00:05:36.180But whereas Jordan Peterson represented this like elder intellectualized misogyny and, you know, a bunch of other things, he was still able to subterfuge a lot of it into academic mumbo jumbo.
00:05:52.120And, you know, the legitimate credentials he had as a former professor and Jungian 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.
00:06:09.520So we go from Jordan Peterson telling boys to clean their room and to get married and, you know, relatively benign things in between the quasi-white supremacist fascistic rhetoric.0.82
00:06:23.320And that begets Clavicular, who is this like id goblin.
00:06:29.340He's like the id of what the manusphere's true desires are, plus some level of neural divergence.
00:06:36.400And so it's just really, it's really an interesting kind of profound pendulum swing.
00:06:41.340Both serve the ultimate same purposes, but it's just a very different vessel for that.
00:06:47.300I feel like in seeing clavicular and a lot of these specific trends, like bone smashing
00:06:52.760and like taking all of these like supplements and chemicals to try to enhance your appearance.
00:06:58.760It reminds me like of so many of the trends that I've previously seen in eating disorder
00:07:04.840and self-harm online spaces aimed at predominantly women and like teenage girls in particular.
00:07:11.860But this is like the male flavor of a lot of that stuff. And I think that like to your point,
00:07:17.460FD, like so much of this is on the rise at a time where like fascism is dominating our politics and
00:07:24.220our culture. And this is a very like fascistic version of personal appearance. It's obviously
00:07:31.020it's white supremacist in nature. And in line with those white supremacist values, it's like
00:07:36.560thinness, this Eurocentric beauty standard that emphasizes things like pronounced cheekbones and
00:07:43.940being extremely thin and being extremely muscular. And for so long, we've seen like this sort of
00:07:50.200panic, but not actually any solutions presented around the issue of like, why are young girls
00:07:55.960and women doing all these things to themselves. And now it's very interesting to see like the way
00:08:01.740that the media is similarly, but on the flip side, positioning young men engaging in all of
00:08:07.360these behaviors that are ultimately self-harm. Like they are self-harming in the pursuit of a
00:08:13.320beauty standard. And one of the arguments that I am going to try to make today is that none of what
00:08:20.180clavicular is doing is like new and frankly like that it's not coming from a different place than
00:08:27.040like any like diet or weight loss or like biggest loser-esque content is I mean it's brought to
00:08:34.380those extremes and I think most notably it's geared towards young men which is why we take
00:08:40.180sort of a renewed interest in it but anyway we'll get there shall I launch into Brayden Peter's
00:08:46.000early life absolutely not a lot of people know that his real name is Brayden Peters which is a
00:08:51.140very like it's very like a like have you ever seen the the the meme of the of the young white
00:08:57.020like southern mother holding up the whiteboard she's she's pregnant she's like should I name my
00:09:01.460kid like Lakin or Braylee or Watkin and it's this feels like very in that vein Brayden is like the
00:09:10.320most like elder gen alpha name that I could imagine for like a white boy. He's born on0.62
00:09:17.120December 17th, 2005 in New Jersey. He's raised in Hoboken. His parents were competitive bodybuilders
00:09:26.620before he was born, which I think is really interesting. It's also very relevant because I
00:09:31.500imagine that did a lot to shape his value system around aesthetics. Dysmorphia is extremely,
00:09:39.860Basically, you have to have body dysmorphia to be a bodybuilder.
00:09:42.980It's kind of like not possible to not have body dysmorphia and be a bodybuilder.
00:09:48.060Also, more than likely, anabolic steroid use and the use of other illicit substances to produce a certain look.
00:09:55.860This starts in the home, to pull a somewhat fraught, problematic phrase.
00:10:01.180A 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.
00:10:08.740And 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 biosocial 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.
00:10:36.760He went to Seton Hall Preparatory High School, which that won't mean anything to most people,
00:10:42.800but that is very close to where I grew up. I went to public high school, but like we would play
00:10:48.940Seton Hall and all these like, you know, sports things that I was not involved in. But I heard
00:10:54.340he went to Seton Hall and I was like, oh, like you're from down the street. That's crazy. He was
00:10:58.140by his own telling a real loner growing up. He has always had an obsessive personality as a young
00:11:06.200person. I mean, he's still young, but as a younger person, he loved Nerf guns and he really loved
00:11:12.100GTA five, which is a normal thing for young men to love. Uh, he is neurodivergent. He talks about
00:11:20.240that pretty openly. I think it is a really important part of this story that often gets
00:11:24.580glossed over because I think now a huge part of his content and unspoken part of it is the
00:11:31.740spectacle of watching a neurodivergent person handle social interactions, especially in a place
00:11:37.340as like turbocharges Miami. Can I send you guys a yearbook photo? Class of 2024. He graduated high
00:11:46.440school in 2024. Wow. I need to like pull myself back from being being like a boomer now where
00:11:52.720he graduated in what? It's striking how like almost unrecognizable he is here. Like if you
00:12:01.600show me this picture with no other context I don't think I would immediately say that that was
00:12:06.280clavicular like knowing that it's him I can see the similarities but he looks strikingly different
00:12:11.420I don't know I disagree I've seen well maybe it's because I'm older and I've seen I was a high school
00:12:18.940teacher and I've seen this like I've seen guys first off this is a young handsome man this is
00:12:26.520not a some type of goober this is a handsome young man that does not look so different than
00:12:32.920the person he's become now to me i could very easily see it um especially when you add a pretty
00:12:39.940we'll say intense cosmetic routine um i've seen more drastic transformations in fact so i don't
00:12:47.240know i i do get that it is striking in terms of like the vacuousness of his eyes the like 1 000
00:12:53.500yard stare he always has now as he's talking to people like this is clearly him masking
00:12:57.840which is this all the conversation i also think it's interesting because he's never by his own
00:13:03.700admission gotten plastic surgery and like you know he'll rattle off a list of a million things that
00:13:09.340he does for his beauty routine i am of the opinion that a lot of what he's doing doesn't do anything
00:13:15.860like i think he just like went through puberty this is my opinion i think he lost weight i mean
00:13:22.000he talks about being on a glp1 and having formerly used crystal meth to like weight loss max
00:13:28.560but like i don't know i think he like changed up his style he figured out his hair gel i don't
00:13:36.380i'm with you after like i don't think he looks that different well i have really bad face
00:13:42.100recognition so that could also no we're not trying to gang up on the woman i swear well okay i do
00:13:48.480have to also say i love that his senior quote is albert einstein a person who never makes a mistake
00:13:54.000never tried anything new oh wow is that even a real albert einstein quote probably not but
00:14:00.300it works for him it sounds made up i also just think it's interesting to note here i posted on
00:14:07.500the a bit fruity instagram a story just like teasing like i'm doing a clavicular episode
00:14:13.340someone responded this could be fake but they responded a guy i met on a park bench after a
00:14:19.500party we went to got raided knew him meaning clavicular and his brother went to school with
00:14:25.260him and watched him get beat up oof i don't know of course that could be fake but i i think it's
00:14:32.960uh an interesting detail here i think it would make sense if he was like bullied or just like
00:14:38.560experienced that type of like culture at a young age it would track a lot with like kind of his
00:14:44.140mentality around how to improve yourself in society yeah yeah i think i think we're lucky
00:14:50.140he's not a school shooter because being neurodivergent can expose you to so many risk
00:14:55.660factors around bullying around social ostracism and joint engaging in manisferian content which
00:15:01.960he admits to doing um the fact that he did look like this that he was a he's like six one shouldn't
00:15:10.280i know that let me google it six two six two um so probably like six feet considering the nature
00:15:17.500of his work but i say all that to say like and i think we're going to get to this there is like
00:15:23.500truth to his worldview of like the way you look being meaningful to how you're treated in society
00:15:30.500So as a moderately attractive man who also probably had neurodivergent traits growing up, as a father of a very handsome young boy who has some neurodivergent 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.
00:16:09.620And he doesn't get a drink in the face, but he does, you know, get dismissed eventually.
00:16:14.220In high school, Clavicular was very involved with online forums like looksmax.org, other sort of incel-adjacent forums.
00:16:27.460At age 14, which was also around the time of COVID lockdowns, Clavicular, who I should say at this point is still just Brayden Peters, begins injecting himself with mail-order testosterone.
00:16:39.140his parents Kenneth and Lauren found out and every time that they found the testosterone they would
00:16:44.820make him throw it away so he set up a P.O. box to keep ordering mail order testosterone he graduated
00:16:52.060high school and began Sacred Heart University which I believe is in Connecticut in the fall of
00:16:57.3602024 and was expelled after just a few weeks for hiding illegal testosterone but also there is
00:17:05.020speculation that his involvement with those online looks maxing communities led for them to
00:17:10.980docs and report him to the school because there's, you know, all sorts of bullying that goes on in
00:17:15.820those forums. Yep. So needless to say, he was expelled from college after a few weeks, which
00:17:22.700he now says is like the best thing that ever happened to him, which frankly, you know, he's
00:17:27.960making a lot of money. So I'm sure he does feel that way. Yeah. Depending on your metric of success,
00:17:33.560It could have been the best thing that ever happened for him.
00:18:28.240And now we're kind of reckoning with like the fallout of that, which is that a lot of people fell down radicalization pipelines.
00:18:36.300And 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.
00:18:46.640We 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.
00:19:06.400And so I think that is, like, really inextricably linked with, like, the earliest days of the pandemic and the quarantine.
00:19:13.460And, like, that is a very generational component of Clavicular and his, like, peer cohort to me.
00:19:19.180I used to do public health and behavioral health.
00:19:22.660There's going to be, like, some really interesting longitudinal studies in, like, 15 years about how COVID affected a generation of young people.
00:19:32.940both my children who were very young when COVID started and a person like Clavicular who was
00:19:40.500coming into high school. So starting high school during COVID, a very critical juncture. My oldest
00:19:46.880son was in second grade when the lockdown started versus my youngest son who had not started school
00:19:53.240at all and had to start school on Zoom. And there was a major difference in turmoil in my household
00:19:59.560trying to like manage my younger sons like everything and then when he got to school
00:20:05.360finally two years later uh there was a lot of work to like get the ball rolling with social
00:20:11.360skills etc also he's on the spectrum so i said to say like that covet part i don't even think
00:20:16.960we're scratching the surface yet totally brayden says he was inspired to start making online content
00:20:23.540by the likes of Nick Fuentes, as well as other fitness influencers. He's cited Rich Piana as a
00:20:31.760role model. Rich Piana, a bodybuilder and YouTuber who died in 2017 at the age of 46. Cause of death
00:20:39.640not completely determined, but was likely from a combination of things, including long-term
00:20:44.680steroid use. It's very telling that his role model is someone who died relatively young,
00:20:51.520Because 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.0.59
00:21:03.320The more I've gotten into these topics, the more I've really wanted to become like an advocate for young people.
00:21:10.140And I don't want people to mistake that as like an advocate for what Clavicular is telling young people to do.
00:21:15.740but clavicular and the millions of people who follow him trying not to jump ahead in my argument
00:21:20.780notes they feel that way for a reason they feel nihilistic like that for a reason and every time
00:21:28.060like we as the media completely ignore that in favor of just like laughing at these people
00:21:34.280we're doing a disservice and there is a reason there whatever okay keep going anyway in summer
00:21:41.4002025 clavicular enters into a content house with a number of other young male fitness streamers
00:21:49.680the core of their content was around like fitness and working out self-improvement yada yada clavicular
00:21:56.380sort of stands out as a shock jock within the context of this content house he has a habit of
00:22:04.500saying the n-word he would just say it to get a reaction out of other people like there's clips
00:22:09.780of him like walking into a restaurant and just like saying the n-word and people just kind of
00:22:14.640like being like what and i don't know that that aspect of his come up is sort of just like0.96
00:22:19.740pathetic and desperate to me pathetic and desperate yes effective my first ever hit tweet0.97
00:22:27.380was like omegle racism have you ever seen like the omegle racist stuff yes omegle for those who0.99
00:22:34.880may not know who are listening, it's like a chat app thing where people just will randomly
00:22:40.860talk to other random people online. And it's a very white thing. And so if you are a person of
00:22:48.440color of any sort, you are going to get called slurs as soon as it becomes apparent that you're
00:22:53.520a person of color. And it's always by children. That's for a lot of reasons. But one thing I0.95
00:22:58.640pointed out is that for white people, racism is a bonding practice. It's one of the ways in which0.61
00:23:06.780racism is allowed to, and white supremacy is allowed to reproduce itself so effectively,
00:23:11.040is because the other is so thoroughly dehumanized over the course of their lives if they're not
00:23:17.280forced to engage with people of color at an early age. And this is, this thing can be said for queer0.71
00:23:22.320people, for immigrants, for religious minorities, et cetera, then you get to kind of develop this
00:23:28.240casual dehumanization of who they are and what they go through. One of the most famous abhorrent
00:23:35.280examples was the George Floyd challenge, when after that story went viral and people were0.59
00:23:40.860seeing the videos of it, there are white people, as a joke, reenacting the murder of George Floyd
00:23:46.180and taking pictures of themselves while standing on someone else's neck. I bring all this up1.00
00:23:51.080Because 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 that type of comedy.
00:24:06.980It's obviously offensive, but I find myself being dispassionate about it because it's almost disconnected from the actual traditional uses of the term.
00:24:17.500It's just to bring attention to themselves.
00:24:19.540And it works partially in part because of how offensive it is.
00:24:25.400Him doing that is exactly join the choir, essentially.
00:24:43.380He was running around the streets of LA screaming slurs at unhoused people on the streets and getting boosts online because of that.
00:24:51.540So it's like, it's a tried and true engagement strategy for like young, disaffected white men.
00:24:57.880And the other thing this reminds me of is last year, I interviewed this young man named Steven Ima, 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 Brayden. But he got the unfortunate reckoning with the fact that the community was so racist.
00:25:19.900he would make content and then he would be confronted with this reality that like he was
00:25:25.400never going to be considered a like true looks max or because he's black and so that was his
00:25:31.600moment of like it pierced the veil of cognitive dissonance and he was like this is this can't
00:25:36.940work for me but for someone like brayden he's getting validation by doing this like the racism
00:25:42.640is cooked into the recipe of what looks maxing is as kat alluded to earlier the concept of beauty
00:25:51.620in a western sense is intrinsically tied to white supremacy when you go and you look at how
00:25:57.480you know old western philosophy um figures talked about beauty and aesthetics it was you know i
00:26:04.060don't think they were thinking specifically about racial hierarchy at the time but they were creating
00:26:08.720the building blocks of it totally i mean to your point fd the parasocial bonding experience he was
00:26:14.460exercising online with a lot of like young white men worked clavicular blows up on kick in the fall
00:26:21.960of 2025 like this is all super recent how quickly this all happened he became one of kick's top
00:26:28.300streamers sidebar if you don't know what kick is it is a sort of right-wing aligned version of twitch
00:26:35.100It was created by the same men who founded Steak, a gambling website that a lot of top
00:26:42.920influencers promote for some ungodly and soulless reason.
00:26:47.660The people who made Steak made Kik after Twitch banned advertising from gambling websites
00:27:52.460saying that Clavicular gave her too much alcohol
00:27:55.740to the point where she could not consent to sex.
00:27:58.200as well as an unauthorized injection of a non-fda approved drug during the live stream as we just
00:28:05.480explained to you so so there is that he like i said was advocating for the pseudoscientific
00:28:14.360practices like bone smashing his usage of testosterone peptides glp1s crystal meth
00:28:20.760etc etc etc the content itself have you guys ever seen claviculars content mainly just through
00:28:27.880only in clips from other people just through the clipping economy yeah and there is a big
00:28:32.540clipping economy basically people who take like one to two minute clips of clavicular's hours
00:28:38.400long streams uh disseminate them on places like twitter clavicular's live streams if you've never
00:28:44.380seen them they are sort of like a cartoonish depiction of like a miami high roller he is
00:28:51.560always either in his mansion which I believe he's now living in the mansion that was previously
00:28:58.800home to the bop house the young only fans girls Miami is a crazy place but he's always either in
00:29:05.460the house on a boat or in a nightclub he's usually surrounded by other looks maxing influencers
00:29:12.040young men in tank tops which I am wearing today I call that I don't know fruity maxing you know
00:29:20.960they all they all have a look like astoundingly wide jaws uh he's also usually flanked by young
00:29:27.460women who all look like tana mojo gotta google who that is is that gonna make my my history look1.00
00:29:36.080weird no she's at this point given the circus of influencers we're describing she's kind of1.00
00:29:41.020just like a normie at this point i do now have trouble i'll see advertisements for like energy
00:29:45.720drinks and I'll be like, I literally cannot tell if this is Tana Mongeau or if this is a woman who
00:29:52.020just looks, has made her face look exactly like Tana Mongeau. Clavicular is oftentimes taking some
00:29:58.020sort of drug, put a pin in that, and struggles through daily social interactions. He struggles
00:30:03.980through talking to women at the club. He struggles talking to other men. Like I said, I think an
00:30:08.980under-discussed part of the whole clavicular spectacle is his neurodivergence. I don't want
00:30:15.280to, you know, blow my talking points about the media aspect, but I think it's very purposeful
00:30:23.460that the mainstream media is not engaging with not just that aspect, but all the other
00:30:29.880parts of what undergirds what he's doing, you know, and how it's working so well for him.
00:30:37.500I would like to take just a quick minute from the show to give a shout out to Factor for
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00:32:06.580a new subscription. That is factormeals.com slash fruity50 off. Thanks so much to Factor,
00:32:13.760and now let's get back to the show. I want to talk for a little bit about Clavicular's worldview.
00:32:21.540Why is he doing any of this? And I've boiled that worldview down to the best of my ability,
00:32:26.560and it is this. The only two things that matter most in life are how much money you have and how
00:32:32.740you look. These are the two main variables that will determine one's success, happiness, and
00:32:38.860opportunities, professionally and romantically. Because class ascendance is virtually impossible,
00:32:45.460you might as well do everything you can to ascend your looks by any means necessary.
00:32:50.680What I always say is, you know, looks maxing is just another version of self-improvement.
00:32:55.600Yeah. And I'm simply stating that in terms of ascending, your sexual market value,
00:33:01.960which means you know how valued you are by women how easily you're going to succeed in the dating
00:33:08.480market it's a lot easier to improve your looks and improve your smv by that metric than it is
00:33:15.820to overcome you know certain disparities with your finances or improving your status and i want to
00:33:22.820point out here that like the more of his content you watch the more you realize it's just a rather
00:33:27.880extreme and male-oriented version of content we've all been very familiar with for a long time.
00:33:33.980The most prevalent and normalized version of this content could be diet and nutrition influencers
00:33:40.000who teach people how to quote-unquote live their best life. Like for decades, Oprah has made weight
00:33:46.460loss content and she's promoted Weight Watchers, she's promoted GLP-1s using her own weight loss
00:33:52.380journey as testimony. Dr. Oz. Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, all of the fake TV doctors with expired licenses.
00:33:59.160Now members of our federal administration governing who gets health care. RFK.
00:34:05.000You know, The Biggest Loser, one of the most popular reality competition shows in American
00:34:09.940history, which I think has very comparable messaging to Clavicular's content and is
00:34:15.380similarly deranged. There's a broader worldview to Clavicular's content, but people mostly fixate
00:34:21.200on his looks maxing methods and they always present it as like this crazy thing an influencer
00:34:27.240is doing with zero cultural precedent. Whereas I think it comes from a very similar place to
00:34:32.800content where we've all been familiar with for a very long time. This is part of a pattern I see a
00:34:37.460lot in culture where men start experiencing something that women have been experiencing
00:34:42.060forever and it's treated as like a wholly unique phenomenon, which it's not. I think there's a lot
00:34:48.180to gain from understanding clavicular and his career and his popularity through the lens of
00:34:53.300eating disorders, which I'm teeing Kat up because this is her sweet spot. This is not an unprecedented
00:34:59.060phenomenon at all. This is the logical conclusion of our entire culture around beauty. And there's
00:35:07.420this amazing book that I have behind me called Pixel Flesh by Ellen Atlanta that is geared
00:35:13.060toward women and like strictly is about women's experiences, but it applies so well here too,
00:35:18.740because this idea that we feed young people, which is that like your worth is inherent.
00:35:25.180It doesn't matter how you look. Like what people value is your kindness, your trustworthiness,
00:35:30.740your relationship building, your honesty, your integrity. None of that pans out in the real
00:35:36.920adult world. It is literally the opposite. So when we tell young people that your looks don't matter,
00:35:43.060we are lying to them because the truth is your looks matter quite a lot. You are less likely to
00:35:50.660face discrimination, bullying. You're likely to get better opportunities economically, personally,
00:35:57.540professionally. People in everyday interactions will treat you better. You're more likely to get
00:36:02.080an apartment. You're more likely to get a job. All of that does stem from appearance in real life.
00:36:09.040So these young people's attitudes about the world are not unhinged from reality. They are a direct reflection of, like, the world we have built for them. And we cannot solve these problems by just telling people to, like, raise their self-esteem or get therapy because they're reacting to, like, the real structural inequalities around beauty standards that are enforced very violently.
00:36:35.500this is the thing that drives me crazy is that people are like why would someone do this
00:36:45.720because this is the world that you've created his worldview i mentioned is that the two i mean
00:36:51.500it's too extreme right he says the only two things that matter are appearance and money
00:36:55.660that's not true and there's and i want to flesh out why that's not true and it's especially not
00:37:00.860true in the romantic sense by the way and that's also the part where he leans in heavily which i
00:37:05.120disagree with but this idea that like you aren't treated differently based on how you look is also
00:37:12.600not true and so much of the critique of of clavicular refuses to engage with the reality
00:37:18.160that he and millions of his followers are responding to and i'm like if we can't do that
00:37:23.100we're just we're just like pointing and laughing and doing nothing to solve the problem am i i
00:37:27.860don't know am i wrong no no no you're right i wanted to add you something you said trigger me
00:37:32.460it's not why would someone do that it's why would a straight man do that i think that's a big key
00:37:40.700here because i think you you alluded to earlier that women have been operating with the same1.00
00:37:46.760ostensibly uh depending on perspective extreme beauty maintenance industry industrial complex
00:37:54.540maybe even uh forever and men have had plenty of like things about wanting to look good there's
00:38:00.900You know, 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.
00:38:16.660There's actually maybe in that you can maybe like chime in on this.0.78
00:38:21.160This is actually like a kind of a back end queer phobic framework that we're dealing with.
00:38:26.660It's like they're basically telling them, well, you know, you're straight.
00:38:29.960So why do you care so much about looking good?
00:38:32.360A normal guy wouldn't act like this, etc.0.80
00:38:34.620I think in a weird way, he's queering how that presents the world by pulling all these straight men into it.0.87
00:38:41.600The media people are basically like, it's really like, as I'm thinking about it, they're basically being like, dude, this is gay.0.76
00:38:50.900And like nobody's having a real conversation about the problem.
00:38:55.120Well, 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.0.98
00:39:07.540I'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.
00:39:18.440it also makes me think about how like you get similar coverage for like the new trendy oftentimes
00:39:26.100it's just kind of an illusion but like you get this sort of coverage for things that like kim
00:39:29.780kardashian for example does like when vampire facials became a thing it's like they're literally
00:39:35.500pulling blood out of your face and then like oh i do remember that like pushing like massaging you
00:39:40.180with your own blood to like theoretically regenerate your cells or whatever and like the
00:39:45.200bbl craze itself i feel like also reminds me of this but for years when you talk about the
00:39:51.060procedures that women do to themselves it's it's similar in that there's a lot of like judgment
00:39:56.640around that narrative what's less questioned is the underlying assumption that like women should
00:40:02.020be doing upkeep to our appearances like women should be like caring so much about what we look
00:40:07.000like like that is like the natural order of things when men do it that's the question of is like why
00:40:12.780do men need to care about these things? And it reminds me of the cultural discourse from a couple
00:40:17.880decades ago around like the metrosexual man, which is a... Is this late capitalism metrosexual
00:40:25.380discourse? I think so. I think that's what this is. That just brings me back to my childhood.
00:40:31.020I've probably told this story before on the show, but I remember like going as a kid to buy shoes
00:40:36.340with my mom at DSW and I picked up a pair of like red Converse or something. And she was like,
00:40:40.900aren't those a little metro like I'm so traumatized by that word and then fast forward a few years
00:40:47.180and I was like it's not metro I'm just gay it's like and like for those who don't remember this
00:40:53.720discourse like my remembrance of like the metrosexual discourse was basically like
00:40:58.180straight men are investing in personal hygiene clothes that match and they're even like doing0.90
00:41:05.960like we like they're buying products for their faces like what's going on but they're not gay0.93
00:41:11.560then why would they do this what's funny is that's also like a recurring thing through history
00:41:17.680there's a twitter thread where a guy is like marking every like decade there's like an article
00:41:25.380like are men manly anymore and it like goes from 2010 to 1910 and it keeps happening over and over
00:41:33.020again because masculinity has always been a perilous framework with through which to try to
00:41:37.820organize society while we're on the topic of eating disorders i just want to add a sort of0.94
00:41:43.220like a funny sidebar that there is basically a woman's version of clavicular whose name is liv1.00
00:41:49.540schmidt we don't have time to get really deep into liv schmidt today she is like the head like0.98
00:41:55.640influencer on sort of like the extreme part of like eating disorder tiktok she is a very small1.00
00:42:01.680white woman formerly i think like a signed model but now just she sells like a community oriented1.00
00:42:07.680course of like of like how to develop like anorexia essentially is what it is is that is1.00
00:42:13.080that right would you say like she and clavicular are two sides of the same coin to a ridiculous0.81
00:42:18.440degree she has the exact same worldview and her worldview is also like you need to be as thin as
00:42:24.720possible and that is the way that you will gain like success and opportunities it's also a grift
00:42:30.880much in the same way that I think what Clavicular is doing is grifting in the sense that her own
00:42:36.280opportunities are astroturfed. It's like a snake eating itself. It's like she needs to pretend
00:42:41.040that she's ultra successful in order to sell courses to other women and girls. And then by1.00
00:42:47.540making money off of the grifting course, she can actually stage things in her life that make her
00:42:53.060appear very, very successful. So it's all kind of an illusion. But both of them sell these courses
00:42:59.360just to men versus women and the live schmidt courses are literally like pay me you know x
00:43:05.060amount of money a month and i will tell you to eat 400 calories a day and like here's how you're
00:43:10.760gonna do it and the funny thing about clavicular and live schmidt is that they are essentially the
00:43:16.320same person and they are also beefing now we're getting to the fun part no it is so funny there
00:43:26.520are clips i'm gonna throw one in here if i can find it but like liv schmidt has gone on clavicular
00:43:31.680stream and clavicular accuses liv schmidt essentially of like grifting of selling her
00:43:37.380own followers bad advice and it's very funny because it's like the spider-man meme pointing
00:43:41.940at each other i'm like that's you can you just like be nice like let's just get through this
00:43:47.160let's just be done i'm being kind to you on the screen and like you're just like
00:43:50.380well over here being rude and making passive aggressive comments why would i be nice to
00:43:54.300someone who's intentionally scamming you're giving them improper advice that you're selling
00:43:59.460for thousands of dollars meanwhile you have no idea what you're talking about so don't ask me
00:44:03.440to be nice i'm simply putting you on the spot that you are not an expert in any of the stuff
00:44:09.400you are simply no no you're you're leading women uh completely astray by lying to them0.94
00:44:17.640by putting on a front that you're being nice it's like no you're just ignorant to any way
00:44:24.100that they could actually ascend and improve their life.
00:53:22.400His 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 H.H. or Heil Hitler by Kanye West and sang along to it.
00:53:40.140After 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.0.92
00:59:11.500and you see why this is attractive it's because it's a meme it's so easily mean it's fun i'm a0.57
00:59:25.140i've said of the argument that black women and black queer people are the like originators of0.51
00:59:31.820all internet culture but the incels and the four channers they might be second low-key yes there's0.98
00:59:40.480a handful of things they've done that i have to say they cooked with if not for just the comedic0.99
00:59:45.400utility unfortunately it's usually related to racism and sexism and homophobia whatever
00:59:49.600but if you could if we could reclaim i would like to reclaim mogging that's the name of this video
00:59:55.080reclaiming reclaim mogging do you guys want to do a little media critique maxing absolutely yes
01:00:00.940So 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.
01:00:10.560I think we've done that up to this point.
01:00:12.660But 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.
01:00:25.260and realize that if I didn't do that, I'd be wasting your time and doing this subject a
01:00:32.300disservice. So I essentially just watched hours and hours and hours of Clavicular interviews,
01:00:37.520and I pulled a bunch of clips for us to talk about. I want to start with a clip from Clavicular's
01:00:42.720interview with Adam Friedland, which was, by the way, the least bad interview. In it,
01:00:48.380Clavicular is explaining why he'd rather invest in his looks than in student loans.
01:00:54.640you could help people doing medical school i would never go back to school i'm already doing
01:00:59.680good enough on social media where i can't even think about the word school in a serious context
01:01:04.460you could be a doctor you could be a good it's a good job no no doctors but you know all this
01:01:09.360stuff do doctors agree with the stuff you're saying right now or doctors are you're rogue
01:01:13.600i'm telling you listen this these people are literally going to school for 10 years accumulating
01:01:19.440a amount of debt just to make like you know a wage that's not really going to
01:01:26.560elevate you to a position where you could beat any looks disparity so it just doesn't really
01:01:31.560make sense to me okay like i have something to say i'm ready to hear it it is very hard to
01:01:43.000acknowledge any level of rationality within the things clavicular says without it coming across
01:01:48.140as an endorsement of his whole shtick.
01:01:50.180I'm aware of that, and for the sixth time,
01:02:09.320He has a large audience across the gender spectrum.
01:02:12.780I don't know if there are a lot of non-binary clavicular fans,
01:02:15.340But, you know, who have real feelings about the world that this type of rhetoric is tapping into.
01:02:22.560And I want to say with regard to his specific referencing of like, why become a doctor when I could just look, Max, and be an influencer?
01:02:31.100I 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 Zoran Mamdani 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.
01:02:56.620But 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.
01:03:12.280So I think the class analysis here is really interesting.
01:03:16.560I was just about to say this is a perverted materialist analysis he is giving to us.
01:03:21.680Exactly. 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 Freeland'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.
01:03:49.600Yes. 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, like, right, we don't answer, I'm assuming we don't answer to like greater resources, except for a sponsor or two.
01:04:07.780Even 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?
01:04:33.420And I say that 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 Tide Pods that don't want to don't want to show up early for work and don't want to work hard like we did during the good old days when when men were men and didn't bone smash.
01:05:02.500And so, like, it doesn't surprise me that you're describing the media as treating it. They did this to PewDiePie 10 years ago. Now, it's becoming harder for them because now more and more they have to engage with the clavicular in order to bring eyeballs to them because nobody around his age is watching mainstream news.
01:05:23.380But 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.
01:05:35.120A hundred percent. When I first started reporting on influencers, it was around the time that
01:05:41.200studies were coming out, like surveys showing that a huge percentage of like Gen Z-ers and
01:05:47.100now Gen Alpha-ers, like their dream job was influencer. And a lot of the adults in the room
01:05:53.420reacted to this by saying like, this generation is so self-centered, so selfish. The idea was
01:06:00.520that this was the fault of the young people that this was in this was a character flaw and that
01:06:05.960the reason why they wanted to be influencers instead of astronauts or scientists is because
01:06:10.560they were just like bad people when the reality is the reason that young people want to be
01:06:16.460influencers is because they see that it is one of the only pathways to actually like moving upwards
01:06:23.460in class it is one of the only ways all of the traditional pathways are broken and in fact like
01:06:29.060the millennial experience has informed the Gen Z, Gen Alpha attitude because millennials did
01:06:35.380everything what they were told to do. They took out the student loans. They went to four-year
01:06:39.740colleges. They got bachelor's degrees. They even got master's degrees. They even got PhDs.
01:06:45.200And then they were ejected into a job market where there were no roles for them. And they have to
01:06:51.140work regular working class jobs just to try to survive and pay back those loans. And we hear
01:06:56.980about this all the time, the younger generations. So of course, we don't want to make the same
01:07:01.300mistakes. Of course, we want to follow the other pathway that is so visible to us that the
01:07:07.260mainstream media, despite questioning this, has broadcast to us, which is like, oh my gosh,
01:07:12.560all these young people don't even have to work hard and just make millions of dollars
01:07:15.720on the internet. And the sad reality is that that's not true either. Influencing is also
01:07:21.960not a pathway to guaranteed or like lazy forms of success. But that's like the new generational1.00
01:07:28.560fallacy. And young people like feeling this way is not crazy. It is informed by like what actually
01:07:35.500happened to the generation before us. Yes, 100 million percent. It's the new American dream.
01:07:41.760And I want to take the pin out of that conference, that leadership conference that I mentioned at
01:07:46.720the very beginning of the episode that I was at with all of these people who are older than me
01:07:50.680and very few of whom spend a good amount of time on the internet. And a lot of them worked in tech
01:07:56.200and a lot of them work in AI. And I can tell you, and I was so excited to record a podcast where I
01:08:04.200could like tell people this, that by the way, guys, when it comes to the future and securing
01:08:10.200a future that has job stability for young people, the emperor has no clothes. All of these people
01:08:16.380will say, yes, it's going to change up the job market, but young people understand AI and young
01:08:23.040people will know how to turn this into new job categories. They have no plan. And we already
01:08:30.080know that AI is eating the bottom rung of jobs in all of these different industries, leaving young
01:08:36.900people no path to enter those industries to begin with. And young people, while they might not be
01:08:42.540able to articulate the very nature of all of this they know that those opportunities are gone
01:08:48.260that is where this nihilism comes from they know about ai they know the future that has been
01:08:54.620guaranteed to young people for the past several decades with college leading to jobs etc is gone
01:09:00.560so when clavicular says why take out all these student loans when i can just be an influencer
01:09:06.720well you can laugh at him all you want but guess who else feels that way basically everyone his
01:09:12.420age and younger yep yeah so i'm an older melina i'm 43 right i'll be 44 in about a month you know
01:09:19.240i'm of like the last past the the the post in terms of like hey all these structures that we
01:09:25.760raised you all on and set up for you guys they actually work and like literally i crossed the
01:09:32.520finish line just before they all became completely dysfunctional they were kind of breaking down
01:09:38.320when I got there, but it was just halfway functional enough that I could make something
01:09:43.580out of myself without ever becoming an influencer, right? But you have to be reminded, as Kat kind
01:09:48.780of alluded to, that the rest of these kids, the younger millennials and now the Zs and eventually0.99
01:09:53.560the alphas, they're like, this is bullshit. What are you talking about? What do you mean work hard,0.99
01:10:00.040get a job? Like you? Yeah. Yeah. They know it's a joke. Ironically, I have found in my years of
01:10:08.300like working for various mainstream media companies. Within the media ranks, I think
01:10:13.380that there is this sort of like resentment toward influencers because I think a lot of people
01:10:18.820working for the mainstream media actually blame the symptoms to be the cause. Like mainstream
01:10:24.600journalists, that job market has never been great. And now it is literally like it is the last
01:10:30.060remaining people who are about to be pushed off of a cliff. And I think a lot of journalists feel
01:10:34.580influencers took our jobs. And so a lot of the coverage of influencers and of social media
01:10:39.860platforms is very resentful and very angry and very like, they want to stick it to them. They
01:10:46.860want to humiliate influencers. They want to knock influencers down a peg. But unfortunately, now it's
01:10:53.980reaching a really interesting point in journalism culture because so many journalists are influencers
01:10:59.020now right they gotta get that suspect sub stack popping exactly many of the journals who are
01:11:04.880still at these major publications are like clinging to that idea that like influencers
01:11:09.840are the enemy instead of the reality which is like our economic mode of capitalism has failed
01:11:16.300we are like go all plunging into an abyss together and like taking shots at like someone else who's
01:11:22.420just trying to like survive and thrive is not going to help anybody that's how i feel watching
01:11:28.600a lot of this coverage. Speaking of which, Clavicular did an extremely viral interview
01:11:34.880with a notably handsome interviewer for 60 Minutes Australia. The interview is about an
01:11:41.100hour long, focuses heavily on Clavicular's looks-maxing tactics, particularly bone smashing,
01:11:47.440and the interviewer is smirking, borderline laughing through the whole thing. And look,
01:11:52.980On one hand, I can understand why, but it all just comes across to me as extremely incurious.
01:11:59.560And for a serious journalistic outlet like 60 Minutes to be taking this approach struck me as just, like, not doing your job.
01:18:52.400uh you're just forgetting that key piece of nuance that uh is is kind of the reason that
01:18:58.660my message resonates so well so what is reaction to that because he's not lying he just he just
01:19:05.380laughs and moves on to the next question but it's so amazing to me because like if you go to the
01:19:10.300youtube video of this interview that 60 minutes australia posted everyone is like it's so funny
01:19:15.700watching this interviewer slowly realize clavicular is insane i'm like where
01:19:20.680i hate i hate like it's people are gonna be like oh you're defending it but it's like oh man it's
01:19:28.160the the leftist prince that is was promised you just don't realize it he's not he's obviously i0.54
01:19:35.080know you're not being serious but it's like he is correctly identifying the problem he's giving the
01:19:39.720wrong solution but he's identifying the problem and the interviewer is like laughing and just
01:19:44.720being like that's not true it's like hello you're a gorgeous man doing an on-screen interview why do
01:19:51.660you think that is right poorly this is again like this feeds into the nihilism of the young0.83
01:19:57.240because young people aren't stupid and like you see donald trump in office and then you get out
01:20:02.960here and you're like being intelligent and kind is what matters most clearly that's not true it all0.94
01:20:09.260contributes to the decline in institutional trust because when people sit there and tell you things
01:20:14.700that so blatantly contradict with reality like you hear that enough times and you're just like
01:20:19.260oh the all of the institutions are lying to me like this is how i feel like a lot of young people
01:20:25.520are sort of like radicalized into like nihilism and then also these extremely toxic subcultures
01:20:32.220because it feels like someone is finally telling them the truth even if like what is actually being
01:20:38.080told is this very like skewed portrait of reality but at least it seems to hit on something that
01:20:44.460the mainstream media is not willing to say the interviewer persists but see i disagree
01:20:51.180claire i don't think appearance is as important as you're suggesting
01:20:57.980do you think that if you were bald if you were fat that you would be doing this interview that
01:21:06.460you would be a journalist yeah yeah i do uh well i would tell you that it's it's very
01:21:14.220unlikely that you would have the career that you do if you didn't have you know the looks package
01:21:21.980you know that that's really what it comes down to like you'll see a lot of media personalities
01:21:27.740with full heads of hair generally in shape and that's what it comes down to see again i disagree
01:21:35.180do you not think there are bald overweight journalists of course i do but i'm just saying
01:21:40.540you would have had to overcome that disparity by being a lot better in other metrics to have
01:21:48.920the career that you do oh he's woke maxing right now he's literally just describing lookism which
01:21:58.840we know is a real like prejudice based on attractive like we know that that's a real
01:22:03.660thing if the interviewer was like had like thought some of this through and actually
01:22:09.620prepared a thoughtful interview and i don't mean to like dog on 60 minutes australia but like
01:22:14.840engage with the reality that this person is living in because so is like we all are and for you to
01:22:21.420just be like well that's not true who are some of the most successful on-screen male broadcast
01:22:26.780journalists anderson cooper david muir attractive fit men with full heads of hair who and white by
01:22:33.920the way and chiseled jaws yeah yeah i mean like it's pretty ridiculous to assert the claim that
01:22:41.300like tons of people who don't conform to the beauty standard are successful in very visible
01:22:47.180positions because it's just not reality and while yes there are a lot of journalists who don't
01:22:53.240conform to beauty standards like or aren't conforming in like the highest echelons of
01:22:57.520beauty standards those are not usually the people on camera like your pathway in life is going to
01:23:03.640change based on how people perceive your appearance. This should not be controversial
01:23:07.580to say, because it's just reflected in all of the available
01:23:11.700data and reality that we live in. What we're actually
01:23:15.520witnessing in a surreal way that I wasn't expecting before we started this
01:23:19.600call is the rejection of clavicular in
01:23:23.380the process of protecting white supremacy. That's not a sentence
01:23:27.680I thought I was going to make, but what clavicular is,
01:23:31.180Like the white supremacy's greatest trick is maintaining invisibility in society, maintaining imperceptibility.
01:23:40.020You're not supposed to notice white supremacy.
01:23:42.540In a recent video, I compared it to dark matter and like the universe.
01:23:46.800I 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.
01:23:57.880But when the 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 properly.
01:24:08.800So you don't know it's there, but it's it's the most thing around us.
01:24:12.660Same thing with white supremacy. What this interviewer would have to engage with is the white and patriarchal nature of how he is privileged in Western society.
01:24:27.360as not just a good-looking and not just a man, but a good-looking straight white man
01:24:32.780means that he started from at least four or five notches ahead of all of his would-be
01:24:37.720competitors. And it's not a surprise that we've only had straight white male presidents,
01:24:43.600that most of them do not like Donald Trump is anomalous in that he looks like a weird
01:24:49.720cartoon character figure. Most of them do look like who we talked about earlier,
01:24:54.480that mocks jd vance no gavin newsom yeah most of them look like gavin newsom you know that is not
01:25:00.740an accidental thing that is structural and systemic and so this looks maxing thing is
01:25:06.580accidentally kind of materialist in its uh in this breakdown of like societal forces
01:25:13.940and in doing that and then platforming him they have to completely ignore that part in order to
01:25:21.880maintain the narrative around, you know, it's a personality that matters and hard work and
01:25:29.040bootstraps and hustle, et cetera, et cetera. And he's like, you know, actually the structural
01:25:34.860framework of lookism and race means that I can be here talking to you versus a woman or a woman of
01:25:42.660color, whatever. So it's actually hilarious, you know, to have to be on the other side of this0.90
01:25:47.580conversation defending the woke critique of based clavicular internet kids would say i actually wrote
01:25:56.220here in my notes this would be like getting an influencer who advocates for the use of skin
01:26:00.160lightening cream on for an interview and then being like well why would you do that the world's
01:26:04.660not racist it's like well neither of you are what like no it's it's and this is the fundamental
01:26:11.460conservative worldview of clavicular right he's saying the world has all of these structures and
01:26:16.920he's correct. He's correct in identifying them. And he's saying that's just the way it is. So
01:26:21.320you might as well try your hardest to survive and come out on top lest you be a loser and get left0.98
01:26:26.400behind. But this interviewer is doing nothing for anybody, least of all the viewer, by ignoring
01:26:32.780the reality that Clavicular is saying we should all just do our best to survive under. Like the
01:26:38.640leftist critique here is like, yeah, we have a world that values those things and prioritizes
01:26:44.200attractive people in all sorts of ways and we should fight against that yeah yeah this reminds
01:26:49.580me of a conversation i had with someone online where they were like demi moore the star of the
01:26:54.120substance they were critiquing her thinness and saying like well she just started a movie that
01:27:00.040was about how bad beauty standards are and i'm like you misunderstood the plot of the substance
01:27:05.240you misunderstood what the substance was trying to say the point of the substance is not just like
01:27:09.900beauty standards are bad. The point of the substance is that women in the entertainment1.00
01:27:13.740industry have to conform to impossible standards of beauty or else they will lose economic
01:27:19.520opportunities. They will be ejected once they surpass a certain age, no matter how well they
01:27:25.700conformed in their youth. And that's what people misunderstand about so much of this culture is
01:27:31.040it is inherently conservative because it doesn't want to change these systemic realities. But also
01:27:37.540like we can't deny that those systemic realities exist because to do that would also not solve
01:27:44.100any of them it's just pretending the problem isn't real somebody just needs to hand this this guy a
01:27:49.180couple of books and we'll see what happens we'll have we'll have two hasans we could we could fix
01:27:55.800clavicular wait you mean clavicular or the journalist no cavicular i think they could
01:28:00.480both read personally but no shade the last clip i want to play for you from this interview is at
01:28:06.180the end when he asks if clavicular is happy. You don't give off this sense that you're
01:28:14.420incredibly happy and fulfilled. I'm wondering, Clav, do you live a happy, fulfilling life?
01:28:24.580I would say for the most part, I do. I just generally don't want to be doing this right now.
01:29:01.560I mean, it's hard to know what he actually likes to do because he just does whatever he needs to do for his like 24 hour streams, which is like going out and then going home and then going out and then going home.
01:29:11.900But it's just so funny as this whole interview unwinds and I watch the full hour and this guy just becomes like Fox News.
01:29:18.120It's like, oh, really? You want to go to the club? Is that what you think is fun? Like, yeah, he's fucking 20.
01:29:22.980yeah i hate how much i have to like fucking advocate for fucking clavicular but he's 201.00
01:29:30.580years old of course he wants to go to the club instead of doing this dog shit 60 minutes interview0.99
01:29:35.300anyway unfortunately he humor mogged the interviewer a lot0.98
01:29:39.440that was revealing and astounding and uh i mean it makes you come back to that initial take of
01:29:51.140Like the thing that people sometimes missed about Jordan Peterson and really all of the Manosphere folks is that they are responding to the material world in a maladaptive way.
01:30:03.920Right. The reason why these 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 late capitalism.
01:30:25.200To have someone like beforehand Jordan Peterson, who felt like an elder for a generation where a lot of people were fatherless or inadequate fathering in the home, to engage with their emotional cores that are neglected creates connection, which is what everybody's missing.
01:30:45.400They're missing connection to other people.
01:30:48.520And so for whatever reason, clavicular and his lifestyle makes people feel connected.
01:30:55.600If you don't acknowledge why that's possible, you're just kind of making content.
01:31:06.160Here's where we can take the pin out of what the broad reaction was to this interview, which Kat, do you want to say?
01:31:13.480Well, everyone was like, it's so funny that they put Clavicular with this really hot Australian broadcaster.
01:31:21.380And people were like, he's actually hotter than Clavicular.
01:31:23.780And that was the main takeaway I saw people like take away from this interview was like, actually, the broadcaster is hotter than him.
01:31:30.620The only tweets I saw with hundreds of thousands of likes were like, oh, I bet Clavicular is shaking in his boots because the interviewer is hotter than him.
01:31:40.020and i'm like guess whose worldview you are reinforcing right now yep jesus it's it's very
01:31:47.320silly to me and like honestly like scrolling through any social media platform on any given
01:31:51.940day will reinforce clavicular's worldview which is why he has it because if you are a young person
01:31:57.840who is spending a lot of time on social media as all people for the most part now are then of course
01:32:03.580you're gonna walk away with this worldview because that is how people treat you they make snap
01:32:09.240judgments based on your appearance and then that dictates how they respond to anything that comes
01:32:13.620out of your mouth right wow business around this time clavicular also does uh an interview with
01:32:19.900piers morgan which is just similarly similarly a joke on the part of piers morgan here's a clip
01:32:27.180i'm i might argue that i'm mogging you right now okay well you know that's a that's a fair
01:32:34.500perspective go for it for those who don't know what i just said what is what does mugging mean
01:32:39.700uh basically outshining someone looking better than them and there's different types of mugs
01:32:44.840right there's uh status mugs there's you know money mugs so you know you might have me in those
01:32:51.440categories but i think we need to add in a little bit of nuance that it's not a uh a looks mug you
01:32:57.020know you you would say that you have the edge over me in looks mogging i i think i might have
01:33:04.960you by just a small margin i don't know but that could be attributed to youth you know so yeah but
01:33:09.700youth is back in the day youth a lot a lot of women find the older dude a lot of women find0.88
01:33:15.400the older dude more appealing than the young pimply youth you know well you know absolutely
01:33:22.700can i just say this is farcical clavicular could not have been nicer in this situation0.72
01:33:29.640where pierce morgan is like oh do you think you'll you'll look smogging me and clavicular
01:33:36.580in that situation good impression matt he could have literally said anything and clavicular was
01:33:41.080like maybe by just a hair but also i have youth on my side and then peers responds by calling him
01:33:47.400pimply what this is content though this is content it is and i also think that piers morgan and
01:33:56.880clavicular are speaking the exact same language when piers morgan says a lot of women actually
01:34:04.340find older guys more appealing notice he says appealing and not attractive because what does
01:34:10.720piers morgan think that women find more appealing about older men the fact that they tend to have
01:34:16.360more money and more power and more status. And ultimately, this very misogynistic worldview that
01:34:22.720Piers Morgan also possesses is not too dissimilar from Clavicular's worldview. It is just a new
01:34:29.180generation of rhetoric around men, women, and the value that they have to provide to each other.
01:34:35.120But it's all rooted in the exact same thing. This is what frustrates me about content creation
01:34:39.860amongst us. I haven't watched too many Clavicular videos and no shade to different creators,
01:34:45.420but all of them have mostly done a lefty intellectual version of what Pierce Morgan just
01:34:51.840did. Right. It's mostly just like, isn't this guy weird? And I hadn't seen anyone engage with the
01:34:59.300critique that clavicular presents to society. And now even more so, because I've, I noticed,
01:35:06.480you know, the phrase, everything I've learned about this person is against my will. So that's
01:35:10.100been me with clavicular, right? But I noticed how he has been everywhere, 60 Minutes, Adam Friedland,
01:35:18.140so on and so forth. And I'm like, man, this is a lot of media attention for a guy that clearly
01:35:23.980doesn't have a whole lot to say. And it's not that engaging. You all have ignored all the other
01:35:30.440assets of the Manosphere. Why is this one in particular of such importance to platform in
01:35:36.180all these spaces. And I realized it's because he's saying the quiet part out loud about the
01:35:42.900structural frameworks of our society, and they need to engage with it in order to pillory it0.67
01:35:49.820so it sounds silly. Because this is maybe a bit of a reach. There's a framework of analysis
01:35:56.500happening here that a handful of these people might catch wind to, and then they might fuck1.00
01:36:02.860around and hear this podcast and then start reading some shit. And then suddenly you have0.99
01:36:08.380critical theory, Maxine, you know what I'm saying? Inshallah, inshallah. Right. Hopefully.
01:36:16.180That's wishful thinking, obviously. But my point is that you can't identify the dark matter.
01:36:21.540It has to remain invisible. And he's doing that. And they're like, eh, no, you're silly.
01:36:28.560you're silly i'm mogging you i think that that's really true and i also think that and again this0.95
01:36:34.540reinforces clavicular's worldview but i suspect that another reason why like all of these media0.95
01:36:40.440outlets are willing and eager to profile him is because he is an attractive young man like again
01:36:48.040not endorsing the things he's done to get there but like he has succeeded in becoming very
01:36:53.200conventionally attractive i think he was to begin with going back to that yearbook photo
01:36:56.620But like Asmongold is a influencer who has a much bigger audience, I think, than Clavicular.
01:37:04.000And you never see the mainstream media talk about that guy.
01:37:07.480And he is not conventionally attractive.
01:37:12.560I think like news agencies famously love interviewing hot people and spotlighting hot people's stories.
01:37:19.700Because, again, I hate to say it, but to Clavicular's point, you will be more visible in society if you conform to these beauty standards.
01:37:30.400And, like, if you really wanted to talk about people who are influencing young men, you would see more of this, like, cast of male characters online, but you don't.
01:37:39.120The news doesn't even know that a lot of those guys exist.
01:37:42.760They literally are invisible to them because they're not bone smashing.
01:37:46.500on april 14th 2026 just a couple weeks ago clavicular was at a miami bar with his fellow
01:37:56.540looks maxer and friend former friend androgenic where he looked extremely out of it kept reiterating0.72
01:38:03.820how fucked up he was on whatever drug he'd taken as he walked around this nightclub with his camera0.87
01:38:09.420crew and fans coming up to him taking selfies before he dropped onto a bench on the side of0.99
01:38:15.200the club. Andrew Jenick offers him more Adderall. Then Clavicular goes unconscious and slides onto
01:38:27.300the ground as cameras cut out. iPhone footage from onlookers show a crew of people rushing
01:38:33.340him into an ambulance. He was brought to the hospital and treated for an overdose. There's
01:38:38.860no confirmation on what exactly he overdosed from, but it's rumored to have been a cocktail
01:38:43.280of drugs including ghb he returned to the internet the following day with a tweet just got home that
01:38:50.300was brutal all of the substances are just a cope trying to feel neurotypical while being in public
01:38:56.640but obviously that isn't a real solution the worst part of tonight was my face descending from the
01:39:03.460life support mask and included was a selfie where he has sort of cuts all over his face perhaps from
01:39:10.760falling over it's unclear and the following night he was back on stream helping open a club in
01:39:17.900miami the worst part of i'm trying to understand what he says we said the worst part tonight was
01:39:23.020my face descending from the life support mask like did he like fall like what does that mean
01:39:28.120wait you know what i just realized it was the life support mask that cut up his face because
01:39:33.140in the world of looks maxing ascending is what you do when you make yourself look better that's
01:39:39.520part of the lingo oh and so he's saying his face descended as a result of having to wear the life0.88
01:39:46.800support mask which is that's fucking dark yeah that's this whole thing is dark can we can we0.74
01:39:52.580engage with the first part of this though which where he says all of the substances are just a0.95
01:39:57.900trying to feel neurotypical while being in public but obviously that isn't a real solution
01:40:04.500Because that is a real thing that neuroatypical people deal with, including controlled substances.
01:40:18.020It may be tragic, but he's very nihilistic.
01:40:20.580So I just tend to, I struggle with the death of the nihilist sometimes because it's like, you got what you want.
01:40:25.920So the sadness is how much this probably resonates with a lot of people.
01:40:30.200And the fact that none of our social authoritative apparatuses are interested in addressing how we produce a clavicular and how he rises to fame and then gets platformed by numerous mainstream figures is what it is.
01:40:47.560I think one of like my cynical takes on this and like the media treatment of clavicular in particular is like clavicular in particular, clavicular in particular, the media is just cashing in on this.
01:41:00.760Like, I think that there are some journalists who have written or examined clavicular who are not trying to do that, who are not engaging or writing or spotlighting him maliciously.
01:41:11.020But I do think that when you zoom out and you look at sort of the history of how the
01:41:15.900mainstream media engages with these very troubled, nihilistic young people, it does start to
01:41:20.800feel like ambulance chasing, like this person's not going to be around for that long.
01:41:25.340Let's like cash in on the phenomenon as much as we can.
01:41:29.100And by the end of it, we haven't done anything to actually like better the world, let alone
01:41:34.940And in fact, it's sad because it reinforces the idea that if you act this way, you will wind up be on the cover of magazines, you'll be on TV, you'll get like all of this short lived attention. Again, it just reinforces the clavicular worldview.
01:41:51.460You 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?
01:42:00.820Because we're literally creating a pathway for young people to get attention by doing this.
01:42:05.720And then we're giving them that attention they so desperately crave.
01:42:08.820I feel like one of my big, if not the biggest, conclusion that I have around this whole thing is just that, like, clavicular is a symptom, not the cause.
01:44:36.080That's a better name than the one I thought up earlier.
01:44:40.180The last thing I'll say is it reminds me a little bit of Andrea Dworkin's analysis.0.94
01:44:46.260Someone who, mind you, literally just this past week on Twitter, I saw people posting pictures of Andrea Dworkin and being like, she looks like this and that's why she hates men, which again reinforces the clavicular worldview.1.00
01:44:58.360But like part of Andrea Dworkin's analysis in right wing women was like right wing women see the world clearly.1.00
01:45:06.880And 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.
01:45:26.500There 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.
01:45:39.060And if only someone could point clavicular in that direction instead of just reinforcing that he's on the right path.
01:45:46.080Yeah, I have more hope and naive empathy for characters like this than the average person.
01:45:53.260i was preparing for my outro so i grabbed the hammer i'm sorry
01:45:58.780maybe it's the hammer maybe it's the hammer and sickle maybe he reads some books and
01:46:03.560it figures it out but more than likely he's just going to in in inexorably harm himself to the
01:46:10.360point where this world is no longer feasible um he's gonna have a mental breakdown because like
01:46:15.720this level of masking daily nightly 24-hour streams is mentally taxing so like there's
01:46:23.560some type of harm coming his way uh and the aftermath analysis i guess will be interesting
01:46:29.600and we will learn nothing i'm nihilist maxing you are but i don't know it's nihilist maxing
01:46:36.580i'm usually optimist maxing but i think we meet in the middle at like realism maxing which is
01:46:41.320actually probably closer to what you're saying but i can still have but you know what this is
01:46:44.840the thing is like i can still have hope for everyone who follows him because they they haven't
01:46:48.600cashed in all of their life on this road that's true that's true the manuscript stuff tends to be
01:46:54.720a phase for young men god willing you know the younger they get in usually the longer they stay
01:47:00.920um but hopefully the vast majority of them make it out and figure life out beyond it fd and cat
01:47:08.620thank you so much for podcast maxing with me this afternoon appreciate you it was fun where can
01:47:14.480people find more of each of you? I'm at spitfirenews.com. That is my newsletter. I am
01:47:23.060context maxing over there. And blue sky. I'm on Instagram at CatTentMarge. I am mainly on YouTube
01:47:35.360at FD Signifier. That's the main tentpole channel. I have four or five other supplemental channels
01:47:41.260for different purposes but the two most active are the fd streams channel which is me streaming
01:47:47.340sometimes it's gaming sometimes it's hot takes and then there's the signified b-sides this is
01:47:52.380more of like a commentary channel where i might talk about this or something else i don't know
01:47:57.180it tends to be interchangeable the topics just the level of effort i put into it i'm also barely
01:48:01.660on blue sky barely on threads barely on instagram i'm trying to normal life max and dad max and so
01:48:08.540i am getting social media mugged by most of my peers this is the thing it's fun it's fun it's
01:48:17.820fun thank you so much for listen maxing today i so appreciate your time i know you could have spent
01:48:25.580it uh you know maxing in all sorts of other ways but i appreciate that you that you fruity maxed
01:48:30.780with us i love you so much i hope you continue to have a wonderful day and week and until next time0.95
01:48:38.540keep fruity maxing peace and blessings y'all it's so stupid i have to stop0.98