social conditioning programs go off-script or outlive their usefulness?
A disturbing pattern seems to be emerging.
American “OG” fitness influencer Conor Murphy recently passed away under strange circumstances in Thailand.
According to media reports, he was acting erratically, attempted to flag down a car to get a ride to who knows where, then argued with a security guard who advised the driver to keep going. Police were called to the scene, reportedly causing Murphy to panic and run to a nearby lake. He dived into the lake, began swimming, became exhausted, and allegedly drowned.
He was 32 years of age, and his body was reportedly found in the “32-foot-deep” lake “around 66 feet from the bank”.
This was not Murphy’s first encounter with Thai authorities. In 2024, they were called to his Pattaya residence after he allegedly threatened his 20-year-old Thai girlfriend and smashed the place up with a golf club.
His recent passing reportedly occurred in Samut Prakan province, which is situated 26 km south of Bangkok.
When reporting on his passing, media outlets invariably refer to Murphy as a looksmaxxer. Murphy posted a video four months ago that was supposedly a parody of looksmaxxing, “intended to highlight and discourage harmful online looksmaxxing trends.”
Throughout that entire video, Murphy was adorned with a pair of devil’s horns.
For a guy who had clearly lost his mind, the video production was unusually slick and professional-looking.
In December 2025, influencer Mary Magdalene, who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on tattoos and cosmetic procedures including breast augmentations, lip fillers, and various reconstructive surgeries, allegedly fell from a high-rise apartment in Thailand at the age of 33.
Aziz Sergeyevich Shavershian, better known as Zyzz, was a Russian-born fitness influencer who grew up in Australia. In 2011, while on holiday in Pattaya, Thailand, he suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 22.
In January 2023, 34-year-old Laith Abdallah Algaz, aka “Leo Rex” and “Leo and Longevity”, died in Pattaya under mysterious circumstances while visiting and staying with Charles Anthony Hughes, aka “Tony Huge”, a former attorney-turned-anabolic drug enthusiast and ‘biohacker’.
Algaz was discovered with signs of violence, with dried blood around his nose and mouth and a scene indicating the house had been “ransacked”.
Despite this, Hughes and the Thai police maintained no one else was involved in Algaz’s death and seemed eager to close the matter.
Algaz’s ex-wife, Lucie, said the autopsy report left out “crucial details” like the exact time of death and the date of the death. She said “there’s an interest in trying to make this case closed.”
Leo Rex’s most-watched video was “How to Build a Better Penis,” according to various online reports (the channel is now defunct). In the video, he reportedly claimed he successfully enlarged his whizzer by two inches through a system of pumps and weights.
Promoting Harmful Nonsense to Malleable Minds
I’d love to tell you that the world of influencers was just a meme factory, their weird behavior nothing more than a source of bemusement to their audiences. Unfortunately, the rising popularity of certain drugs and cosmetic procedures shows these terribly misguided figures do indeed wield considerable “clout”.
Online fitness influencers have played no small part in the runaway use of the nasty anabolic steroid trenbolone, a veterinary drug that was never officially marketed for human use.
The various testosterone esters are basically synthetic copies of what exists in the human body. When used judiciously, well-researched and slow-acting esters like testosterone enanthate are safe enough to use on a long-term basis as a hormone replacement therapy.
Anabolic steroids like trenbolone, or “tren” as it is commonly known, are a whole other story. They are lab-tweaked versions of the testosterone molecule, which leads the user into uncharted territory, even at ‘modest’ dosages.
Like other steroids in the nandrolone category (such as the infamous Deca-Durabolin), trenbolone exhibits one of the highest anabolic-androgenic ratios seen among anabolic drugs. On paper, this sounds ideal: You supposedly maximize the drug’s anabolic (muscle- and bone-building) effects, while minimizing the androgenic effects such as acne, hair loss, gynecomastia (breast development) in men, and deepening of the voice in women.
As history has repeatedly shown, what sounds great on paper often turns out to be a dumpster fire in real life.
And so it is with tren.
Piatkowski et al, who’ve published a number of papers on trenbolone, interviewed 16 PED users (mean age 31.25, range 24–45). There were nine males and seven females in their sample. All 16 reported lifetime and repeated use of PEDs, with 10 reporting current use. Eight participants had used trenbolone at least once.
Unsurprisingly, polypharmacy was common, with seven of the 10 current users taking multiple drugs concurrently.
Trenbolone was identified as the PED with the largest number of associated adverse issues, which impacted performance and day-to-day functioning.
Some users reported that it negatively affected their sleep (also known as “trensomnia”), produced fluctuating energy levels, and an increase in aggression and intimidating behaviours, and episodes of psychological or emotional instability with “the potential to cause harm to others”.
One participant told the interviewers:
“But being on tren [trenbolone] man, like if someone cut me off in traffic and I can be like oh whatever, but whatever I didn’t die. This is great. On tren man I’ll be like yelling out my window blasting that c**t, telling him to pull over, like let’s go f**king fight. This is bulls**t”.
“I know for myself that I will never touch tren again. The psychological effects of that, I was not ready for and was not capable of handling. My mind pretty much just went to mush. Like I was just an angry c**t. You couldn’t have told me anything different — even if you if you were right, I was still right like it was just f**ked, so I think this drug plays a massive role in the psychological aspect”.
Another participant stated:
“[on using tren] I would lose it I’d go buck wild man. Shouting, throw, throwing things, one time I even punched a wall. Mentally like, it isn’t a good drug”.
Use of exogenous testosterone often results in increased sex drive. No surprises there, given what we know about testosterone’s biochemical actions.
Trenbolone, however, has established a reputation not just for boosting libido, but directing it at unexpected targets: Fat women, other men and even transsexuals.
One respondent told the interviewers:
“I know that [tren] fries your frontal cortex. Not only does it remove your moral compass, you just stop thinking, ‘Maybe this is a really bad idea if I cheat on my partner’ because I’m just so full of testosterone and tren [trenbolone] I want to f**k anything with a heartbeat”.
While everyone loves to mindlessly dump on the younger generations (”this generation is cooked, man!”), another survey by Piatkowski et al found age was significantly and positively associated with tren use. This suggested “that older males may be administering higher doses. This could reflect more experienced or prolonged use of AAS as men age, potentially indicating a trajectory toward a need for larger doses to achieve desired effects.”
Living a Vacuous, Empty Life is Good For You!
If you’ve been paying attention not just to fitness influencers, but Mansophere figures like Andrew Tate, Wes “Peggy” Watson, Vincent “Pubes” Fisher and convicted sex offender Ben “She Was 15” Azoulay, you’ll know that they place a heavy emphasis on seeking external validation through drug-enhanced musculature and ostentatious displays of material wealth.
Conor Murphy originally rose to fame by recording “prank” videos where he would remove his top to reveal his supposedly ‘natural’ musculature to random and admiring women in the street.
I’ll be the first to acknowledge that being complimented on your physique/appearance feels good. It’s a nice bonus on top of all the other benefits that come from eating and training right.
But what happens when you fail to keep this in perspective? What happens when, instead of simply viewing it as a nice bonus, your core identity and life mission revolve around chasing this external validation?
Your life becomes a terribly empty endeavor, that’s what.
The influencersphere is not encouraging us to become thinkers and people of substance. It is doing its darndest to turn us into unthinking, empty morons whose life purpose revolves around instant gratification and validation-seeking.
Instead of discipline and sometimes uncomfortable introspection, we are presented with tren, ayahausca, exotic cars, lip fillers and plastic boobs.
It’s what whoever rigs the algorithms wants us to embrace.
It’s all fake AF, and you should avoid it like F.
No matter your age.
Ciao,
Anthony.