transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Hey, it's Bridget, just wanted to give you a quick heads up that this episode gets into some conversation about disordered eating and self-harm. There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. I think it is time that we talk about looks maxing and a specific looks maxing influencer named Clavicular. Mike, you and I were just talking about this before we got on the mic together. You and I talked about Clavicular and whether or not we were going to do an episode about him. Kind of a while ago, he's been on my radar for a little bit.

Speaker 2:
[00:45] That's right. Yeah, you brought him up a while ago, and obviously he has kind of blown up in the news over the past week, two weeks, I'm not sure exactly the timeline. And it seems like it hasn't really gone great for anyone, although maybe he would disagree. Maybe he would say it has been great for him and he's really blown up his profile.

Speaker 1:
[01:10] Yes. So the reason that I wanted to start there is because when he first started popping up on my radar, it was, I would say like late 2025, and he had not yet really blown up. I was aware of him just from the work that we do and talking about what's happening in different gendered circles of the Internet. So I was pretty aware of him and looks maxing. But honestly, I made sort of an editorial judgment call of whether or not he was going to be somebody that we talked about on the podcast. At the time, I looked at his follower accounts on platforms, streaming platforms like Kick, and I thought, okay, this person is not a nobody. He's definitely a niche somebody in this pocket of the Internet. But comparing him to some of the other in cell, Manosphere extremist influencers that we do talk about, people like Andrew Tate, Fresh and Fit, he was pretty small. When I was working at Ultraviolet, specifically doing work around missing disinformation, we had this internal thing that we call a threat matrix that determined when and whether and how we would talk about specific pieces of disinformation. Because we found that not every piece of harmful content really warranted blowing it up and talking about it. So we would have this way of saying, okay, well, this piece of harmful content exists, it's out there, it's not really making it into mainstream circles, so let's keep an eye on it, versus let's talk about it and risk amplifying it more. Do you feel me?

Speaker 2:
[02:38] Yeah, that makes all the sense in the world. You know, people who are creating misinformation, and this is something that I've studied for the past several years, how health misinformation spreads online. People who are creating it want to get it in front of people. The point of making it is so that people see it and it affects people. And then, you know, there are various reasons why they might want to do that. And so then if you're somebody who is trying to push back against that, either because you want to promote good health information or you're concerned about democracy and trying to push back against false political narratives or whatever, it makes a lot of sense that you want to be thoughtful about which stories you highlight because attention is the whole name of the game. And, you know, it's like the Barbara Streisand effect.

Speaker 1:
[03:26] Exactly. And I wanted to start there because I think that exact tension and dilemma has to be part of the conversation about influencers like Clavicular and how we talk about movements like Looks Maxing. So I want to get into all of this. But first, I want you to imagine a 20-year-old woman. She grew up online. She's deeply insecure about her body, but she does not refer to that as an insecurity. She calls it a lifestyle. She streams herself. She teaches her growing teenage following, which pills to take to suppress appetite, which injections they should be getting, how to change the way their body looks through self-harm practices. She films herself physically hurting her own body, but calls it self-improvement. She has a paid membership for other girls who want to do what she's doing, and she's made a ton of money off of it. At one point on camera, on a live stream, she injected her underage boyfriend with an unlicensed substance to change the shape of his jaw. So if that was going on, I want you to think, how would we, how would media, how would all of us be talking about her right now?

Speaker 2:
[04:40] It's a great question, and I think the obvious answer is that we would be talking about her very differently. There's clearly a gender difference in the way that the media has been treating this man than they would if he were a woman speaking to a largely female following.

Speaker 1:
[04:59] So I want you to keep that in mind as I tell you about Braden Peters, also known online as Clavicular, a figure in the so-called looks maxing movement.

Speaker 2:
[05:11] What is looks maxing, Bridget?

Speaker 1:
[05:13] So looks maxing is one of those things where on its face, it actually doesn't sound bad. It sounds like the kind of advice that we often give young men who might be having trouble or issues with self-esteem. Things like focus on yourself, work on yourself, focus on your posture, have good hygiene, things like that. So on its face, it's these things like getting a better hair cut, getting better skin care, going to the gym, focusing on good posture. When it went viral in 2022 and 2023, it was mostly these self-deprecating memes about jawline exercises and something called mewing to make your jaw and your face look more chiseled. So the important thing to know about looks maxing is that it's the gateway. It is how millions of young boys and men got introduced to a subculture that has very different values underneath. There's a whole kind of glossary of terms that are associated with it. Terms like soft maxing, which is low risk stuff that you do to your body, haircut, posture, skin care, gym, mostly normal stuff. Then there's hard maxing, permanent dangerous body modifications, things like bone smashing and steroids. There's phrases like ascending or to ascend, which is climbing higher in a physical hierarchy of men, or mogging, which is dominating somebody visually, like winning genetically. If you had a side by side, you kind of have to give it as like back in the day, those magazines who wore it best, a side by side comparison where somebody is dominating visually. There's also your SMV or your sexual market value, which is the number assigned to your attractiveness, basically like a credit score for your face and body. Mike, we talk about this on the show a lot, how you and I live in very different internet media ecosystems. Has any of this made its way across your desk?

Speaker 2:
[07:06] Honestly, only in the most superficial ways. Like I'm vaguely aware that this general category of stuff is out there and that young men are engaging a lot in content about their looks and their fitness in ways that connect with value systems a couple steps away that are pretty questionable, if not outright objectionable. But the actual content itself, I really haven't seen much of it. I think the various algorithms of whatever social media platforms I'm on, they're not showing this stuff to me.

Speaker 1:
[07:49] Even though if you were to take a cursory look at where this trend came from, what it's all about, you might think, oh, it's a TikTok thing for men who want to have good posture. What's wrong with that? That kind of softer, cuddlier TikTok version is downstream of something much darker. I am probably going to be saying this a few times in this episode, but I believe this is where a lot of folks in media went wrong. They allowed looks maxing to be this non-threatening TikTok trend for guys, which obscured its actual darker roots and connections to some pretty unsavory, specific online ideology spaces and communities. So the term itself looks maxing was coined around 2014 on incel forums, places like Pickup Artists Hate, Slut Hate, Lookism. These are online spaces for men who are like incels or involuntarily celibate, who generally blame women for their inability to form relationships. The maxing suffix of the phrase looks maxing actually has roots in gaming. Men maxing is like sacrificing some of your stats to maximize others. Have you ever heard of that?

Speaker 2:
[09:01] Yes, I am very aware of men maxing. It's a thing that people do in games of all sorts and Dungeons and Dragons. People complain about characters who engage in men maxing rather than developing their characters' personality more. Right? And in video games, it's a much more acceptable practice just to really, you know, rather than focusing on the holistic experience, focus on specific stats like your strength or your dexterity or something that are going to allow you to, you know, make the most powerful character in the game or whatever.

Speaker 1:
[09:45] I did love this post on threads from Kyle F. Andrews. I'm old enough to remember when maxing was something you did while chilling out and relaxing all cool. From that Will Smith song.

Speaker 2:
[09:58] Yeah, I am also old enough to remember.

Speaker 1:
[10:01] For the youth listening, chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool while shooting some b-ball outside of the school.

Speaker 2:
[10:10] Yeah, totally acceptable form of maxing.

Speaker 1:
[10:13] Honestly, maxing reminds me a lot of the episode that we did around Andrew Huberman, the host of that podcast, Huberman Lab. This idea that human traits and behaviors and outcomes and life circumstances are all simple enough that they can be boiled down into stats and then gamified. Which is a good reminder that it's not just young people who kind of get taken up in seeing the world and society and people that way. And it's funny because it's a very simple black and white worldview that I definitely see the appeal in.

Speaker 2:
[10:49] Totally. And the thing that makes it tricky is that in a lot of cases, it's not wrong, right? Like the Huberman example is a good one. Dopamine matters a lot. It controls a lot of our mood, our behaviors, what we do, our decisions. That is a true thing. However, to then go another step and be like, the only thing that matters is dopamine, and I am going to organize my entire life around, you know, controlling my dopamine, is just a radical oversimplification that is, in some cases, wrong and in other cases, harmful.

Speaker 1:
[11:27] Yes, the reason why this is a little bit complicated because on its face, it's not totally wrong, right? Like, I personally engage in something that is not totally divorced from this, which is called habit stacking, where if there is a set of positive habits or changes you would like to make in your life, connecting them into a pattern or a chain of behavior, right? So I want to go to bed earlier. I want to consistently wash my face and do my skincare routine before bed. I connect those two habits. And so one small habit begets another small habit, and it becomes a chain of behavior. I don't think that's radically dissimilar from some of the attitudes that drive this kind of thinking that, oh, you can sort of gamify your behavior to positive ends. I don't want to make it seem like that on its face is negative, because I don't think it is. But when it becomes negative is exactly how you put it. When it turns into this extreme form, when you oversimplify it into these things of, okay, well, if only people were identifying these habits and doing them in X, Y, Z kind of way, they would have a much deeper or greater control over their life circumstances, when that is just a very oversimplified worldview to the point that it could actually be dangerous if you take it to the extreme, extreme, which I think a lot of these folks have.

Speaker 2:
[12:44] Totally. And I'll let you move on here, but I think you really hit the nail on the head with it, the idea of taking it to the extreme. And I think it's the idea that you can optimize your behavior, which I think is prevalent in so many harmful subcultures that we talk about on the Internet. Because again, it's attractive because it's simple, right? If there's just one outcome that you care about, whether it's fitness or dieting or getting good sleep or whatever, if that's the only outcome you care about, then it's appealing to think that you could optimize your whole life and existence for that one outcome. That works in the world of business or professional spaces, where if you have a factory, you want to optimize your production of widgets per minute or something, right? So you have the most productivity coming out. But the idea of optimizing for a human life actually just feels really sad to me, right? There is so much richness to human experience. The idea that you would pick just one thing and optimize everything around that, it feels so limiting. And then for that one thing to be your perceived physical attractiveness to others is even more depressing.

Speaker 1:
[14:00] Oh, you said it. And I know you're trying to move on. But again, I don't think that these influencers are wrong, that perceived physical attractiveness does come with benefit in society. So they're just so good at taking these things that are correct in a kind of way, and then taking them to such an intense extreme to the point that it can become as limiting for your ability to live a full life. Yes. And these researchers, Anda Solea and Lisa Segura, published a peer-reviewed study in 2025 on exactly how this happened. They call it, quote, digital subcultural diffusion. That's when this language and ideology of in-cell spaces gets repackaged as just regular old self-improvement content. And the white supremacist logic underneath it becomes, quote, less apparent to those unfamiliar with online extremist practices. So I really think that it gets at the heart of what this is, where it's so easily seen as just get a better haircut, just focus on your skincare, just hit the gym, just focus on your grind. These things that on their face seem fine, but they only seem fine because they've been stripped away from their actual more odious roots. And I think that's exactly what we're seeing. Like, I wanted to start the episode with talking about some of these terms that have roots in this movement because they've made their way into online language. People say, you know, blank maxing all the time. Sometimes it's sort of like a meme or a joke, but I have seen so much of this terminology sneaking into mainstream expressions now. In the news roundup bit that we did about Nicole Kidman walking behind Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez at the Oscars, I saw people saying, oh, she's really easily mogging them. And I'm like, oh my god, like this word, we're using this word in everyday conversation online now.

Speaker 2:
[15:59] Oh, that's so interesting. I heard that mogging before, but maxing, yeah, definitely familiar with and have been seeing it pop up in more and more types of conversations where it's just taken as like a given that this, oh, this is like a good thing. Definitely you want to maximize it.

Speaker 1:
[16:19] Yes. I did see a video where Clavicular is at a party and he walks up to a woman sitting by herself and he says, so you're really by yourself maxing right now.

Speaker 2:
[16:28] Wow. That's amazing.

Speaker 1:
[16:34] Let's take a quick break. So, something I think needs to be made explicit about these looks maxing communities, which once you look at them clearly, you see it everywhere. It's not really about attracting women. They are not performing for women. They are performing for other men. And Mike, you and I, a couple weeks back, we watched that Louis Thoreau Manosphere documentary on Netflix, which I meant to talk about on the podcast. I don't think we ever did. And it was the fact that these are men performing for other men was so apparent. There was a takeaway from watching that documentary for me, and I'm curious for your take as a man, but I would almost say that it came off as much of a gender performance as drag is to me. Like that's how much of an overt gender performance, albeit for other men, that all of the influencers interviewed in that documentary came off like to me.

Speaker 2:
[17:42] Absolutely. And this is something that makes it really hard for me to take these guys seriously, which like I know that they should be taken seriously because they have massive platforms and are like causing real harm throughout societies. Yes, absolutely. We need to take them seriously. They're just all so pathetic, right? Like they have this view of masculinity that is completely dependent on pleasing the other men around them and living their lives to try to impress the leader of whatever channel they subscribe to. It's like the most pathetic, least masculine way to live that I could imagine.

Speaker 1:
[18:25] Yeah. In one of the scenes in the documentary, I can't remember his name, but the influencer from Florida, who he's walking around shaking just like men, shaking their hands in the street. And the way these men and boys are like fangirling toward this man, it's about the other men. That's just like very clearly, very objectively what it's about. It is about these guys being so impressed by this like big, manly, masculine men who really peacocks and performs for them. And that's what it's all about. I mean, the same way that I would probably feel if I saw Beyonce walking down the street or not, I would completely fangirl out about her and I would be like shaking her hand and telling her how much I love her. That is how they are responding to this guy. It really is just, yeah, it's about the other men. And you see that fact represented in the ideology about men performing gender for other men, rather than trying to attract women, all the time when you look at their content. We talked about this in a news roundup, but when Nick Fuentes was live streaming from this party bus in Miami, it's Nick Fuentes with a bunch of other like Cliniculars there, it's all these other extremists, incel adjacent male influencers. They're on a party bus. They have women on the bus, but the women are just sort of sitting together by themselves. None of the men are talking to the women. The women are sort of on their phones and talking amongst each other, essentially being treated as if they are props. And so it's okay, well, if this is about attracting women, you've got women on the bus, no one's talking to these women, you're all just talking to the men and the women are just sort of there?

Speaker 2:
[20:11] Yeah. I think you summed it up.

Speaker 1:
[20:13] And so instead of legitimate self-improvement advice, what many of these young men are getting is content where it basically says, in the words of social scientist Rupert Smalls, if you cannot hit these benchmarks, then you really ought to consider self-harm. And that's basically what they are being told, while that content is also being sort of packaged as reasonable self-improvement content that gets monetized and boosted by algorithms on social media.

Speaker 2:
[20:44] Yes. And it is surely not a coincidence that this kind of ideology aligns so well with deference to authority figures and reverence for authority figures who are running these channels, positioning themselves as experts, telling people what to do, what to buy, what training programs to pay for. The scammability of it, I am sure, is a huge part of the appeal for the people that make this content.

Speaker 1:
[21:19] Yes, and again, I mean, if I had to give you one top line, so what, of why I wanted to bring this conversation to the podcast, it's that the whole thing is a grift, the same way that lifestyle MLM, selling leggings or whatever the hell else to women is a grift, where it's like, oh, you can have this lifestyle, you can be this kind of woman, you can be a boss babe who was able to make her own money, but also stay at home with your littles mama bear through selling this thing and giving your attention and your deference to me, the expert woman who was really gamed at the system, it's the same thing just for men. And so my question is, I think we've seen a lot of critical reporting on that kind of dynamic when it is geared toward women, I think that we should be attaching that same lens to what is very clearly the same kind of thing only being directed at men. In the Manosphere documentary, I'm so glad that they dug into one of these pieces is that it's also very clearly a financial grift for these guys where it's not just hit the gem, do this to your face, look this kind of way. It's also you need to be rich, but not rich because you worked a regular job or went to college, rich because you got rich outside of the system without a boss. I can teach you how to do that via investment, you know, online stuff, question mark, give me money. And I loved how Louie Theroux was like, okay, this Manosphere influencer, Tiki Taki, told me that he was going to make me rich to my investment. I invested $500 with him and within weeks, it was almost all gone. I remember that bit of the movie.

Speaker 2:
[23:02] I do. I was going to bring up that same part. It's like one of my favorite parts of the movie that he puts in the 500 pounds because he's a great.

Speaker 1:
[23:10] Oh, sure.

Speaker 2:
[23:11] And yeah, just like tracks the losses and brings the viewer along as he's receiving text messages about different investment opportunities, all of which turn out to be terrible.

Speaker 1:
[23:23] Yeah, give me your 500 pounds and I'll essentially flush it down the toilet for you. So something that needs to be said outright is that looks maxing has such deep ties and roots in white supremacy, because the ideal face in looks maxing is, you know, it's not a neutral beauty standard at all. It is specifically and overwhelmingly a Eurocentric white masculine beauty standard. And that is the whole thing. There are actually some really interesting pieces about black looks maxers. There's one we'll link to it in the show notes at Wired by Jason Parham. You'll hear from these black looks maxers about the moment that they realize that all of the tips and tricks, you know, the mewing, the doing stuff to your face, the posture, the gym, the this, the that, the skincare, the standard that they are meant to be reaching is whiteness. And if they are not white, there's nothing they can do that's going to make them white. So some of them will talk about this moment where they realize, this is a losing game. I can do all of these things and I'll never be able to change my race. So it's just a losing game that I'm sinking all of my money and time and attention and focus to. There's an acronym JBW, like Just Be White, this attitude that says, oh, well, in order to get women, in order to meet this standard, you have to be white. A student journalist writing for the Bucknell Student Paper wrote, quote, if the ultimate goal of looks maxing is to gain social status and the desired end result resembles the Western male beauty standard, looks maxing starts to look a lot like a well-disguised form of modern white supremacist ideology. And I could not agree more. They also get into just real harmful pseudoscience tools, things like measuring the skull shape and orbital angle and facial bone structure, stuff that is basically just a rehash of 19th century phrenology, right? These attitudes, there is a lot of these attitudes that non-white people have inherently worse features and traits because of stuff like skull and bone structure. Just real harmful bunk science that you would have thought we left in the 19th century, but here it is being repackaged for a modern age and taking off on the Internet.

Speaker 2:
[25:45] That's such a good historical connection and just to make sure listeners have this background, it sounds like kooky nonsense now, the idea that you could measure somebody's skull and know whether they are a good human or a bad human or a murderer or not or intelligent or not because that's obviously nonsense. But at the end of the 19th century and even into the 20th century, that stuff was legitimized in scientific communities and used to fuel a lot of laws and society level decisions. So I think it's important to keep in mind that it sounds nuts, but it was accepted as mainstream by a lot of people. Legitimate scientists always knew that it was nonsense, but a lot of government folks and others and laypeople really bought into it. And so even though it's kooky, it is very powerful stuff.

Speaker 1:
[26:49] So I've mentioned this a little bit, but I do think the issue here is algorithmic. You know, this content, you don't go looking for it, it finds you. Senior lecturer Jamila Rosedale of the Australian College of Applied Psychology found that TikTok algorithms specifically convert young men into incels through repeated exposure to this looks maxing content online. A Common Sense Media report found that 73% of teen boys regularly encounter masculinity content pushed into their feeds without seeking it. And importantly, it's not on its face like looks maxing content, it's content about things like building muscle, working out, making money, fighting or weapons.

Speaker 2:
[27:32] Yeah, and this is a point that I make when I'm doing talks about health misinformation. People are not seeking it out, right? It's exactly like you just said, it's other types of content related to, you know, fitness or sports or weapons or fighting or anything like that. And it's not like people are going up seeking health information, they're just consuming it as content, often without really consciously thinking about it.

Speaker 1:
[27:58] Yeah, I think I talked about this on the podcast before, but we're talking about the way that this content is specifically gendered. It definitely targets women as well. You know, I was doing some research online about fertility. Let me tell you, if you are looking at our main social media platforms for advice on fertility, you are a few swipes away from the craziest fucking lies you have ever seen in your life about your body. So, it's definitely something that is gendered. We're all sort of dealing with it. Dr. Jason Firestein, who's a therapist who runs Phoenix Men's Counseling, told Healthline, young men fall into this false sense of acceptance and what they believe women want from them. They can get caught up in potentially lifelong struggles with feeling inadequate. He specifically called looks maxing a social media driven body dysmorphia trend. Similarly, research from the British Psychological Society in 1926 found something else that is pretty damning. They found that in every single rating thread that they analyzed, at least one user insulted others, unfavorably compared them or encouraged them to harm themselves, every single one. So again, looks maxing on its face might seem like a very reasonable soft trend that just took off on TikTok about men and boys wanting to improve themselves, but actually it is pretty plainly rooted in white supremacy and other harmful ideologies and it's pretty plainly about self-harm.

Speaker 2:
[29:29] And thinking about that in terms of the way we know that algorithms behave and the types of content that they reward, not surprising that the more extreme content is what is getting served up to people in their recommended feeds.

Speaker 1:
[29:45] Yes, and that is a great segue into Clavicular. More after a quick break. Let's get right back into it. So we told you about looks maxing. Let's talk about this looks maxing influencer, Clavicular. His real name is Braden Peters. I am going to call him that, his real name for the rest of this episode. I'm not going to use his stage name, Clavicular. I see Peters as both a very serious perpetrator of harm, both harm to himself and harm to others, and also a clearly troubled person who has been failed by people around him. That might be a controversial take. I think that both things are true. I want to be clear that I'm not saying that Peters is not responsible for his own behavior. We will get into some of the behavior that he has done that is very harmful. But my larger question is that there are people involved in this situation who I believe should know better who are I would say in some ways profiting off of making content about clearly somebody who I would say is not well.

Speaker 2:
[31:15] So to say that a different way, you're not going to engage in responsibility maxing where one person or a group is exclusively responsible. You're actually saying that two things can be true at the same time.

Speaker 1:
[31:28] Yeah, and I might be mugging the New York Times a little bit here, comparing our different senses of responsibility and ethics when it comes to writing about complex subjects.

Speaker 2:
[31:38] Vocabulary burn.

Speaker 1:
[31:41] Okay, so let's get into Peters' origin story. He was born in December of 2005. Do you know that Janine Garofalo joke that I love where she's talking about, she's talking about meeting somebody who was born in 1999 and she says, I was already a blackout alcoholic with an eating disorder and you were just joining us. When I find out somebody was born in 2005, that's kind of how I feel.

Speaker 2:
[32:05] Yeah. I mean, I remember 2005. I was doing stuff. Yeah. He was just joining us.

Speaker 1:
[32:11] What were you doing in 2005?

Speaker 2:
[32:14] Oh, in 2005, I was winding down my time in Boston. I had graduated from college two years earlier, and I spent two years working in a lab before moving to Madison, Wisconsin, for grad school. So 2005 was a great time, actually. I worked in a lab. I actually was making some money for the first time in my life. Not good money, but was no longer an undergrad student. I had some fun responsibilities, but not too many. I had great friends there. Many of them are still living there. That was a good time in 2005. What were you doing in 2005?

Speaker 1:
[32:51] In 2005, I was in college in North Carolina, probably leading some sort of campus protest as an excuse to get out of a class and try to bully my professor in accounting at his credit. Probably what I was doing. So it's 2005. Peters is born. He grows up in Hoboken, New Jersey. His dad is a businessman. His mom is reportedly a bodybuilder. I've seen some fuzziness around that claim that might be something that she's sort of trying to use as a little bit of an origin story mythos now. Peters told GQ that his childhood, quote, was probably the same as anyone else's. His later accounts, though, tell a different story. So by Peters' own account during COVID, he was online up to 14 hours per day. He describes himself as just sort of rotting in his room, not being social and really struggling. And that is when he found looks maxing forums. So before his 15th birthdate, he ordered testosterone online. He told the New York Times that finding testosterone, quote, it's like a cheat code. Why would I not do this? His parents found his stash of drugs and confiscated them, but he kept buying more and more. At one point, he is said to live with his grandmother. So now it's the fall of 2024. He enrolls at Sacred Heart University. He gets expelled three weeks later after campus police find testosterone in his dorm room. He says that he was reported by a rival looks maxing forum user, and that's why he had this trouble with the law. He briefly works in a restaurant and then pivots to doing content full time. And this is when he becomes clavicular. So the reason why I'm calling him Peters and not clavicular is because his name is not arbitrary. Clavicular is a reference to the clavicle, the collarbone. And that is one of the primary metrics that looks maxing communities use to assess your frame or the perceived masculinity of your bone structure. Again, goes back to that phrenology bit that we were just talking about. So calling yourself clavicular is really a statement of a specific kind of ideology, which is like why I'm just going to call him Peters. So when you get into that origin story, you know, a lonely kid dealing with the isolation of COVID, spending 14 hours a day online, to me, it is hard to not read Peters' story as one of radicalization, that he found these forums, the kind of extreme nature of them that you and I were talking about when we first started the episode, Mike, leading him down this increasingly extreme radical pipeline.

Speaker 2:
[35:40] Yeah, you know, thinking about a 15-year-old kid that, if he was born in 2005, he would have been 15 in 2020 when COVID started. You can't help but feel kind of bad for him.

Speaker 1:
[35:51] Yes. I mean, again, I want to, I'll probably say this a hundred more times, he is somebody who has been responsible for great harm both to himself and to others. I will be honest and say in doing this research, the more I looked into him, past what I already knew from his content, the more I am like, this is somebody who is not well. It is a little bit hard for me not to feel a bit bad for him personally. Again, I bet it's not to absolve the things that he has done and the ideology that he is clearly spreading. But yeah, it's just a little bit hard for me not to say like, this is definitely an unwell young person.

Speaker 2:
[36:27] Yeah. Our goal here in this episode, I think is not to absolve him from blame or anything like that, but really to understand what his weird place in culture means for all of us and for other young people, I think, who are vulnerable to the same type of content, many of which now created by him.

Speaker 1:
[36:54] Yeah. And that's my thing is that I don't really expect an unwell 20-year-old to be living by certain standards. I should be able to expect it from The New York Times and other mainstream outlets who cover him. We shouldn't be able to expect it from the people who run social media platforms and algorithms, right? I think it's about not just putting the scrutiny on Peters as an individual, but asking what people and institutions with power have enabled this. Because I really do think that's part of the conversation that we're sort of not having.

Speaker 2:
[37:30] Yeah. And so I guess just before we get to that, did you want to talk a little bit about what some of his content does look like?

Speaker 1:
[37:40] Sure. So the core of his content is evaluating faces. He got big evaluating the faces of strangers on campus, celebrities, viewers who submit their photos, and he rates them through his looks maxing system. He famously gave Michael B. Jordan one of, according to me, the most handsome people I have ever witnessed. So Michael B. Jordan is objectively one of the hottest men alive. He is black. Peters gave him a 3.5 out of 10 and presented this as his clinical verdict. He walks up to strangers with tape measures and stuff to assess their physical facial dimensions on camera. He advocates for bone smashing, which is literally hitting yourself in the face with a hammer to change your bone structure. We'll come back to that. He launched Clavicular's Clan, which is a paid membership program, marketed as offering guides that are guaranteed to help you ascend or reach a higher level of hierarchy. If you listen to our Skinny Talk episode, it's that kind of thing will sound very familiar to you. By February 2026, according to a profile in the New York Times, Peters was earning more than $100,000 per month from his kickstreams alone. So that's not even counting his paid membership program and whatever else money he's making from doing all of this. So mind you, this is somebody who was in a service industry job just two years prior. And I say that to say, I can kind of understand why young men and boys, people who are maybe feeling disillusioned from college, student loans, the rising cost of living, the job market, all of these expectations where the system does not provide for you to reasonably ever feel like you can meet those expectations. I could understand against that backdrop why young men are looking at this kid who was waiting tables just two years ago and now is making $100,000 per month and saying, that is the trajectory I want for myself. I am going to follow this person's advice and guidance because I want to live a life like that.

Speaker 2:
[39:48] Yeah, I'm sure it's extremely attractive. I mean, hell, it's attractive for me, right? $100,000 per month, that is like a ton of money, especially for young people. You know, looking at the economy, the prospect of jobs, college, you could forgive young people for feeling like the financial system is rigged against them. Yeah. And I think that there are things a young person can do with that belief that are probably healthier and more financially beneficial to them in the long run, certainly, than, you know, hopping aboard this guy's face smashing train. But I can see the appeal.

Speaker 1:
[40:32] Yeah, and something that folks should know is that there is a very deep thread through a lot of this content that says that the most acceptable or desirable way to make a living is to be, quote, outside of the system, right? It's not going to college and then getting a nine to five job where you are a slave to somebody else. It is finding a way to make money online, finding a way to make money through content, finding a way to like make money through investments or something like that where you are not working a traditional nine to five job. There is definitely this attitude that going to college and getting a regular job, a desk job, a day job has failed men. And so the smartest men find ways to circumvent that system and find a way to make money for themselves. Again, just to be like objectively clear, they are selling a pipe dream, right? Like I don't have a nine to five job. I'm self-employed. It's hard as shit. It is certainly not if anybody who tells you it's a path to like you being your own boss and being super successful and having no problems and no worries is, I can tell you, I can personally tell you is selling you a pipe dream. But I don't think that these kids are wrong for being attracted to this because there is a grain of truth there that society has sold, that college and a good job is a recipe for life success. That is clearly not the case for most of us, right? And so like, again, I can understand why this is so attractive because there's a grain of truth to it.

Speaker 2:
[42:03] Yeah. You know, once again, there's a grain of truth in there that then gets distorted and used to sell snake oil. And in this case, the snake oil includes self-harm.

Speaker 1:
[42:18] In November 2025, Peters films himself injecting fat dissolving peptides. So he dissolves these fat dissolving peptides into his then 17-year-old girlfriend's jaw on a live stream. Medical professionals flagged this immediately as the unlicensed practice of medicine on a minor, but no criminal charges followed. He's been arrested twice, once in Florida for a battery charge after provoking a fight between two women and then posting it online to exploit them. This was after a video surfaced of him in Florida, shooting a gun at an alligator that was already dead, just to in his words, test to see how dead it really was. When I first heard about this, these two things happened around the same time. So I was like, oh, did he get arrested for the alligator shooting incident on video? The alligator shooting actually did not yield charges. The New York Times reported that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said on social media that it was, quote, looking into the incident after the video surfaced. He was also arrested in Arizona for possessing a controlled substance, including Adderall and an oral steroid, but prosecutors declined to press charges. So none of these incidents had any kind of like real negative impact on his career, obviously. In my opinion, these incidents, if anything, they only helped him grow a bigger profile. Each time he was arrested, it made headlines. Here is how the New York Times titled a piece about his arrest after the fight video. Clavicular, an Internet narcissist, is arrested after posting a fight video. And then the subhead reads, the influencer known for promoting handsomeness is accused of arranging a brawl between two women. Separately, the authorities are investigating a video of him shooting an alligator that appeared to be dead.

Speaker 2:
[44:07] Promoting handsomeness, that doesn't sound so bad.

Speaker 1:
[44:10] Yeah, that's what I'm saying. And again, in this episode, there is a tension because, listen, I am not someone who thinks that figures like this should not be written about or talked about because when we don't, when we ignore them, we just allow their platforms to grow and grow and fester and fester. However, describing him as an influencer who is known for promoting handsomeness, in my opinion, is not a very responsible way to write about this particular figure. Particularly a figure who pretty explicitly is dealing with self-harm and body dysmorphia. And so I started with that comparison of how the media would talk about this if we were talking about a woman. If a woman who explicitly was dealing with disordered eating and self-harm around disordered eating and body dysmorphia was being written about this way, I don't think they would describe her as an influencer known for promoting hotness or known for promoting being attractive. I think they will be describing her in a very different way. So the question remains, why the choice to describe him as an influencer known for promoting handsomeness when his whole thing is, in fact, self-harm and body dysmorphia? And something else that I think is important to understand about Peters and looks maxing more broadly, and also just like most of this manosphere in cell stuff, I mean, you're going to, it's, I'm not saying anything that's super ground breaking, is that it's both political, obviously and objectively, while also framed as not political. Peters actively tries to distance himself from in cell ideology and the politics around it. He has publicly said that he is not political. He has described looks maxing as simply self-improvement, something that helps men ascend out of being in cells, not something rooted in it. But then when you look at who he actually hangs around and spends his time with, it becomes very clear, right? The New York Times reported that Peters has socialized with people like Nick Swentez, who is a white nationalist commentator, Andrew Tate, who we know was accused of rape and human trafficking. We've talked about it on the pod before, but there's that video of all of them on the party bus and then going to a nightclub in Miami, chanting to the Kanye West song, Schmile Schmittler, the phrase I will never say on this podcast, because I just know someone's going to clip it and be like, gosh, he said it. After that clip circulated, Peters met with prominent Jewish club owners in Miami, and then posted on Instagram, no more politics, just mogging, which is a very interesting response to being filmed, singing Schmile Schmittler in a nightclub.

Speaker 2:
[47:01] It also makes me want to know more about those club owners who met with him. Like it's notable that he's not meeting with like faith leaders or community leaders. No, it's club leaders, club owners, club owners who probably didn't appreciate the sentiment, but did appreciate the publicity. Yeah, I mean, I'm just gonna go out on a limb and guess.

Speaker 1:
[47:23] Yeah. And then there was this viral 60 Minutes Australia interview that happened just two days before Peter's overdose. So correspondent for 60 Minutes Australia, Adam Hegarty, asked Peters in this like one on one sit down interview, what I thought were entirely reasonable questions given everything that we've discussed. He asks, does Peters identify as an incel? Peters objects to the question. He denies any connection to incels. And again, framed looks maxing as the opposite, something that helps men move beyond this incel label. When Hegarty followed up by then asking about his relationship with figures like Andrew Tate, Peters then accused the interviewer of making the interview political. He then makes a pointed personal attack saying, oh, well, if you want, I can help you find out who your wife cheated on you with, which is a line that he had used in an earlier interview with Piers Morgan, and then walks off set. Side note, my theory that if you watch Bravo's Real Housewives or Reality TV, you understand so much about people like this, where Phaedra Parks on Atlanta Housewives was known for rehearsing reads in her head and then just trying to figure out which one might work in a given circumstance. When one works, she would return to it again. It's like an old, tired housewives trick. This is clearly hip, Peters using that trick of, I cycle through about four or five responses that I have memorized. I'll try to pick one that will hit for a specific circumstance. If it does hit, great, I'll lean on that. And if it doesn't, I don't have any other kind of response. I have no fallback planned. So he says, I can help you figure out who your wife cheated on you with. The interviewer was like, I'm not married. He doesn't have any kind of fallback for that. He's just like, this interview is over and starts taking off the wires to leave abruptly.

Speaker 2:
[49:25] Sad. It's just a sad response. And those seem like totally reasonable questions.

Speaker 1:
[49:32] Yeah. But again, they're not reasonable if you need this ideology and this worldview to be not political. His spokesperson told people about this interview, quote, Clavicular is young, he understands the media, and he can spot a dishonest reporter when he sees one. And so this reporter wasn't dishonest. And that is really the pattern, you know, looks maxing went from in cell forms to TikTok by shedding the language of incels and just repackaging it as, you know, acceptable, reasonable self-improvement. And I think that Peters does that same thing personally. He keeps that ideology, ditches the label, and then has to attack anybody who draws the obvious connection. This is kind of a tangent, but it's something that I see more and more of, where people who are objectively doing things that are clearly political get to just call it non-political, and people will accept that. You know, we saw just this weekend, Joe Rogan, who has described himself as things like, quote, politically homeless, you know, has really been talking critically about Trump, despite explicitly endorsing Trump on his podcast and having Trump on the podcast. He, time and time again, will be like, oh, well, I don't really have a political home. Just last week, Rogan was front and center behind Donald Trump as he signed legislation about psychedelics into law. It's like how athletes will go to the White House. Like in the aftermath of the US Men's Olympic Hockey Team winning gold over Canada, some of the players were photographed wearing Trump hats, like red MAGA hats. And so these are oftentimes the same people that want to say, oh, I'm not political. So not even making a judgment about whether or not they should do this, you don't get to wear a MAGA hat and then also say that you're not political. And so I guess I wanted to point out this trend of how people who are objectively aligning themselves with a very specific political ideology, then kind of get to have it both ways of saying, oh, well, people just look for anything to make it political. No, you're making it political. At least just own that you are making things political. Comedians like Joe Rogan do this all the time and it burns my beans. Where just own that you are aligning with a specific political ideology and have that be that. Don't try to sell me that you're not being political when you're so clearly being political. Don't say that it's us on the left who make everything political. You're wearing a Trump hat. That's political.

Speaker 2:
[52:06] Yeah, and it's not new. It's almost like it's a shorthand way to just write off any accountability for one's actions. Be like, oh, well, let's not get political about this. I'm just saying some things that perhaps have ramifications, but don't be political. Don't hold me to account for what I've said or done.

Speaker 1:
[52:27] Yes, and I think it's just so easy for them to be like, well, right-wing white people stuff, that's not politics. That's just common sense. Good old-fashioned common sense. Black leftists, now that's political, right? It's always back to that Carlin routine with me. It's just a way to be like, my stuff is stuck, their stuff is shit. Oh, my worldview and ideology, that's not political, that's not politics. Their worldview and ideology, now that's political and that's bad. They make everything political. I think it's grounded in this idea of wanting to have it both ways, wanting to align with power and who's in the White House and Trump and all of that, have the power of that while still getting to have the veneer of, oh, I stay out of politics, I don't want to make things political, yada yada. I think that Peters and the way that the looks maxing ideology has been able to shed this very specific grounding in a very specific political ideology is exactly that. And I think that is a little bit of what's happening here because, in my opinion, I think when looks maxing was written about as just some reasonable self-improvement trend on TikTok, as opposed to the actual roots that it has in noxious ideology that it does have, I think it was this kind of way of both laundering the ideology in traditional media and also boosting the celebrity of figures like Peters. And so, that is sort of the meat of what I think is happening here. So it turns out that I have so much more to say about this. So this is going to be a two-part episode. Next week, we'll talk more about traditional media's role in amplifying Peters and what it means for all of us. So let us know what you thought about this first part of the conversation, and don't miss part two. Thanks for watching. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoti.com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unboss Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, write and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.