Clavicular Is a Symptom, Not The Cause (with F.D. Signifier and Kat Tenbarge)

Not this ASMR. This is a visual-based joke, so the people who are only listening to the podcast aren't gonna get it. I bought a hammer for this, guys. I'm doing props now. I'm hitting the microphone with a hammer so that it's a microphone fibers will grow back stronger. Matt, I love the reveal that you didn't have a hammer. I'm happy you said it because I thought the same thing went down. You got to at least have a hammer. You have a tool sent to get out and buy a hammer. It is a nice one to us all. It is neon with grips. 12.99, baby. Hello, hello, and welcome back to a bit fruity. I'm Matt Bernstein. I'm so happy that you're here. I recently spent a weekend at a leadership conference where I was invited in my capacity as a podcaster and where most people were a lot older than me. We're gonna talk more about that later, but I got pulled into multiple conversations over the course of the weekend where people wanted me to explain to them clavicular and looks maxing, mostly because they kept hearing those words from their kids. Clavicular is the online pseudonym for the 20-year-old Braden Peters, a radical men's self-improvement in heavy air quotes influencer who advocates for all manner of aesthetic intervention, including weight loss, GLP1s, peptides, testosterone injections, a variety of what he calls pharmaceuticals, and at times, crystal meth. He's perhaps most famous for his practice of bone smashing, a pseudoscientific wellness practice that involves taking a hammer to your jaw and cheekbones and creating micro-fractures, so the bones will grow back stronger and more pronounced. Heavy on pseudoscience, it's not real, please don't do it. Clavicular has millions of followers across platforms, and I don't think I need to make a strong argument on the morality or virtue of any of this. But while I conceived of this episode as an explainer on clavicular and his influence on young men, I've since noticed how much of the existing media about him, which attempts to do the same thing, is not good. I might argue that I'm mocking you right now. Okay, well, you know, that's a fair perspective. Are you mugging me right now? I don't know. So much of the discourse around clavicular centers around what he does, and the fact that so many young people watch him hand-ringing about how to get him off the internet. But as someone who personally led the charge to get Andrew Tate de platformed five years ago, I can tell you guys that this type of reporting is at best a small fraction of the story, and at worst, not the point at all. If we can't be genuinely curious about what's happening here and why, we'll just keep mocking young, aggrieved people like their zoo animals without changing any of the outcomes. And I get that someone like clavicular is seemingly begging to be gawked at with his outlandish beauty routine, but I also think the fact that he has millions of devoted followers should call upon us to do a deeper inquiry into the conditions that produced whatever's going on here. Reminder, taking something seriously does not mean endorsing it. I do not endorse bone smashing. So we're going to take a deeper look today, and to do that, I am so excited to be joined by two of my favorite people. Welcome back to the show, FD Signifier, YouTube Leftist Video S.A. King, and Kat Tenbarge, writer of Spitfire News. Welcome to the show, guys. Thanks for having us. I'm so excited to talk about this, and hopefully not smash our bones. No bones smashing. I feel pretty satisfied with my bone structure to not employ the use of a hammer. I do have my very first hammer in case anyone ever wants to use it, throughout the course it was. Afterwards, you'll begin by learning how to hang up a painting in the apartment instead of smashing your cheekbones in. I don't do that, my boyfriend does. That's the magic of a gay couple. Before we launch into this. What is your baseline knowledge coming in slash feelings, slash whatever? I have. This is my take on clavicular clavicular. This is the data is response to the rise of Jordan Peterson. So Jordan Peterson was this big deal starting again. I feel like they start like 2018, 2019 is what he really got his like big blow up. He dominated the male attention space. He has since died. What? No, he's not dead, but he, according to his daughter, he might as well be. I don't know the full story. It's weird. There's like a brain worm or mold. I thought that was there already, but continue. So something's going on and he's not the same. He may never return to be present. Whereas Jordan Peterson represented this like elder intellectualized misogyny and a bunch of other things. He was still able to substitute a lot of it into academic mumbo jumbo and the legitimate credentials he had as a former professor and youngian philosophy and he had serious debates with other serious philosophers. And so much like any like major movement, there's always a reactive movement that comes after it. So we go from Jordan Peterson, being telling boys to clean their room and get married. And you know, relatively benign things in between the quasi white supremacist fascistic rhetoric. And that be gets clavicular who is this like Ed Goblin. He's like the end of what the man is fears true desires are plus some level of neural divergence. And so it's just really it's really an interesting kind of profound pendulum swing. Both sort of the ultimate saying purpose is, but it's just a very different vessel for that. I feel like in seeing clavicular and a lot of these specific trends like bone smashing and like taking all of these like supplements and chemicals to try to enhance your appearance. It reminds me like of so many of the trends that I've previously seen in eating disorder and self harm online spaces aimed at predominantly women and like teenage girls in particular. But this is like the male flavor of a lot of that stuff. And I think that like to your point FD like so much of this is on the rise at a time where like fascism is dominating our politics and our culture. And this is a very like fascistic version of personal appearance. It's obviously it's white supremacist in nature. And in line with those white supremacist values, it's like thinness. This Eurocentric beauty standard that emphasizes things like pronounced cheekbones and being extremely thin and being extremely muscular. And for so long, we've seen like this sort of panic, but not actually any solutions presented around the issue of like why are young girls and women doing all these things to themselves. And now it's very interesting to see like the way that the media is similarly, but on the flip side positioning young men engaging in all of these behaviors that are ultimately self harm. Like they are they are self harming in the pursuit of a beauty standard. And one of the arguments that I am going to try to make today is that none of what clavicular is doing is like new. And frankly like that it's not coming from a different place than like any like diet or weight loss or like biggest loser-esque content is I mean, it's brought to those extremes. And I think most notably it's geared towards young men, which is why we take sort of a renewed interest in it. But anyway, we'll get there. Shall I launch into Braden Peters early life? Absolutely. Not a lot of people know that his real name is Braden Peters, which is a very like it's very like a like I've ever seen the the meme of the of the young white like Southern mother holding up the whiteboard. She's she's pregnant. She's like, should I name my kid like Lincoln or barely or Watkin? And it's this feels like very in that vein. Braden is like the most like elder Jen alpha name that I could imagine for like a white boy. He's born on December 17th, 2005 in New Jersey. He's raised in Hoboken. His parents were competitive bodybuilders before he was born, which I think is really interesting. It's also very relevant because I imagine that did a lot to shape his value system around aesthetics. This Morphea is extreme. Basically, you have to have body this Morphea to be a bodybuilder. It's kind of like not possible to not have body this Morphea and be a bodybuilder. Also more than likely anabolic steroid use and the use of other elicit substances to produce a certain look. This starts in the home to pull a somewhat fraught problem. a lot of what he's doing right now and his matter of fact, response to it, is probably a byproduct of what he witnessed as a child. - Mm-hmm. And I feel like that's so crucial because oftentimes in looking at young people who have like self-harming behaviors and eating disorder behaviors, we assume that the internet introduced them to these ideas when like more often than not, they're very complex bio-social disorders that do come from like parents and authority figures instilling these values at a young age and sometimes even the same detrimental behaviors like steroid use. - He went to Seton Hall Preparatory High School, which that won't mean anything to most people, but that is very close to where I grew up. I went to public science high school, but like we would play Seton Hall and all these sports things that I was not involved in, but I heard he went to Seton Hall and I was like, "Oh, like you're from down the street." That's crazy. He was by his own telling a real loner growing up. He has always had an obsessive personality as a young person. I mean, he's still young, but as a younger person, he loved nerf guns and he really loved GTA V, which is the normal thing for young men to love. He is neurodivergent. He talks about that pretty openly. I think it is a really important part of this story that often gets glossed over because I think now a huge part of his content and unspoken part of it is the spectacle of watching a neurodivergent person handle social interactions, especially in a place as like turbocharges Miami. - Can I send you guys a Eurobook photo? Class of 2024. He graduated high school in 2024. - Wow. - I need to like pull myself back from being like a boomer now. - Well, he graduated in what? - It's striking how like almost unrecognizable he is here. Like if you show me this picture with no other context, I don't think I would immediately say that that was clavicular. Like knowing that it's him, I can see the similarities, but he looks strikingly different. - I don't know, I disagree. - Well, maybe it's 'cause I'm older and I've seen, I was a high school teacher and I've seen this. Like I've seen guys. First off, this is a young handsome man. This is not a some type of goober. This is a handsome young man that does not look so different than the person he's become now to me. I could very easily see it, especially when you add a pretty we'll say intense cosmetic routine. I've seen more drastic transformations in fact. - So I don't know, I do get that it is striking in terms of like the vacklessness of his eyes, the like 1,000 yards there, he always has now as he's talking to people. Like this is clearly a masking which is all the conversation. - I also think it's interesting because he's never by his own admission got in plastic surgery. And like, you know, he'll rattle off a list of a million things that he does for his beauty routine. I am of the opinion that a lot of what he's doing doesn't do anything. Like, I think he just like went through a puberty. This is my opinion. I think he lost weight. I mean, he talks about being on a GLP one and having formerly used crystal meth to like weight loss max. (laughing) But like, I don't know. I think he like changed up his style. He figured out his hair gel. I don't, I'm with you after like, I don't think he looks that different. - Well, I have really bad face recognition, so that could all. - No, we're not trying to gang up on the woman. I swear. - Well, okay, I do have to also say I love that his senior quote is, "Albert Einstein, a person who never makes a mistake, never tried anything new." - Oh wow. - Is that even a real Albert Einstein quote? - Probably not, but it works for him. - It works for him. - Sounds made out of. (laughing) - I also just think it's interesting to note here. I posted on the a bit fruity Instagram a story just like teasing like, I'm doing a clavicular episode. Someone responded, this could be fake. But they responded, a guy I met on a park bench after a party we went to got rated, knew him, meaning clavicular and his brother, went to school with him and watched him get beat up. - Oof. - I don't know, of course that could be fake, but I think it's an interesting detail here. - I think it would make sense if he was like bullied or just like experienced that type of like culture at a young age. You would track a lot with like kind of his mentality around how to improve yourself in society. - Yeah, I think we're lucky he's not a school shooter 'cause being nor divergent can expose you to so many risk factors around bullying, around social ostracism, and engaging in manisferian content which he admits to doing. The fact that he did look like this, that he was a, he's like six one. - Shouldn't I know that? Let me Google it. Six two. - Six two. So probably like six feet considering the nature of his work. But I say all that to say like, and I think we're gonna get to this, there is like truth to his worldview of like the way you look being meaningful to how you're treated in society. So as a moderately attractive man who also probably had nor divergent traits growing up as a father of a very handsome young boy who has some nor divergent traits. I can tell you that when your personality doesn't match the initial impression, that can in a weird way create a buffer from some of those worst outcomes. Does that make sense? - Yeah. - Like what I've seen him try to talk to girls. And they're so down, they're so with it initially 'cause he's very attractive. But as he talks, you can see them being like, "Oh, you're weird." - Yeah. And he doesn't get a drink in the face where he does get dismissed eventually. - In high school, Clivicular was very involved with online forums like looksmax.org, other sort of in-sell adjacent forums at age 14, which was also around the time of COVID lockdowns. Clivicular who I should say at this point is still just Braden Peters begins injecting himself with male order testosterone. His parents Kenneth and Lauren found out and every time that they found the testosterone, they would make him throw it away. So he set up a PO box to keep ordering male order testosterone. He graduated high school and began Sacred Heart University, which I believe is in Connecticut in the fall of 2024, and was expelled after just a few weeks for hiding illegal testosterone. But also there is speculation that his involvement with those online looksmaxing communities led for them to docs and report him to the school, 'cause there's all sorts of bullying that goes on in those forums. - Yup. - So needless to say, he was expelled from college after a few weeks, which he now says is like the best thing that ever happened to him, which frankly, he's making a lot of money. So I'm sure he does feel that way. - Yeah, depending on your metric of success, it could have been the best thing that ever happened for him, for his health, probably not. - Before he really blows up online, which is only in the last year everybody, he worked as a wage cook at a restaurant in Massachusetts, and it was during this time that he was making this like looksmaxing content on YouTube. It really blows up in the summer of 2025. - The COVID part of this is really interesting and like generational to me. I feel like we already are experiencing this and we're already like reckoning with this, which is that during the period in 2020, where a lot of like kids were doing online school, a lot of people were doing some sort of quarantine. We saw like the rates of people's online engagement, just like skyrocket. And even people who were not previously extremely online, like became very extremely online during this time period, and now we're kind of reckoning with like the fall out of that, which is that a lot of people fell down radicalization pipelines. And it's no surprise because like looking at the bigger societal portrait here, people were scared and anxious and looking for ways to like control their surroundings. We also know that eating disorders like reported rates of eating disorders, people seeking treatment for eating disorders, skyrocketed in these early days of the pandemic because one of the motivations for wanting to like restrict and control your body is knowing that it is one of the few ways you can control what's happening to you. And so I think that is like really inextricably linked with like the earliest days of the pandemic and the quarantine. And like that is a very generational component of clavicular and his like pyrrico for it to me. - I used to do public health and behavioral health. There's gonna be like some really interesting longitudinal studies in like 15 years about how COVID affected a generation of young people. Both my my children who were very young when COVID started and like a person like clavicular who was coming into high school, so starting high school during COVID, a very critical juncture. My oldest son was in second grade when the lockdown started versus my youngest son who had not started school at all and had to start school on Zoom. And there was like a major difference in like terminal in my household trying to do it. to like manage my younger sons like everything. And then when he got to school finally two years later, there was a lot of work to like get the ball rolling with social skills, etc. Also he's on a spectrum. So I said at the say like that COVID part, I don't even think we're scratching the surface yet. Totally. Braden says he was inspired to start making online content by the likes of Nick Fuentes as well as other fitness influencers. He's cited Rich Piana as a role model. Rich Piana, a bodybuilder and YouTuber who died in 2017 at the age of 46. Cause of death not completely determined but was likely from a combination of things including long-term steroid use. It's very telling that his role model is someone who died relatively young because it's just like it goes along with this really nihilistic worldview where it's like literally like live fast die young like bone smashers get it all. Yes. The more I've gotten into these topics, the more I've really wanted to become like an advocate for young people. And I don't want people to mistake that as like an advocate for what clavicular is telling young people to do. But clavicular and the millions of people who follow him trying not to jump ahead in my argument notes. They feel that way for a reason. They feel nihilistic like that for a reason. And every time like we as the media completely ignore that in favor of just like laughing at these people, we're doing a disservice. And there is a reason. There's whatever. Okay. Keep going. Anyway. In summer 2025, clavicular enters into a content house with a number of other young male fitness streamers. The core of their content was around like fitness and working out, self-improvement, yada yada. Clavicular sort of stands out as a shock shock within the context of this content house. He has a habit of saying the N word. He would just say it to get a reaction out of other people. Like there's clips of him like walking into a restaurant and just like saying the N word and people just kind of like being like what? And I don't know that that aspect of his come up is sort of just like pathetic and desperate to me. Pathetic and desperate. Yes. Effective. My first ever hit tweet was like omega racism. Have you ever seen like the omega racist stuff? Yes. Omega for those who may not know in the who are listening is like a chat app thing where people just were randomly talk to other random people online. And it's a very white thing. And so if you are a person of color of any sort, you're going to get called slurs as soon as it becomes apparent that you're a person of color. And it's always about children. That's for a lot of reasons. But one thing I pointed out is that for white people, racism is a bonding practice. It's one of the ways of which racism is allowed to and white supremacy is allowed to reproduce itself so effectively, is because the other is so thoroughly dehumanized over the course of their lives if they're not forced to engage with people of color at early age. And this is this thing can be said for queer people for immigrants for religious minorities, etc. Then you get to kind of develop this like casual dehumanization of who they are and what they go through. The most one of the most like famous abhorrent examples was the George Floyd challenge when after that story went viral and people were seeing the videos of it. There are white people as a joke, reenacting the murder of George Floyd and like taking pictures themselves while standing on someone else's neck. I bring all this up because historically, young white men have found an easy way to get attention is through taboo. And there's few more taboo terms or things they can do than drop racial slurs against black people and make and make that type of comedy. So obviously offensive, but I find myself being dispassioned about it because it's almost disconnected from the actual traditional uses of the term. It's just to bring attention to themselves. And it works partially in part because of how offensive it is. Him doing that is exactly, join the choirs essentially. Not join the choir. What's the phrase? You get it. It's like, I hate to always bring him up, but this is what Jeffrey Star was doing on my space in 2005. Yeah. Literally the exact same thing. He was running around the streets of LA screaming slurs at unhoused people on the streets and getting boosts online because of that. So it's like it's a tried and true engagement strategy for like young, disaffected white men. And the other thing this reminds me of is last year I interviewed this young man named Stephen Aimeh, who is a former looks Maxer and he's a young black college student. And he told me like he was really into looks Maxing same age as Braden, but he got the unfortunate reckoning with the fact that the community was so racist. He would make content and then he would be confronted with this reality that like he was never going to be considered a like true looks back so because he's black. And so that was his moment of like it pierced the veil of cognitive dissonance and he was like, this is this can't work for me. But for someone like Braden, he's getting validation by doing this. Like the racism is cooked into the recipe of what looks Maxing is. As Kat alluded to earlier, the concept of beauty in a western sense is intrinsically tied to white supremacy. And when you're going, you look at how, you know, old western philosophy figures talked about beauty and aesthetics. It was, you know, I don't think they were thinking specifically about racial hierarchy at the time, but they were creating the building blocks of totally. I mean, to your point, FD, the parasocial bonding experience he was exercising online with a lot of like young white men worked. Clivicular blows up on kick in the fall of 2025. Like this is all super recent. How quickly this all happened. He became one of kick's top streamers, cybar. If you don't know what kick is, it is a sort of right wing aligned version of Twitch. It was created by the same men who founded stake gambling website that a lot of top influencers promote for some ungodly and a soulless reason. The people who made stake made kick after Twitch banned advertising from gambling websites like stake. So kick became a vessel to advertise stake and attracted content creators to the platform with a generous 95 to 5% split of subscription revenue, which is basically unheard of. Clivicular begins making up to hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. He became known for streaming constantly, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days at a time. He moves to Miami. He becomes known for like viral stunts like he injected his then 17 year old girlfriend with fat dissolving peptides in her face to reshape her jaw. Hello, hello, editing Matt here. And I had to insert this point that between the time we recorded this episode and when we are uploading it, the teenager we just described whose name is Alexandra Mendoza, who's now 18, has filed a lawsuit against Clivicular alleging sexual battery, saying that Clivicular gave her too much alcohol to the point where she could not consent to sex, as well as an unauthorized injection of a non-FDA approved drug during the live stream as we just explained to you. So there is that. Like I said, was advocating for the pseudoscientific practices like bone smashing, his usage of testosterone, peptide, GLP ones, crystal meth, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The content itself, I think you guys ever seen Clivicular's content? Mainly just through clips. Only in clips from other people. Just through the clipping economy. And there is a big clipping economy. Basically people who take like one to two minute clips of Clivicular's hours long streams disseminate them on places like Twitter. Clivicular's live streams, if you've never seen them, they are sort of like a cartoonish depiction of like a Miami high roller. He is always either in his mansion, which I believe he's now living in the mansion that was previously home to the Bob House, the young only fans' girls. Miami is a crazy place. But he's always either in the house, on a boat, or in a nightclub. He's usually surrounded by other looks-maxing influencers, young men in tank tops, which I am wearing today. Call that, I don't know, fruity-maxing. You know, they all have a look, like astoundingly wide jaws. He's also usually flanked by young women who all look like Tana Mojo. It's got to Google who that is. Is that going to make my history look weird? No, she's at this point, given the circus of influencers we're describing. She's kind of just like a normie at this point. I do now have trouble. I'll see advertisements for like energy drinks, and I'll be like, I literally cannot tell if this is Tana Mojo, or if it's just a woman who just looks, has made her face look exactly like Tana Mojo. Clivicular is oftentimes taking some sort of drug, put a pin in that. and struggles through daily social interactions. He struggles through talking to women at the club. He struggles talking to other men. Like I said, I think an underdiscussed part of the whole clovicular spectacle is his neurodivergence. - I don't wanna blow my talking points about the media aspect, but I think it's very purposeful that the mainstream media is not engaging with not just that aspect, but all the other parts of what undergirds what he's doing, and how it's working so well for him. - I would like to take just a quick minute from the show to give a shout out to Factor for sponsoring today's episode. Don't you just love when you get home after a long day, you open the fridge, the groceries, they're looking at you, they look good, they're waiting for you to do something with them, but you just don't have it in you to cook. That's just most days for me, so no judgment here. Or maybe you're a meal prepper, and what's looking at you when you open the fridge is the same chicken and rice you've had for dinner for the last four nights. What if there was an easier, more varied way to eat in a pinch? There is. 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And I've boiled that worldview down to the best of my ability and it is this. The only two things that matter most in life are how much money you have and how you look. These are the two main variables that will determine one's success, happiness and opportunities professionally and romantically. Because class ascendance is virtually impossible, you might as well do everything you can to ascend your looks by any means necessary. What I always say is looks maxing is just another version of self-improvement. And I'm simply stating that in terms of ascending your sexual market value, which means how valued you are by women, how easily you're going to succeed in the dating market, it's a lot easier to improve your looks and improve your SMV by that metric than it is to overcome certain disparities with your finances or improving your status. And I want to point out here that the more of his content you watch, the more you realize it's just a rather extreme and male-oriented version of content we've all been very familiar with for a long time. The most prevalent and normalized version of this content could be diet and nutrition influencers who teach people how to quote unquote live their best life. Like for decades, Oprah has made weight loss content and she's promoted weight watchers, she's promoted GLP ones using her own weight loss journey as test domain. Dr. Oz. Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, all of the fake TV doctors with expired licenses. Now members of our federal administration governing who gets healthcare. R.F.K, you know, the biggest loser, one of the most popular reality competition shows in American history, which I think has very comparable messaging to Clavicular's content and is similarly deranged. There's a broader world view to Clavicular's content, but people mostly fixate on his looks maxing methods and they always present it as like this crazy thing an influencer is doing with zero cultural precedent, whereas I think it comes from a very similar place to content where we've all been familiar with for a very long time. This is part of a pattern I see a lot in culture where men start experiencing something that women have been experiencing forever and it's treated as like a wholly unique phenomenon, which it's not. I think there's a lot to gain from understanding Clavicular and his career and his popularity through the lens of eating disorders, which I'm teeing cat up because this is her sweet spot. - This is not an unprecedented phenomenon at all. This is the logical conclusion of our entire culture around beauty and there's this amazing book that I have behind me called Pixel Flash by Ellen Atlanta that is geared toward women and like strictly is about women's experiences, but it applies so well here too, because this idea that we feed young people, which is that like your worth is inherent. It doesn't matter how you look. Like what people value is your kindness, your trustworthiness, your relationship building, your honesty, your integrity. None of that pans out in the real adult world. It is literally the opposite. So when we tell young people that your looks don't matter, we are lying to them because the truth is, your looks matter quite a lot. You are less likely to face discrimination, bullying, you're likely to get better opportunities economically, personally, professionally. People in everyday interactions will treat you better. You're more likely to get an apartment. You're more likely to get a job. All of that does stem from appearance in real life. So these young people's attitudes about the world are not unhinged from reality. They are a direct reflection of the world we have built for them. And we cannot solve these problems by just telling people to raise their self-esteem or get therapy, because they're reacting to the real structural inequalities around beauty standards that are enforced very violently. Clock it. [LAUGHS] This is the thing that tries me crazy. Is that people are like, why would someone do this? Because this is the world that you've created. His worldview, I mentioned, is that the two-- I mean, it's too extreme, right? He says the only two things that matter are appearance and money. That's not true. And I want to flesh out why that's not true. And it's especially not true in the romantic sense, by the way. And that's also the part where he leans in heavily, which I disagree with. But this idea that you aren't treated differently based on how you look is also not true. And so much of the critique of clavicular refuses to engage with the reality that he and millions of his followers are responding to. And I'm like, if we can't do that, we're just pointing and laughing and doing nothing to solve the problem. Am I-- I don't know, am I wrong? No, no, no, you're right. I wanted to add, you said, trigger me. It's not why what someone do that is why would a straight man do that. I think that's a bit key here. Because I think you alluded to earlier that women have been operating with the same, ostensibly depending on perspective, extreme beauty, maintenance, industry, industrial complex, maybe even forever. And men have had plenty of things about wanting to look good. There's-- I grew up watching Hair Club for men commercials. That was a well-known thing I would see. I can't remember the last time I wasn't marketed erection pills since I was a young man, you know. So there's a lot to it. There's actually maybe in that, you can maybe chime in on this. This is actually like a kind of a back-end queer phobic framework that we're dealing with. They're basically telling them, well, you know, you're straight. So why do you care so much about looking good? A normal guy wouldn't act like this, et cetera. I think in a weird way, he's querying how that presents the world by pulling all these straight men into it, the media people are basically-- it's really like, as I'm thinking about it, they're basically being like, dude, this is gay. Why are you doing this? Yes. Yes. And nobody's having a real conversation about the problem. Well, so I have to say this whole thing of like a man is doing all these weight loss techniques and taking steroids and injecting his face with things. I'm like, no one fixated on this story has been to a gay club in a while because the things that these people are doing. It also makes me think about how like, you get similar coverage for like the new trendy. Oftentimes, it's just kind of an illusion. But like, you get this sort of coverage for things that like Kim Kardashian, for example, does. Like, when vampire facials became a thing, it's like they're literally pulling blood out of your face. And then like-- Oh, I do remember that. --like pushing, like, massaging you with your own blood to like, theoretically regenerate your cells or whatever. And like the BBL craze itself, I feel like, also, reminds me of this. But for years, when you talk about the procedures that women do to themselves, it's similar in that there's a lot of like judgment around that narrative. What's less questioned is the underlying. assumption that women should be doing upkeep to our appearances. Women should be caring so much about what we look like. That is the natural order of things. When men do it, that's the question of, why do men need to care about these things? And it reminds me of the cultural discourse from a couple decades ago around the metro-sexual man. It is a capitalism, metro-sexual discourse. I think so. I think that's what this is. That just brings me back to my childhood. I probably told this story before on the show, but I remember going as a kid to buy shoes with my mom at DSW, and I picked up a pair of red converse or something, and she was like, aren't those a little metro? Like, I'm so traumatized by that word, and then fast forward a few years, and I was like, there's something metro. I'm just gay. It's like, and for those who don't remember this discourse, by remembrance of the metro-sexual discourse was basically straight men are investing in personal hygiene, clothes that match, and they're even doing their buying products for their faces. Like, what's going on? But they're not gay, then why would they do this? What's funny is, that's also a recurring thing through history. There's a Twitter thread where a guy is marking every decade there's like an article like, are men manly anymore? And it, like, goes from 2010 to 1910. And it keeps happening over and over again, because masculinity has always been a perilous framework through which to try to organize society. While we're on the topic of eating disorders, I just want to add a sort of like a funny sidebar that there is basically a woman's version of Clavicular, whose name is Liv Schmidt. We don't have time to get really deep into Liv Schmidt today. She is like the head like thin fluencer on sort of like the extreme part of like eating disorder TikTok. She has a very small white woman. Formerly, I think like a signed model, but now just, she sells like a community-oriented course of like, of like how to develop like anorexia, essentially what it is. Is that, is that right? What'd she say? Like, she and Clavicular are two sides of the same coin to a ridiculous degree. She has the exact same worldview. And her worldview is also like you need to be as thin as possible. And that is the way that you will gain like success and opportunities. It's also a grift, much in the same way that I think what Clavicular is doing is like grifting in the sense that like her own opportunities are astroturfed. It's like a snake eating itself. It's like she needs to pretend that she's ultra successful in order to sell courses to other like women and girls. And then by making money off of the grifting course, she can actually like stage things in her life that make her appear very, very successful. So it's all kind of an illusion. But both of them sell these like courses just to men versus women. And the live Schmidt courses are literally like, pay me, you know, X amount of money a month. And I will tell you to eat 400 calories a day. And like, here's how you're going to do it. And the funny thing about Clavicular and live Schmidt is that they are essentially the same person. And they are also beefing. Now we're getting to the fun part. No, it is so funny. There are clips. I'm going to throw one in here if I can find it. But like Liv Schmidt has gone on Clavicular's stream and Clavicular accuses Liv Schmidt essentially of like grifting of selling her own followers bad advice. And it's very funny because it's like the spider men mean pointing at each other. Like that's you. I mean, you just like be nice. Like let's just get through this. Let's just be John. I'm being kind to you on the screen. And like you're just like over here being rude and making passive aggressive comments. Why would I be nice to someone who's intentionally scamming? I'm being nice. You're giving them improper advice that you're selling for thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, you have no idea what you're talking about. So don't ask me to be nice. I'm simply putting you on the spot that you are not an expert in any of the stuff you are simply. No, no, no, you're you're leading women completely astray by lying to them by putting on a front that you're being nice. It's like no, you're just ignorant to any way that they could actually ascend and improve their lives. And if you didn't know, like if it was totally divorced from the context of who Clavicular is, you'd be like, wait, he has a point because he's like, Liv, you're scamming them. You don't know their bodies everywhere. It doesn't even work. And then you're like, wow, he's making a point. And then you go look at what he's selling. And it's the exact same thing. Yeah, yeah. We should certainly touch on the overtly massage andistic elements of Clavicular's worldview. He subscribes to and is driven by something I've talked with you on this podcast about FD, the sexual marketplace value theory or SMV, which is an insell derived theory that all people have a numeric value in the dating marketplace on through 10, primarily determined by money and appearance. He believes women are hypergamous, perhaps more hypergamous than ever, meaning they are exclusively drawn to men above their own rank, which is why it's important as men to reach those top ranks. Lest you never get a girlfriend. I mean, I think with with convict, you're being the topic in particular, it is important to acknowledge the role that desirability and social economic status has in your ability to find love in this country. We live in a capitalist vice and premises nation. So the more capital and the closer you you're proximity to whiteness, the better off for you in most cases and most cases, they're plenty of exceptions, but they wouldn't describe it as that. They, this, you know, according to the insell guides, are Lord and Savior, Elliott Roger, as they would probably say, it's just because women are innately evil and illogical at the same time. The funniest thing that always wants me about this type of rhetoric and these conversations is that these guys don't ever have girlfriends. They never have girlfriends. They've never had wives. They've never had functional relationships. They've never, you know, been in love even possibly a lot of them. So it's always like the blind leading the blind, which is what makes it possible because like if I also have never had any romantic anything, then how would I know that this person is grifting me in line? It's done in crew graphic. If you don't know enough to know what's nonsense, you'll go wholeheartedly into that nonsense. Like this whole world view around dating and relationships is immediately shattered once you spend 10 minutes in a normal real world setting. If you just go to like a mall or an amusement park or a restaurant in any like normal place, you will and look around you and look at the people who are in relationships and look at the families and look at the couples, it's obvious that none of this is true. With Clavicular, you could genuinely make the case that this 20-year-old barely operates in the real world. Like we know from the age of 14 he was spending all of his time for the most part in extreme isolation on these like extremist online platforms. And then the second that he like reaches adulthood or like, you know, shortly after he reaches adulthood, he's now basically shuttled around from like one influencer space to the other. He doesn't spend time in like the real Miami. He goes to these like influencer houses. He really lives in this like surreal hyper reality where maybe the illusion that all of the stuff he believes in is not true for the vast majority of people, maybe that spell is not being broken for him. Yeah. And he will very openly and harshly judge women's appearances in a way that is obviously misogynistic, though I will say, he's kind of a rare bird in the sense that he is almost if not equally critical of men's appearances. Which I think is actually relevant because it speaks to a deeply homoerotic element of the whole looks maxing community and its obsession with like men surveilling other men. Yeah. I find his nature to be queer in a way if that makes sense. Oh, say more. I don't know who I want to say more because I don't know how I feel about that sake. Clivicular, more like queer vicular. It's like the famous quote and I'm forgetting who it's from, but it's the man loving quote. Matt, you know what I'm talking about. I do know what you're talking about, which is basically that like heterosexuality like for men is ultimately man loving because I can't articulate it well. Well, it's basically just the idea that like and you see this so clearly in like the clivicular model of like how he evaluates men and women, which is like ultimately it's in the pursuit of like the ultimate male form, which includes being surrounded by women who love it admire you because of how like structured your face is. But like his obsession, his aesthetic obsession, his values, his judgments, they revolve around other men like he's obsessed with the male form more than anything else. And so in that sense, his whole ideology is very, very male loving. And another interesting thing that doesn't apply so much to clivicular, but like just in general, the manosphere is obviously very misogynistic. It's all like rooted and threaded through with misogyny. So is this like beauty standard culture for women? It's also very misogynistic. In the online pro eating disorder, pro self-harm spaces that I reported on. Women are oftentimes expressing feelings of hatred at themselves. Like this self-harm component is very an expression of internalized misogyny. So it's interesting that throughout this whole culture on both sides of the gender split, the two things at the bottom that unite at all are racism and misogyny. And that is the foundation of this whole culture. - Are you off of me with Yowee? - Oh yeah. - So that the fact that that's to what person is like, no. (laughing) - Wait, you know what? You know what Yowee is, Matt? - It's not even, is Yowee gay? 'Cause like-- - Yowee? - Yowee, Yowee. - How do you spell that? - Y-A-O-R. - Y-A-O-R. (laughing) - It's erotic. It's gay erotic manga. - Oh. - And/or romance. - I'm looking at the pictures. This looks, these, these, I don't know. This looks nice. (laughing) (laughing) - I'm bringing it up because-- - For no, is that not good? - Well, I mean, it depends on, I'm not gonna say whether it's good or not, because I've heard a lot of your arguments. Yowee does have some issues with it in that, and the reason I bring it up a clavicular. Yowee is on the surface, no stensibly queer, but it's done in a way, clearly to appeal to straight women. And so it doesn't really humanize queerness as much as it's just a fetishization of male power and aesthetics. And all the Yowee guys look like clavicular. Like, you won't get too far into any one of them to find at least one of the characters will look like clavicular. I just, there's something to that. I don't, I haven't, I'm not quite fruity enough myself to really, to really dig into this, but I really think there's a there there that I look up. I shout out to whichever queer creator is going to do the queer and clavicular video. But there is a clear-- - Queer. - A people of traditional masculinity to allow him to do this very male centered, very Greek, like the Greeks in the Romans would notoriously had same sex lovers. It wasn't queer though, right? - Mm-hmm. - It was about power. - It was an extension of masculinity that they would have male lovers too. And so that's kind of what I'm getting at. - It might not surprise you to learn that as clavicular blew up, he was quickly absorbed into the mainstream atmosphere with people like Andrew Tate, Sneco, Myron Gaines, Nick Fuentes, and the like, despite not identifying as a political streamer himself. His pension for misogyny obsession with male hierarchies and willingness to say outrageous things made him a natural fit regardless. I will say, clavicular never had the same relationships to overt politics as a lot of these figures during an interview with conservative podcaster Michael Noles. Clavicular said that he would vote for Gavin Newsom over JD Vance if those were the two 2028 candidates because Newsom Mogs Vance. - Next election cycle, who's gonna win? It's gonna be Gavin Newsom against JD Vance because JD Vance is subhuman and Gavin Newsom Mogs. JD Vance is subhuman? - Yeah. - What makes you say that? - He's got a very short, total facial width to height ratio. He's obese, very recessed side profile. Whereas Newsom is like six, three Chad. - His relationship to the overtly political manosphere peaked in January, 2026 when he and all of the figures I just listed went out to a Miami nightclub together, requested the DJ play HH or Hile Hitler by Kanye West and sang along to it. After which the Miami mayor released a statement condemning it, clavicular then met with several Jewish nightclub owners and posted a photo with them on Instagram with the caption, "No more politics, just Mogging." (laughing) - Which is an awesome quote. (laughing) (laughing) - That could have been someone else's high school yearbook quote. - No more politics, just Mogging. (laughing) - Oh, I kind of love that. - This is also like, this is what I mean when I'm like, there's a hyper reality to like clavicular's life. - It's a Tim and Eric's skin. - Yes, and like the way that he exists in Miami at times, like I'm like, this is not real life. This is not like real Miami. These are like these bizarre groups of men who are on camera. It's like reality TV. It's staged for the purpose of online performance and they're all kind of melting their brains by doing it and not engaging with reality. - Yeah. - Also, if you felt lost at any point, my dear listener, I want to establish a few key terms. Probably should have done this earlier, but Mogging, going full boomer. Mogging is, it's like outshining someone and it can be a suffix on any word. Status, Mogging, looks, Mogging, money, Mogging. Maxing is doing something to the extreme, which can also be a suffix on anything like looks, Maxing. - Well, actually I think I have to have to correct you. I have to correct you. I'm gonna, I'm gonna language Mog you really do, definition Mogging. - Okay, please, please, please. - It's important, the caveat is that Maxing isn't to the extreme, is to the greatest possible extent of the individual. And that's where you get like gesture Maxing. I remember when I first heard this with Trans Maxing a couple of years ago, did you argue about that one? - Trans. - With in sales? - Like being as trans as possible? Yeah, so one of the things that the in sale community, which is also very artistic, autistic, artistic, godly, I'm opposite of Mogging with language now. There was like a whole, it went viral like a post within their world, basically saying, if you're a slim wrist, scrawny, short male, you actually can Trans Max to be a mid-tier female, essentially what they were saying. That if you are, if you had. The concept of trans-friendly looks Maxers, I live. - No, it is, well, friendly is a trend. - Right. - If you can do a lot of work there. But yeah, they were basically like, look, if you are too ugly as a guy, you may actually have a chance as a woman. But that's where I first learned the framework of Maxing to be an individual journey. So yeah. - Thank you for intellect Maxing me, or intellect Mogging me. - Fuck. (laughing) - This has convinced me more than anything else that Euphoria creator Sam Levinson must be an insult. - Oh yeah, oh yeah. - Oh yeah. - I knew Kat was gonna find a way to complain about Sam Levinson in here somehow. - All of this seems to track with whatever the ideology of Euphoria is as well. - Do you guys mind if I pee really, really fast? - No, go for it. - That's why I'm actually gonna join you. Well, I will. (laughing) - We're back through Maxing. Be right back. - Just wanted to take a quick break from the show to give a shout out to Rocket Money for sponsoring today's episode. It's getting warmer out. Spring is edging us and you know what that means. Spending probably a little more money. Maybe it doesn't, maybe it doesn't for you. Maybe you're extremely fiscally responsible, but for the rest of us, I know that it is a common thing as it gets warmer out as you're going out more. Treats and things start popping out at you and you just can't hold yourself back from them to spend a little more money when it's warm out. If that sounds like you, Rocket Money might be a nice tool to have in your back pocket. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps you find and cancel unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending and helps you lower your bills so you can grow your savings. The app analyzes your bills, your credit card statements, gives you a dashboard where you can see everything in one place and helps you cancel subscriptions you don't want or don't need anymore with just a few clicks. This is extremely helpful for someone like me. I subscribe to a lot of things, especially for work, like newspapers, online magazines, streaming services that I only need for a very limited amount of time and Rocket Money will always help me make sure that I am canceling them without them charging me more than I want to be charged. Rocket Money has over five million users and has saved them a total of $500 million. It can save the average user $740 annually when using all of the app's premium features. If you'd like to try Rocket Money today, you can head over to rocketmoney.com/frudy. That is rocketmoney.com/frudy. Thanks so much and now let's get back to the show. That's back already. I got piss mauged. (laughing) (laughing) And you see why this is attractive? It's because it's a meme. It's so easily meanable. It's fine. I'm a set of the argument that black women and black queer people are the originators of all internet culture. But the insils and the forechanners, they might be second, low pea. Yes. There's a handful of things they've done that I have to say they cooked with if not for just the comedic utility. Unfortunately, it's usually related to racism and sexism and homophobia, whatever. But if we could reclaim, I would like to reclaim mauging. That's it in this video. Reclaiming, reclaim mauging. Do you guys want to do a little media critique, Maxing? I'll be back. - Absolutely. - So like I said at the top of the episode, I conceived of today's show as an overview of Clavicular's rise and the negative effect he has on young men. I think we've done that up to this point, but then I watched the media's coverage of him, most of which comes across as belligerently unwilling to engage at all in the world that produced Clavicular and made him famous, and realized that if I didn't do that, I'd be wasting your time and doing this subject a disservice. So I essentially just watched hours and hours and hours of Clavicular interviews, and I've pulled a bunch of clips for us to talk about. I want to start with a clip from Clavicular's interview with Adam Friedland, which was by the way the least bad interview. In it, Clavicular is explaining why he'd rather invest in his looks than in student loans. - You could help people doing medical school. I would never go back to school. I'm already doing good enough on social media where I can't even think about the word school in a serious context. - It's not me, a doctor, you could be a good thing, you know. - It's a good job, no? - No, doctors. - But you know all this stuff. Do doctors agree with the stuff you're saying right now? - Doctors are rogue. - I'm telling you, listen to this. These people are literally going to school for 10 years accumulating a (bleep) amount of debt, just to make like, you know, a wage that's not really going to elevate you to a position where you could be and he looks disparity. So it just doesn't really make sense to me. (groaning) - Okay. Like, I have something to say. - I'm ready to hear it. - It is very hard to acknowledge any level of rationality within the things Clavicular says, without it coming across as an endorsement of his whole stick. I'm aware of that and for the sixth time, I'm not endorsing his whole stick. I'm not endorsing you to invest your student loan money in plastic surgery as he goes on to argue for us, saying it won't get you in that much trouble, but he is speaking to a generation of young people. Boys and girls, by the way. He has a large audience across the gender spectrum. I don't know if there are a lot of non-binary Clavicular fans, but, you know. Who have real feelings about the world that this type of rhetoric is tapping into, and I want to say with regard to his specific referencing of like, why become a doctor when I could just look smacks and be an influencer? I just listened to a whole thing about private equity firms buying up medical practices, and how a lot of doctors in places like New York City just helped elect Zora and Mom Donnie, because increasingly doctors who we've always thought are the epitome of like, you've made it. You own your own practice. You have freedom. You aren't part of the working class if you're a doctor. But guess what? When private equity firms start buying up your medical practices and turning you into an employee with strict quotas of how many patients you have to see and how long you can spend with each one, well, now doctors are increasingly identifying as workers. So I think the class analysis here is really interesting. I was just about to say this is a perverted materialist analysis he is giving to us. Exactly. Because what strikes me about Clavicular is he often correctly identifies the problems facing his generation, but offers obviously horrible solutions. But my problem, though, is that the mainstream media coverage of him, which Adam Greenland's not exactly mainstream media coverage, and so I'm not even referring to this interview, but a lot of the coverage can't even concede that he's tapping into real generational despair. Yes, you know, yes. Yeah, so the media, the media's role in general is to be a function of the state in so many ways. That's why even what we're doing now, while we are all independent, right, we don't answer, I'm assuming we don't answer to like greater resources, except for a sponsor or two, even the way these algorithms function, they function for the purpose of manufacturing consent, even when you want to be transgressive or radical or whatever, then it's like, okay, but how can we atomize you as much as possible? How can we create rage cycles with you and your audience? How can we make sure that you're fighting with Hassan or, you know, insert other figure here, instead of actually, you know, building power? And I'll say what to say, for the still very mainstream media, which is not being watched by us as millennials, which is only being watched by boomers and older, for them, it's to reaffirm this image of young people's despair as a bunch of silly kids eating Thai pots, that don't want to show early for work and don't want to work hard, like we did during the good old days when men were men and didn't bone smash. And so like, it doesn't surprise me and that you're describing the media as treating it. They did this to PewDiePie ten years ago. Now, it's becoming harder for them because now more and more, they have to engage with a clavicular in order to bring eyeballs to them because nobody around his age is watching mainstream news. But what it comes down to is they can't engage with him critically, because that would mean engaging with everything critically, you know, and their viewers don't want to hear that. A hundred percent. When I first started reporting on influencers, it was around the time that studies were coming out, like surveys showing that a huge percentage of like Gen Zers and now Gen Alphas, like their dream job was influencer. And a lot of the adults in the room reacted to this by saying, like this generation is so self-centered, so selfish. The idea was that this was the fault of the young people that this was a character flaw and that the reason why they wanted to be influencers instead of astronauts or scientists is because they were just like bad people. When the reality is, the reason that young people want to be influencers is because they see that it is one of the only pathways to actually like moving upwards in class. It is one of the only ways all of the traditional pathways are broken and in fact, like the millennial experience has informed the Gen Z Gen Alpha attitude because millennials did everything what they were told to do. They took out the student loans, they went to four-year colleges, they got bachelor's degrees, they even got master's degrees, they even got PhDs, and then they were ejected into a job market where there were no roles for them and they have to work, regular working class jobs, just to try to survive and pay back those loans. And we hear about this all the time, the younger generations. So of course, we don't want to make the same mistakes. Of course, we want to follow the other pathway that is so visible to us that the mainstream media, despite questioning this, has like broadcast to us, which is like, oh my gosh, all these young people don't even have to work hard and just make millions of dollars on the internet. And the sad reality is that that's not true either. Influencing is also not a pathway to guaranteed or like lazy forms of success, but that's like the new generational fallacy. And young people like feeling this way is not crazy. It is informed by like what actually happened to the generation before us. Yes, 100 million percent. It's the new American dream. And I want to take the pin out of that conference, that leadership conference that I mentioned at the very beginning of the episode that I was at with all of these people who are older than me and very few of whom spend a good amount of time on the internet and a lot of them worked in tech and a lot of them work in AI. And I can tell you, and I was so excited to record a podcast where I could like tell people this, that by the way, guys, when it comes to the future and securing a future that has job stability for young people, the emperor has no clothes. All of these people will say, yes, you know, it's going to change up the job market. But young people understand AI and young people will know how to turn this into new job categories. They have no plan. And we already know that AI is eating the bottom rung of jobs in all of these different industries, leaving young people no path to enter those industries to begin with. And young people, while they might not be able to articulate the very nature of all of this, they know that those opportunities are gone. That is where this nihilism comes up. They know about AI. They know the future that has been guaranteed to young people for the past several decades with college leading to jobs, et cetera, is gone. So when Clavicular says, why take out all these student loans? When I can just be an influencer, well, you can laugh at him all you want. But guess who else feels that way? Basically everyone his age and younger. Yep. So I'm an automobile and I'm 43, right? I'll be 44 in about a month. So I'm of like the last past the post in terms of like, hey, all these structures that we raised you all on and set up for you guys, they actually worked. And like literally, I crossed the finish line just before they all became completely dysfunction. They were kind of breaking down when I got there, but it was just halfway functional enough that I could make something out of myself without ever becoming an influencer, right? And you have to be reminded that's cat kind of alluded to that the rest of these kids, the younger millennials and now the Z's and eventually the Alphas, they're like, this is bullshit. What are you talking about? What do you mean work hard? of the job. Like you? Yeah. Yeah, they know it's a joke. Ironically, I have found like in my years of like working for various mainstream media companies within the media ranks. I think that there is this sort of like resentment toward influencers because I think a lot of people working for the mainstream media actually blame these symptoms to be the cause. Like mainstream journalists, that job market has never been great and now it is literally like it is the last remaining people who are about to be pushed off of a cliff. And I think a lot of journalists feel like influencers took our jobs and so a lot of the coverage of influencers and of social media platforms is very resentful and very angry and very like they they want to stick it to them. They want to humiliate influencers. They want to like knock influencers down a peg. But unfortunately like now it's reaching a really interesting point in like journalism culture because so many journalists are influencers now. Right. They got to get that sub-stack popping. Exactly. Many of the journals who are still at these major publications are like clinging to that idea that like influencers are the enemy instead of the reality, which is like our economic mode of capitalism has failed. We are like to go all plunging into an abyss together and like taking shots at like someone else who's just trying to like survive and thrive is not going to help anybody. That's how I feel watching a lot of this coverage. Speaking of which, Clavicular did an extremely viral interview with a notably handsome interviewer for 60 minutes Australia. The interview is about an hour long focuses heavily on Clavicular's looks maxing tactics, particularly bone smashing. And the interviewer is smirking borderline laughing through the whole thing. And look on one hand I can understand why. But it all just comes across to me as extremely incurious. And for a serious journalistic outlet like 60 minutes to be taking this approach, struck me as just like not doing your job. I want what in what metric? Any status mugging? What do you mean by that? I mean like I might be status mugging you maybe. I don't know you're fine. Like potentially money mugging who's to say, right? I just I don't know. But like you know those are different types of logs that you could achieve on someone. It doesn't only pertain to looks, right? So there's there's all types of mugs. Will your whole persona and stick is about appearance and looks, right? So would you say your looks mugging me right now? I can't really can't really see you to be fair. Okay. It's kind of hard with the light. A camera square far away. So I'll just give it to you. Really? Yeah. I mean I can't see. Why did they leave this in? That the whole interview is like that. Also it's he's saying I can't see you super well because they're not in the same room and he's looking at a laptop screen of this guy that's far away and the light is in his face. Yeah. And even still it strikes me. God like these fucking bad interviewers. I've turned me into a clavicular defender. It's so void of substance. And like I said, all of all of these interviews are like, do you think you're hotter than me? You're 60 minutes. The clavicular clavicular is like 20 and like you know doing some crazy shit. But like what's your excuse? It's really interesting to me that clavicular almost sounds like a resigned college professor explaining to a freshman student. Like what you think is not accurate. I'm trying to explain to you the basis of my culture. And you're just sitting here asking me unserious questions. Was I actually appreciate? Like I appreciate the the farce in it all to an extent. I just often don't get to see straight white men like try to explain the nuances of a of a culture. So I'm just like somebody, somebody on TikTok needs to just doing was anomatic of that as yowee because that is how yowee goes. That's how it goes. It's a yuki in semi. That's this to like rolls of dominance. The unseriousness of it just leaves me to continue down that path. Clavicular is like the Connor story and the interviewer is like the Hudson Williams if this was heated right before he's not where I thought this was going. And like okay another critique of this that I often have of how like mainstream media covers influencers is like the content that is being created whether it's a 60 minutes episode or like a 60 minute long YouTube video. They are competing in the same environments for the same theoretically like audience pool. And a lot of times like mainstream media is subjected to the exact same dynamics that online content creators are. And we talk about this with online content like how striving for virality tends to flatten things because you are going to get more attention with like a quick snappy clip out of context then with a lengthy nuanced discussion that actually like probes systemic factors. And we criticize like viral content and social media content for these dynamics. But the exact same dynamics also exist in mainstream media where there is more value to creating a clip. You're going to get more viewers. You're going to go more viral. If you have a clip of an interviewer asking Clavicular are you mocking me right now? Then if you have an interviewer asking Clavicular about like generational despair and economic anxiety. So really these are two people trying to do kind of the same thing. And that becomes very obvious when you have these interactions like this. And to that end the interviewer then asks Clavicular if he believes what he says. And this is how it goes. Fascinating talking to you. I feel like you're a very different person face to face than the persona you give out online. Do you believe half the stuff you say? Do I believe half the stuff I say? So what are you saying in authentic? I'm just curious that is a lot of what you say on your videos and online about guiding attention more than necessarily it being what you truly believe? In terms of streaming, yeah like a lot of the activities that I do like clubbing every day, doing certain activities like that. Is that something I would do if I wasn't a content creator? No. So that part is I guess you could say just for virality, you know, a pretty sheltered person. I like to spend time to myself ideally. So all those experiences where I'm going out and about talking to people, maybe that's not the most real version of myself. But everything I talk about in regards to looks maxing in my philosophy, that's 100% real. What an earnest response about how he is performing for cameras because he believes that that's all he can do. And to a certain extent, like I don't know, is he wrong? No. Well, two cloviculars point, which is something I never thought I would say. The reaction online to this interview that I saw, the viral reaction to this interview. Don't, don't, we're going to get to it. We're going to get to it. My lips are sealed. Let's watch another clip. The interviewer then says that he thinks personality and character matter more than appearance. Say now, I would disagree and make the argument clap. The character, personality, maturity, intelligence are far more important than appearance. Do you think I'm wrong? Well, bingo, there it is. But those are all perceived entirely differently once again based on your looks. So you're absolutely correct. You're just forgetting that key piece of nuance that is kind of the reason that my message resonates so well. So what is the reaction to that because he's not lying. He just laughs and moves on to the next question. But it's so amazing to me because if you go to the YouTube video of this interview that 60 minutes Australia posted, everyone is like, it's so funny watching this interviewer slowly realize cloviculars insane. I'm like, where? People are going to be like, oh, you're defending. It's clovicular. The leftist prince that was promised. They just don't realize it. He's not, he's obviously, I know you're not being serious, but it's like he is correctly identifying the problem. He's giving the wrong solution, but he's identifying the problem. And the interviewer is like laughing and just being like, that's not true. It's like, hello, you're a gorgeous man doing an on screen interview. Why do you think that is? Right. Poorly. This is again, like this feeds into the nihilism of the young because young people aren't stupid. And like, you see Donald Trump in office, and then you get on here and you're like, being intelligent in kind is what matters most clearly. That's not true. It all contributes to the decline in institutional trust, because when people sit there and tell you things that so blatantly contradict with reality, like you hear that enough times and you're just like, oh, all of the institutions are lying to me. Like, this is how I feel like a lot of young people are sort of like radicalized into like nihilism, and then also these extremely toxic subcultures, because it feels like someone is finally telling them the truth, even if like what is actually being told is this very like skewed portrait of reality, but at least it seems to hit on something that like the mainstream media is not willing to say. - The interviewer persists. The say, "I disagree, Clav. I don't think appearance is as important as you're suggesting." Do you think that if you were bald, if you were fat, that you would be doing this interview, that you would be a journalist? - Yeah, yeah, I'd say. - Well, I would tell you that it's very unlikely that you would have the career that you do. If you didn't have, you know, the looks package, you know, that's really what it comes down to. Like you'll see a lot of media personalities with full heads of hair, generally in shape, and that's what it comes down to. - So you again, I disagree. Do you not think they're a bold, over-white journalist? - Of course I do, but I'm just saying, you would have had to overcome that disparity by being a lot better in other metrics to have the career that you do. - Oh, he's wokamaxing right now. (laughing) - He's literally just describing lookism, which we know is like prejudice based on attract. Like we know that that's a real thing. - Mm-hmm. - If the interviewer was like, had like thought some of this through and actually prepared a thoughtful interview, and I don't mean to like, dog on 60 minutes Australia, but like, engage with the reality that this person is living in, because so is like, we all are. And for you to just be like, well that's not true. Who are some of the most successful on-screen male broadcast journalists? Anderson Cooper, David Murr, attractive fit men with full heads of hair, who, and white, by the way, and chisel jaws. - Yeah. - Yeah, I mean like, it's pretty ridiculous to assert the claim that like tons of people who don't conform to the beauty standard are successful in very visible positions, because it's just not reality. And while yes, there are a lot of journalists who don't conform to beauty standards, like, or aren't conforming in like, the highest echelons of beauty standards, those are not usually the people on camera. Like your pathway in life is going to change based on how people perceive your appearance. This should not be like controversial to say, because it's just reflected in like, all of the available data and reality that we live in. - But what we're actually witnessing in a surreal way that I wasn't expecting before we started this call, is the rejection of clavicular in the process of protecting white supremacy. Not a sentence I thought I was going to make, but what clavicular is like, the white supremacy's greatest trick is maintaining invisibility in society, maintaining imperceptibility. You're not supposed to notice white supremacy. In a recent video, I compared it to dark matter and like the universe. I don't know if anybody's like a science nerd, but dark matter is literally what makes up most of the universe, not stars or proton clouds or whatever, but like literal matter you can't see. But when scientists analyze the math behind the universe, they had to make up the concept of dark matter in order to make the universe function proper. So you don't know it's there, but it's the most thing around us. Same thing of white supremacy. What this interviewer would have to engage with is the white and patriarchal nature of how he is privileged in Western society as not just a good looking, and not just the man, but a good looking straight white man means that he started from at least four or five notches ahead of all of his would be competitors. And it's not a surprise that we've only had straight white male presidents that most of them do not, like Donald Trump is anomalous in that he looks like a weird cartoon character figure. Most of them do look like who we talked about earlier that Mark's JD Vance. - No, Gavin Newsom, yeah. - Most of them look like Gavin Newsom, you know, that is not an accidental thing that is structural and systemic. And so this looks maxing thing is accidentally kind of materialists in this breakdown of like societal forces. And in doing that and then platforming him, they have to completely ignore that part. In order to maintain the narrative around, you know, it's a personality that matters and hard work and bootstraps and hustle, et cetera, et cetera. And he's like, you know, actually the structural framework of look as him and race means that I can be here talking to you versus a woman or woman of color, whatever. So it's actually hilarious, you know, to have to be on the other side of this conversation, defending the woke critique of based clavicular in that case we can say. - I actually wrote here in my notes, this would be like getting an influencer who advocates for the use of skin lightning cream on for an interview. And then being like, well, why would you do that? The world's not racist. It's like, well, neither of you are, what? Like, no, it's, it's, and this is the fundamental conservative worldview of clavicular, right? He's saying the world has all of these structures and he's correct, he's correct in identifying them. And he's saying, that's just the way it is. So you might as well try your hardest to survive and come out on top, less you be a loser and get left behind. But this interviewer is doing nothing for anybody, at least of all the viewer by ignoring the reality that clavicular is saying we should all just do our best to survive under. Like the leftist critique here is like, yeah, we have a world that values those things and prioritizes attractive people in all sorts of ways and we should fight against that. - Yeah. - Yeah. - This reminds me of a conversation I had with someone online where they were like Demi Moore, the star of the substance, they were critiquing her thinness and saying like, well, she just started a movie that was about how bad beauty standards are. And I'm like, you misunderstood the plot of the substance. You misunderstood what the substance was trying to say. The point of the substance is not just like beauty standards are bad. The point of the substance is that women in the entertainment industry have to conform to impossible standards of beauty or else they will lose economic opportunities. They will be ejected once they surpass a certain age, no matter how well they conformed in their use. And that's what people misunderstand about so much of this culture is like, it is inherently conservative because it doesn't want to change these systemic realities. But also like, we can't deny that those systemic realities exist because to do that would also not solve any of them. It's just pretending the problem isn't real. - Somebody who needs to hand this guy a couple of books and we'll see what happens. - Yeah. - We'll have two hussons. - We could fix clavicular. - Wait, you mean clavicular or the journalist? - No, clavicular. - I think they could both read personally, but no shade. The last clip I want to play for you from this interview is at the end when he asks if clavicular is happy. - You don't give off this sense that you're incredibly happy and fulfilled. I'm wondering, clap, do you live a happy fulfilling life? - I would say for the most part I do, I just generally don't want to be doing this right now. I had something outside to do. - What am I caving you from? - I wanted to go to a club. - Is that your idea of fun going to the club? - Well, maybe it's not the most enjoyable activity, but it's gonna be a lot more fun than this. No offense. - What does he like to do? - I mean, it's hard to know what he actually likes to do because he just does whatever he needs to do for his 24 hour streams, which is going out and then going home and then going out and then going home. But it's just so funny as this whole interview on Wines and I watch the full hour. And this guy just becomes like Fox News. It's like, oh, really? You want to go to the club? Is that what you think is fun? Like, yeah, he's fucking 20. - Yeah. (laughing) I hate how much I have to like fucking advocate for fucking clavicular, but he's 20 years old. Of course, he wants to go to the club instead of doing this dog shit 60 minutes interview anyway. - Unfortunately, he humor-mogged the interviewer. - I got. (laughing) - That was revealing and astounding. And I mean, I used to come back to that initial take of like the thing that people sometimes missed about Jordan Peterson. And really, all of the Manusphere folks is that they are responding to the material world in a maladaptive way, right? The reason why these entities are powerful and require us to struggle against them is because they provide community to young men, a more diverse group of young men than people often realize, that are incapable of getting it elsewhere due to the ravages of capitalism and lay capitalism. To have someone like at the beforehand, a Jordan Peterson, who felt like an elder, for a generation where a lot of people were fatherless or an adequate fathering in the home, to engage with their emotional cores that are neglected, creates connection, which is what everybody's missing. They're missing connection to other people. And so for whatever reason, clavicular and his lifestyle makes people feel connected. If you don't acknowledge why that's possible, you're just kind of making content, you know? That's what this really is, just content. - Exactly, feel at space. - Here's where we can take the pin out of what the broad reaction was to this interview, which Kat, do you wanna say? - Well, everyone was like, it's so funny that they put clavicular with this really hot Australian broadcaster. And people were like, he's actually hotter than clavicular. And that was the main takeaway. I saw people take away from this interview, was actually the broadcaster's hotter than him. - The only tweets I saw with hundreds of thousands of likes, were like, oh, I bet clavicular is shaking in his boots, 'cause the interviewer's hotter than him. And I'm like, guess whose worldview you are reinforcing right now? - Yep. - Jesus. - It's very silly to me. - And honestly, scrolling through any social media platform on any given day will reinforce clavicular's worldview, which is why he has it, because if you are a young person who is spending a lot of time on social media, as all people for the most part now are, then of course you're gonna walk away with this worldview, because that is how people treat you. You make snap judgments based on your appearance, and then that dictates how they respond to anything that comes out of your mouth. - Right, well, business. - Around this time, clavicular also does an interview with Pierce Morgan, which is just similarly a joke on the part of Pierce Morgan. Here's a clip. - I might argue that I'm mocking you right now. - Okay, well, you know, that's a fair perspective. Go for it. - For those who don't know what I just said, what does, what does mocking mean? - Basically outshining someone looking better than them, and there's different types of mobs, right? There's status mobs, there's, you know, money mobs. So, you know, you might have me in those categories, but I think we need to add in a little bit of nuance that it's not a looks mug, you know? - You would say that you have the edge over me in looks mogging. - I think I might have you by just a small margin. I don't know, but that could be attributed to youth, you know? - Yeah, but you know, it was back in the day. - Youth, a lot of women find the older dude. A lot of women find the older dude more appealing than the young pimpley youth, you know? - Well, you know, absolutely. - Can I just say-- - This is farcical. - Clivicular could not have been nicer in this situation, where Pierce Morgan is like, "Oh, do you think you'll look smogging me?" And clivicular, and that's a good impression, Matt. - He could have literally said anything, and clivicular was like, maybe by just a hair, but also I have youth on my side. - And then Pierce responds by calling him pimpley? (laughing) - What? - This is content though, this is content. - It is, and I also think that Pierce Morgan and Clivicular are speaking the exact same language. When Pierce Morgan says a lot of women actually find older guys more appealing. Notice he says appealing and not attractive. Because what does Pierce Morgan think that women find more appealing about older men, the fact that they tend to have more money, and more power, and more status. And ultimately, this very misogynistic worldview that Pierce Morgan also possesses is not too dissimilar from Clivicular's worldview. It is just a new generation of like rhetoric around men, women, and the value that they have to provide to each other, but it's all rooted in the exact same thing. - This is what frustrates me about content creation, like amongst us. I haven't watched too many Clivicular videos and no shade to different creators. But all of them have mostly done lefty intellectual version of what Pierce Morgan just did. - Yeah. - It's mostly just like, isn't this guy weird? And I hadn't seen anyone engage with the critique that Clivicular presents to society. And now even more so, 'cause I've noticed, you know, the phrase, everything I've learned about this person is against my will. So that's been me with Clivicular, right? But I've noticed how he has been everywhere, 60 minutes, Adam Friedland, so on and so forth. And I'm like, man, this is a lot of media attention for a guy that clearly doesn't have a whole lot to say. And it isn't even though, like, it's not that engaging. You all have ignored all the other aspects of the man's sphere. Why is this one in particular of such importance to platforming all these spaces? And I realize it's because he's saying the quiet part out loud about the structural frameworks of our society. And they need to engage with it in order to pillory it so it sounds silly. Because this is maybe a bit of a reach. There's a framework of analysis happening here that a handful of these people might catch when to and then they might fuck around and hear this podcast and then start reading some shit and then suddenly you have critical theory. Maxing, you know what I'm saying? - Inshallah, inshallah. - Right, hopefully. Wishful thinking, obviously. But my point is that you can't identify the dark matter. It has to remain invisible. And he's doing that. And they're like, eh, no, you're silly. You're silly, I'm maulging you. - I think that that's really true. And I also think that, and again, this reinforces Clivicular's worldview. But I suspect that another reason why all of these media outlets are willing and eager to profile him is because he is an attractive young man. Again, not endorsing the things he's done to get there, but he has succeeded in becoming very conventionally attractive. And I think he wants to begin with, going back to that yearbook photo. But Asman Gold is a influencer who has a much bigger audience, I think than Clivicular. And you never see the mainstream media talk about that guy. And he is not conventionally attractive. And I think that is a big point. Why? I think like news agencies famously love interviewing hot people and spotlighting hot people's stories. Because again, I hate to say it, but to Clivicular's point, you will be more visible in society if you conform to these beauty standards. And like if you really wanted to talk about people who are influencing young men, you would see more of this cast of male characters online, but you don't. The news doesn't even know that a lot of those guys exist. They literally are invisible to them because they're not bone smashing. On April 14th, 2026, just a couple of weeks ago, Clivicular was at a Miami bar with his fellow looks Maxor and friend, former friend, Andrew Jenik, where he looked extremely out of it, kept reiterating how fucked up he was on whatever drug he'd taken as he walked around this nightclub with his camera crew and fans coming up to him taking selfies before he dropped onto a bench on the side of the club. Andrew Jenik offers him more adderol. What did you last think, Lou? She went natty. You went natty. Then Clivicular goes unconscious and slides onto the ground as cameras cut out. iPhone footage from onlookers show a crew of people rushing him into an ambulance. He was brought to the hospital and treated for an overdose. There's no confirmation on what exactly he overdosed from, but it's rumored to have been a cocktail of drugs, including GHB. He returned to the internet the following day, with a tweet, just got home. That was brutal. All of the substances are just a cope trying to feel neurotypical while being in public, but obviously that isn't a real solution. The worst part of tonight was my face descending from the life support mask and included was a selfie where he has sort of cuts all over his face, perhaps from falling over. It's unclear. And the following night, he was back on stream helping open a club in Miami. The worst part of, I'm trying to understand what he says, we said the worst part tonight was my face descending from the life support mask. Like, did he like fall? Like, what does that mean? Wait, you know what I just realized? It was the life support mask that cut up his face because in the world of looks, Maxine, ascending is what you do when you make yourself look better. That's part of the lingo. And so he's saying his face descended as a result of having to wear the life support mask, which is, that's fucking dark. Yeah, that's, this whole thing is dark. Can we engage with the first part of this, though, which he says all of the substances are just a coat trying to feel neuro-typical? while being in public, but obviously that isn't a real solution, because that is a real thing that neuroate-seppical people deal with including control substances. He's gonna die young and I'm maybe tragic, but he's very nihilistic, so I just tend to struggle with the death of the nihilist sometimes because it's like, you got what you want. So the sadness is how much this probably resonates with a lot of people. And the fact that none of our social authoritative apparatuses are interested in addressing how we produce a clovicular and how he rises to fame and then gets platformed by numerous mainstream figures is what it is. I think one of like my cynical takes on this and like the media treatment of clovicular in particular is like. clovicular in particular. The media is just caching in on this. Like I think that there are some journalists who have written or examined clovicular who are not trying to do that, who are not engaging or writing or spotlighting him maliciously, but I do think that when you zoom out and you look at sort of the history of how the mainstream media engages with these very troubled nihilistic young people, it does start to feel like ambulance chasing. Like this person's not going to be around for that long. Let's like cash in on the phenomenon as much as we can. And by the end of it, we haven't done anything to actually like better the world, let alone like this individual. And in fact, it's sad because it reinforces the idea that if you act this way, you will wind up beyond the cover of magazines, you'll be on TV, you'll get like all of this short-lived attention. Again, it just reinforces the clovicular worldview. You know, if you have young people trying to emulate this model and do the same thing, then I think at some point the media machine has to say like, are we complicit in this? Because we're literally creating a pathway for young people to get attention by doing this and then we're giving them that attention they so desperately crave. I feel like one of my big, if not the biggest conclusion that I have around this whole thing is just that like clovicular is a symptom, not the cause. It's evidence. And my problem with like so much of the coverage is that they aren't willing to engage with the cause because it's hard and it's not sexy. You know, these sorts of the constant coverage around like what this attractive young man's spiraling out. In Miami, that makes for a sexy story that'll get a lot of clicks and a lot of people laughing and then like, maybe he will die. He idolizes the YouTuber bodybuilder who did die. And a lot of those bodybuilders die. Like bodybuilder, the average, I don't know the stats, but like a tons of bodybuilder, inflores and type people die before 40 or in their 40s. I know that there are plenty of people that are like YOLO with with it all. And again, going back to what he saw as a kid, the use of substances to achieve a physical aesthetic is nothing that he would have been unfamiliar with. And I'm sure he's the consequences are what they are. And I feel like here's where I get really earnest. I'm always earnest. But I'm like, if you're listening to this podcast, if somehow this caught you, you're someone in clovicular's target demo, I'm not going to tell you that you don't live in at least to a certain extent, the world that clovicular is describing. Lookism exists. People will treat you differently in many situations based on how you look. And also, that is not a reason for you to just lie down and surrender to that world. Because there are, I don't know. Oh, and that's even hard for me to say. Because I do a lot of stuff to try to make myself look better. Right. I don't live outside of those norms either. I'm wearing all this makeup. I go to the gym every day. I do this and I do that. Like I can't pretend to live outside of it. I'm not the 16 minutes guy. Pretending I live in a world you don't also live in. But we shouldn't. You know, and we should all, I don't know, we should fight for a world and for community building online and in real life, where we can value what I think are objectively more important qualities and one another. All to say, I think we should start empathy maxing. Yes. Exactly. I don't know. I don't know. That's a better name than a one I thought up earlier. The last thing I'll say is it reminds me a little bit of Andrea Dorkins. And now someone who mind you literally just this past week on Twitter, I saw people posting pictures of Andrea Dorkin and being like, she looks like this. And that's why she hates men, which again, reinforces the clavicular worldview. But like part of Andrea Dorkins analysis in right wing women was like right wing women see the world clearly. They just don't want to change it. And I feel like that is a really big point with that separates you out from like the clavicular like nihilism crowd. And like the we recognize that these things are real, but we also actually want to strive for a better world crowd, which is like there is a better version of living that is not just like flaving out young. There is like a version of like looking outside the mainstream media echelon, looking outside just trying to succeed within these narrow pathways that have been designed for us and trying to create different ones. And if only someone could point clavicular in that direction instead of just reinforcing that he's on the right path. Yeah. I have more hope in naive empathy for characters like this than the average person. I was preparing for my outro so I grabbed the hammer. I'm sorry. Maybe it's the hammer. Maybe it's the hammer and sickle. Maybe he greets some votes and it figures it out. But more than likely he's just going to in an inexorably calm himself to the point where this world is no longer feasible. He's going to have a mental breakdown because like this level of masking daily, nightly 24 hour streams is mentally taxing. So like there's some type of harm coming his way. And the aftermath analysis I guess will be interesting and we will learn nothing. I'm nihilist maxing. But I don't know. It's nihilist maxing. I'm usually optimist maxing, but I think we meet in the middle at like realism maxing, which is actually probably closer to what you're saying. But I can still have, but you know what? This is the thing is like I can still have hope for everyone who follows him because they they haven't cashed in all of their life on this road. That's true. That's true. The ministry of stuff tends to be a face for young men, God willing, you know, the younger they get in, usually the longer they stay. But hopefully the vast majority of them make it out and forget life out beyond it. FDN cat. Thank you so much for podcast maxing with me this afternoon. Appreciate you. It was fun. Where can people find more of each of you? I'm at spitfirenews.com. That is my newsletter. I am context maxing over there. And blue sky. I'm on Instagram @cattenmerge. I am mainly on YouTube, but after the signifier, that's the main tent pole channel. I have four or five other supplemental channels for different purposes. But the two most active are the FD stream channel, which is me streaming sometimes it's gaming. Sometimes it's hot takes. And then there's a signifier. B size is more of like a commentary channel where I might talk about this or something else. I don't know. It can't be interchangeable atop. It's just a level of effort I put into it. I'm also barely on blue sky, barely on threads, barely on Instagram. I'm trying to normal life max and dad max. And so I am getting social media marked. This is the thing. It's fun. It's fun. It's fun. Thank you so much for listen maxing today. I so appreciate your time. I know you could have spent it, you know, maxing in all sorts of other ways, but I appreciate that you that you fruity max with us. I love you so much. I hope you continue to have a wonderful day and week and until next time. Keep fruity maxing. Peace and blessings, Joe. So stupid. I have to stop.