Injections, Bone Hammering and the Pursuit of Peak Male Beauty

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Daily

Episode: Injections, Bone Hammering and the Pursuit of Peak Male Beauty
Date: March 22, 2026
Hosts: Natalie Kitroeff
Guest: Joe Bernstein (journalist, NYT)

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Overview

This episode explores the rise of "looksmaxing," an extreme online subculture of young men obsessed with achieving "peak male beauty" through aggressive and sometimes dangerous self-interventions. Journalist Joe Bernstein investigates the ideology, culture, and outsized influence of the movement’s breakout star, Clavicular (Braden Peters). The episode examines why looksmaxing is resonating with millions of young men, the cultural context fueling its spread, and what this phenomenon says about modern society’s relationship with beauty, masculinity, and status.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Is Looksmaxing? (02:03–06:20)

• Definition:
  Looksmaxing is an online community, mostly men, dedicated to making themselves more attractive “by any means necessary”—ranging from basic grooming to extreme measures like experimental hormones, facial bone hammering, and surgery.

  "They tap their facial bones with a hammer on the theory that by causing lots of microscopic damage to the bone, it will grow back bigger and more attractive." (Joe Bernstein, 03:14)

• Origins:
  Emerged as an offshoot of the incel (involuntarily celibate) community. Incels are nihilistic, blame their romantic failures on physical unattractiveness, and harbor resentment (often misogynistic); looksmaxers share the fatalism but believe improvement—however extreme—is possible.

• Beauty Ideals:
  Narrow, white-centric ideals predominate; open racism surfaces in forums, with Matt Bomer cited as the "peak" male template. Nonwhite contributors face harassment and exclusion.

  "The ideal is a white guy. I mean, there's no getting around that." (Joe Bernstein, 04:50)

2. The Gamification of Male Beauty (06:27–08:19)

• Lingo:
  Words like "looksmaxing," "mogging" (outperforming others in attractiveness), and "ascend" (moving from 'ugly' to 'beautiful') originate from internet and gaming culture.

  "The idea is that those guys are taking all of those points and feeding them only into a single bucket, and that's their looks." (Joe Bernstein, 06:27)

• Peer Focus:
  While attracting women is a stated goal, much of the energy is devoted to comparison and competition with other men.

3. Clavicular: From Forum User to Influencer (08:31–15:29)

• Rise to Fame:
  Clavicular (Braden Peters) is a 20-year-old who gained notoriety by pushing looksmaxing techniques to extremes, openly experimenting with various drugs and interventions, and livestreaming his experiences.

  • Controversial Acts:
    • Taking and promoting unregulated substances.
    • Injecting fat dissolvers into his underage girlfriend’s face on livestream (13:00).
    • Association with polarizing internet personalities and racist rhetoric.

• Viral Spread:
  Clips from his Kick streams are widely shared on TikTok and Instagram, exposing millions far beyond the original niche forums.

  "There might be 10,000 people just watching what he does... That circle, it's millions and millions of people." (Joe Bernstein, 15:18–15:29)

4. Meeting Clavicular: Motivations and Mindset (18:23–29:07)

• Origin Story:

  • Isolated childhood, hyper-fixated interests.
  • Started testosterone at age 14 to build muscle, outmaneuvering parents' attempts to stop him.

    "If I could accelerate my progress in the gym with a simple pharmaceutical intervention, then of course I’m gonna do it." (Clavicular, 21:39)

• Obsession with Measurement:
  Quotes his own body metrics, facial ratios, and tracks a complex regimen of drugs (Accutane, Retatrutide, testosterone, melanotan, minoxidil, etc.)

  "Right now my Bidaltoid is only 21 inches... my biachromial width, which is the span of your clavicle, that's where he gets his name." (Joe Bernstein, 25:01–25:16)

• Chemical Risks:
  Open about probable infertility and dismissive of side effects, regarding them as worthy sacrifices for status through beauty.

  "That's a cope, no sibo garbage." (Clavicular, 28:25 in response to concerns about sexual side effects)

• Beyond Sex—About Status:
  For some, especially Clavicular, the goal may not even be sex or relationships, but status among men.

  "Do I have time to waste having sex which is going to gain me nothing? Just doesn’t seem very logical to me." (Clavicular, 30:02)

5. Gender, Generational, and Cultural Context (32:17–39:17)

• Not New for Women:
  The hosts discuss how women have long faced cultural pressure for extreme body interventions, noting the irony and shift as young men now embrace similar behaviors (33:21–33:40).

  "For women, this is like Tuesday." (Natalie Kitroeff, 32:17)

• Generational Attitudes:
  Earlier stigmas for men caring about appearance have faded in the Instagram/TikTok era—a world dominated by highly visual, quantifiable self-presentation.

• A Superficial Culture:
  The panel acknowledges that the larger culture, not just these subcultures, increasingly equates worth with appearance.

  "It becomes harder and harder to tell young men that the way they look doesn't matter when the culture has become so removed and image based." (Joe Bernstein, 34:37)

• Dangers of Extremity:
  Participants worry that young boys are especially vulnerable to the mental health risks, fatalism, and disordered thinking promoted in looksmaxing forums.

  "I've heard from families who've been really affected negatively and even in devastating ways when their kids get too into this culture." (Joe Bernstein, 37:17)

• Cultural Reflection:
  The hosts reflect on the compulsion to quantify everything in modern society—beauty, value, relationships—and what is lost in that process.

  "You miss out on everything that is messy and complicated ... about beauty, about physical attraction, about closeness with someone, love, relationships. The humanity in that is often about the imperfections." (Natalie Kitroeff, 39:17)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “No offense, but you're sitting there jester gooning like a subhuman beta cuck. Meanwhile, I'm out here oramaxing like an S tier gigachad.”
  — Joe Bernstein reading forum lingo (01:13)

• “Politics are jester. It's not something that I want to involve myself in.”
  — Clavicular on avoiding political controversy (14:45)

• “You could see him looking at this as something that's paid off for him... It's paid him a lot of actual money, but it also helped him. He would say ascend.”
  — Natalie Kitroeff (22:44)

• “Even if you did have those side effects, it's more important to have hair than to have functioning genitals.”
  — Joe Bernstein summarizing Clavicular’s value system (28:48)

• “Do I have time to waste having sex which is going to gain me nothing? Just doesn’t seem very logical to me.”
  — Clavicular (30:02)

• “You're watching these sort of lonely kids online reinvent the female beauty standard in real time, for men.”
  — Joe Bernstein (33:21)

• “As a society, we’re headed in a way where more extreme interventions in one's appearance are becoming more and more normal... I think that our culture is becoming more looks focused all the time.”
  — Joe Bernstein (38:18)

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Important Timestamps

• [02:03] — Defining looksmaxing and its ethos
• [04:50] — The white-centric beauty ideal and racism in the community
• [08:31] — The rise of Clavicular and community influence
• [13:00] — Clavicular injects fat dissolvers into girlfriend on stream
• [15:18] — Looksmaxing goes viral beyond niche origins
• [18:23] — Joe Bernstein meets Clavicular in Arizona
• [21:52] — Clavicular starts testosterone at age 14
• [25:01] — Obsessed with body and face statistics
• [26:10–27:21] — Extreme drug cocktail and impact on health
• [28:25] — Clavicular dismisses concerns as "cope"
• [30:02] — Status as the true aim, not sex or relationships
• [32:17] — Parallels with female beauty standards
• [37:17] — Real mental health risks for young men
• [39:17] — Hosts reflect on the loss of humanity in quantifying beauty

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Takeaways

• Looksmaxing is a new, internet-fueled manifestation of very old obsessions—now hyper-accelerated, toxic, and quantifiable.
• At its core is a belief in appearance as the root of value, status, and power for young men—mirroring and sometimes surpassing pressures long experienced by women.
• The phenomenon is driven by social media visibility, the attention economy, and a culture that prizes image above all.
• The movement's export of misogyny, racism, and dangerous medical advice is especially concerning for at-risk boys and teenagers.
• Yet, its spread is as much a reflection of society-wide values and structures as it is of individual pathologies.

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Recommended for listeners interested in:
Internet subcultures, masculinity, online extremism, body image, influencer culture, youth mental health, and the cultural effects of social media.

Transcript

[Podcast Announcer]

This podcast is supported by Doctors Without Borders.

[Doctors Without Borders Sponsor Voice]

When emergencies strike, when war reaches homes, when floods wash everything away, Doctors Without Borders doesn't wait. They're already on the ground to help people, to provide care, to save lives. When you give to Doctors Without Borders, you make a global impact. Powering their local teams in more than 75 countries around the world. Donate today at doctorswithoutborders.org thedaily

[Natalie Kitroeff]

from the new York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroweff. This is the Sunday Daily. There's a corner of the Internet where young men spend hours rating each other's bodies. They evaluate the length of their mid faces and the distance between their pupils. They take testosterone and inject fat dissolving compounds into their jaws. They hit themselves in the cheekbones with hammers. They call what they do looksmaxing. And their community, which started as a subculture, is now bursting into the mainstream. Their particular way of speaking popped up at last week's Oscars and has been used by the Pentagon. They even made it to Saturday Night Live.

[Joe Bernstein]

No offense, but you're sitting there jester gooning like a subhuman beta cuck. Meanwhile, I'm out here oramaxing like an S tier gigachad.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

The rise of this movement has a lot to do with the ascendance of its biggest star, Clavicular, a 20 year old influencer whose most deeply held belief is that looks are genuinely all that matters. Today I talk with my colleague Joe Bernstein about why the ethos of looksmaxing appeals to so many young men and what its resonance says about our culture. It's Sunday, March 22nd. Joe, welcome to the Sunday Daily.

[Joe Bernstein]

Great to be here.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

So we are about to embark on a conversation about looks maxing, which we should acknowledge is a made up word. It is an Internet meme, community turned cultural phenomenon, inspiring dozens of articles in every magazine and newspaper that you've heard of, including ours. And all of that attention, as far as I can tell, essentially boils down to everyone trying to understand what exactly this trend actually is and what it means about our culture. So let's start there. What is looksmaxing?

[Joe Bernstein]

So looksmaxing is a community of mostly men on the Internet who are dedicated to making themselves more attractive by any means necessary.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

And what does that mean exactly?

[Joe Bernstein]

What I mean is that there's almost no end to what they'll do to make themselves more attractive according to their standards. From things that most people do, like showering and getting a good night's sleep to ordering experimental chemicals from China, to taking hormones to Getting surgeries to. And this is one of the most sort of noteworthy things that they do. They tap their facial bones with a hammer on the theory that by causing lots of microscopic damage to the bone, it will grow back bigger and more attractive.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Just so wild. Okay, so who are these people, these bone tappers?

[Joe Bernstein]

Right. So to understand looks maxers, we have to start with the Internet community of incels. These are young men who describe themselves as involuntarily celibate. These guys believe because they aren't conventionally attractive, because they weren't born with the right genes. We're talking tall, broad shoulders, strong jawline, all the above, that they'll never be capable of attracting and getting a mate.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Right. And incels are known for being a sometimes violent, often very hateful group of people, especially toward women.

[Joe Bernstein]

Right? Yeah, it's a pretty nihilistic subculture. The idea is that if you aren't attractive enough, your life is over. Look, smackers are an offshoot of that ideology that is slightly less fatalistic. They're very, very harsh about their appearance and about the role that attractiveness plays in life outcomes. But they also think it's possible to move past physical shortcomings by going to extreme lengths to improve their physical appearance.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Cue hammering your face.

[Joe Bernstein]

That's right. And it's important to say that they're all aiming for a very specific ideal of beauty.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

And what is that ideal? Define it for me.

[Joe Bernstein]

Well, the ideal is a white guy. I mean, there's no getting around that. This movement has been accused of being outright racist. There's no room in this sort of subculture for a face that isn't white in its standards of what's beautiful. In fact, last year, wired had a story about a black guy who tried to make looks Mexican content, and he was sort of racially harassed out of the subculture.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Yeah. So that definitely sounds racist.

[Joe Bernstein]

Yeah. And if you go on the looksmaxing forum, the rhetoric is frequently pretty racist, nihilistic. It's nasty. And looks maxers might dismiss that accusation as dumb or that they're being ironic or deliberately shocking, but they don't really do anything to disprove it. In fact, their ideal of beauty is a specific actor, a white actor named Matt Bomer. Look him up if you don't know what he looks like. And they measure these ratios and features on their face. So it's, like, very important to them. The distance between their pupils, the distance from their nose to their upper lip, the slant of their eyes, whether they're upwardly slanted. Or downwardly slanted, the amount of upper eyelid that they show really kind of granular details about the face that you and I probably have never thought about. And they obsess about this stuff on online forums, and that's where they post photos, brutally criticize each other, and share various techniques for maximizing their looks. To become more like Matt Bomer, essentially.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Right. And that idea of maximizing your looks, that's where you get the word looks maxing, sort of.

[Joe Bernstein]

So it's a bit of Internet lingo that initially comes from the world of role playing games. So, like think of dungeons and Dragons and final fantasy. Basically, at the beginning of the game, you get a set number of points to distribute to your character. And the idea is that those guys are taking all of those points and feeding them only into a single bucket, and that's their looks.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

And all of this is basically what, in service of attracting women?

[Joe Bernstein]

Kind of, but not completely. And this is where looks maxing is actually different from the incel culture we talked about earlier. So incels are completely focused on women and how they've been unfairly treated by women. Looks maxers may start from that place, but they treat women and women being attracted to them as much more of a status symbol. It's a sign to look smackers that they've started to do something that they call ascend.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

And what does it mean to ascend?

[Joe Bernstein]

So ascend is a kind of key concept in the looksmaxer cosmology. The idea is essentially that they have moved from a state of ugliness to a state of beauty, and that this status is their reward.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

It does seem as though the looks maxers are very focused on other men and how they view each individual member of this community, how they rate each other totally.

[Joe Bernstein]

It's a community that is really focused on comparing yourself favorably or unfavorably to other men. And there's a term they use for this. It's called mogging.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Mogging.

[Joe Bernstein]

Mogging. So mogging is when you prove yourself superior to someone else. So if you're more attractive than another man, you're mogging him. Your looks mogging him, you're beating him. In the status game, you could be height mogging him, you could be hair mogging him, you could be jaw mogging him. And the ability to attract women is just one part of that status game.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Okay, so how does this small subset of people online, this niche, become much more mainstream? What's the story there?

[Joe Bernstein]

Right. So the explosion of looks maxing into the kind of highest reaches of pop culture was really due to one guy and he's a guy who calls himself Clavicular.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

What's going on, fellas? Today I want to do a little bit of a review on Tirzipatide or

[Joe Bernstein]

Magiano, whatever you want to call it. So Clavicular was born Braden peters. He's a 20 year old Internet personality and a live streamer. And he first gained some degree of recognition within the actual looks maxing community. So he comes from the community itself and he was a guy who was one of the most frequent posters on the message board, but also someone who was sort of willing to push looks maxing techniques as far as they would go on the board itself.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

And what exactly does that mean?

[Joe Bernstein]

So basically when Peters was a teenager, he started experimenting with all these techniques.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

What's up? I just want to give a comprehensive overview of SARMs, or selective androgen receptor modules.

[Joe Bernstein]

But not only that, as he's doing this, he's also posting all the time on this forum about his results.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

I want to go over what SARM stack you should run for each of your specific goals.

[Joe Bernstein]

So he's almost like a guinea pig for all these other guys who are interested in looks maxing. He's evaluating methods, he's sharing his results, he's giving instructions for people on the forum with for how to try these things themselves and that within the community it sort of made him the main character.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

So how does he get bigger than just this one place?

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

Hey, what's going on guys? I'm sure you guys saw the title of this video and we're interested to see what happens. So I want to do this video as a little bit of a story time.

[Joe Bernstein]

Okay, so Clavicular is a teenager and when he's 18 he goes to college during his freshman year.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

Unfortunately, someone decided to archive all of my posts and send them all to the public safety at my university.

[Joe Bernstein]

He gets caught with a bunch of steroids in his dorm room and gets kicked out.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

So I'm not exactly sure which person on the forum decided to go ahead and do this, but I know it was someone from the Lux Max forum, unfortunately. So I guess they got the best

[Joe Bernstein]

of me and this is an extremely important moment for him.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

Now I am able to fully dedicate my time to looksmaxing. So I think this is going to wind up being a blessing in the

[Joe Bernstein]

end because from here on out, he decides to devote himself completely to looksmaxing.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

He goes all in.

[Joe Bernstein]

All in.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

Are we up? Oh, finally. Boys, boys, boys, boys. How are we doing? Today.

[Joe Bernstein]

And as a part of that, he starts streaming these live videos of himself on kick, which is a platform, like sort of a more extreme version of Kitch.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

Your body fat is the first thing that's holding back. I can't even tell if you're mogging or not. Let's see.

[Joe Bernstein]

And he does videos where he's rating people and he's going out in the world and talking to people. But real quick question, because everybody on

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

this streaming world says I'm like super

[Joe Bernstein]

ugly and super hideous and I look cracked out. What are your first initial thoughts on,

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

like, my looks, bro? I would say that you're around average to slightly above average in looks, so.

[Joe Bernstein]

And all of this catches the attention of some larger, more widely known streamers. So she got 3.5. Why? And how can she improve?

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

Well, her midface is way too long

[Joe Bernstein]

and these guys put him on their streams because he's such a kind of a character you can't look away from.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

You know, all the facial convexities are wrong. Her radix is recessed. Moving on. Okay, well, how much time do we have on the podcast?

[Joe Bernstein]

Part of the reason he becomes so famous so quickly is that he's obviously courting controversy.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

I was going to talk about a controversial lean maxing hack. I don't know if you want to.

[Joe Bernstein]

So he was talking about the really extreme things he'd done to stay thin for three days.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

I spammed a combination of Adderall and methamphetamine for appetite suppression.

[Joe Bernstein]

Like, for example, taking meth.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Taking meth, taking meth.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

We're about to do some fat dissolver, guys.

[Joe Bernstein]

And another controversial incident. Actually live on stream. He injected some fat dissolving peptides into the face of his then 17 year old girlfriend.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

Chat, we're look. Smack singer, Rolex maximum. It's all good, Dr. Clav.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Yeah, my God.

[Joe Bernstein]

And then he goes on stream with controversial figures like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate. Let's see if you're stronger than me, bro. You're all fucking young man on every fucking injection and drug in the world. I'm an old man on cigars. That's it. So he goes in a club in Miami and they're all chanting along to the Kanye west song Hail Hitler.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Okay? I mean, he's associating with them. He's singing Heil Hitler with them. I mean, I know you said Luxemaxers dismiss accusations of racism as stupid, but here you have another overt example of it.

[Joe Bernstein]

Yeah, and like Clavicular routinely uses the N word.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Wow.

[Joe Bernstein]

Yeah, I asked him about it, and again, he said it was dumb, basically meaning the reporter's trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. But you can't really trivialize using the N word. It's just racist.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Right.

[Joe Bernstein]

He's not really giving any thought to the harm this language might cause to him to look smackers. It's just another kind of trolling, which is probably why they're so glib about using it. And after all, on the Internet in 2026, that gets clicks. It's a way of growing an audience. And so for someone like clavicular who comes out of a kind of men's Internet, or really a teenage boy's Internet, using these guys as a way to become more famous would seem like the most natur thing in the world. And now that he's gained a degree of. Of renown, he's actually distanced himself to some degree from this kind of rhetoric.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

I would say sort of. People don't really know how to handle my ideology, so they want to figure out which political camp I'm a part of so desperately.

[Joe Bernstein]

He says a lot, and he told me he doesn't care about politics and that, in fact, here's another one of those look, smacking terms.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

Politics are jester. It's not something that I want to involve myself in.

[Joe Bernstein]

Politics is jester.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

What is jester?

[Joe Bernstein]

Okay, so jester basically means anything where you're making a fool of yourself for others to get attention, and it's a waste of time.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

My. My main pursuit is that of esthetics and improving my looks to the maximum degree. So the fact that that's become a political phenomenon just really doesn't make sense to me at all.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Got it. So how viral at this point is he going Exactly.

[Joe Bernstein]

So on kick, which is the streaming platform, it's sort of Clavicular. Raw. The raw Clavicular feed. At any given time, there might be 10,000 people just watching what he does.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Okay.

[Joe Bernstein]

But of course, the Internet deals in large numbers, huge numbers. And where those really start to rack up is all of these people who are watching his stream and taking clips from the raw feed. And they take these clips and they upload them to the much bigger, bigger social media platforms, TikTok, Instagram. And if you think about that, that circle, it's millions and millions of people, people like us, and we're people who are just sort of Internet fluent and use social media. That's where we encounter Clavicular. And it's how I first noticed him. And I guess when I started noticing him, I started wondering about, who is this guy? What motivates him? Where does he come from? What does he want for the future?

[Natalie Kitroeff]

And.

[Joe Bernstein]

And that's why I wanted to go to Arizona and meet him, which is

[Natalie Kitroeff]

exactly what you did. We're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to have you tell us about what it was actually like to sit down with Clavicular in person and what you learned about what actually drives this guy.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

Foreign.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

We'll be right back.

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This podcast is supported by Doctors Without Borders.

[Doctors Without Borders Sponsor Voice]

When emergencies strike, when war reaches homes, when floods wash everything away, Doctors Without Borders doesn't wait. They're already on the ground to help people, to provide care, to save lives. When you give to Doctors Without Borders, you make a global impact, Powering their local teams in more than 75 countries around the world. Donate today at doctors without borders.org thedaily

[Podcast Announcer]

Today's episode is supported by the Persistence Lab, a podcast from AbbVie. The show explores what happens when science meets real human resilience. Each episode highlights a challenge in medicine or healthcare, and the people who refuse to give up hear from scientists, experts and patients as they share important moments and motivations that inspire progress and contribute to the future of care. If you're curious about what's really happening behind the scenes in health and science, search the Persistence Lab wherever you listen to podcasts. Life in Italy with Belmond we got

[Natalie Kitroeff]

married at Hotel Caruso in May on the Amalfi coast. On the wedding day, looking out as I ate breakfast, I could see the olive trees where our dinner would later happen. I could hear the birds chirping. I could hear our pianists practicing. I could hear almost nothing else.

[Podcast Announcer]

Discover a new pace of travel. Read more [e-mail] Belmond LifeInItaly

[Natalie Kitroeff]

so Jo, I am dying to know, what were your first impressions when you meet Clavicular? First of all, where did this meeting happen? Like set the scene for me.

[Joe Bernstein]

So Clavicular was in the Phoenix area to host a few parties. So that's where I went to Phoenix. Phoenix is also one of the test markets for Waymo, the self driving car. And so I'd taken a Waymo to the Airbnb he was staying at in Tempe. But the Waymo dropped me off like a 15 minute walk from the Airbnb and there's like nothing you can do. There's no driver to say like actually this isn't where I want to go and so like it's Arizona. It's hot. So like by the time I actually get to the Airbnb, I'm like kind of sweaty and disheveled. I'm like a 41 year old dad and I'm like about to meet this 20 year old face of the Internet and I'm just kind of thinking like, what am I doing here exactly?

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Suffice it to say, you're conscious of your appearance in this moment for many reasons.

[Joe Bernstein]

I'm conscious that I'm not looks maxing at the moment. Okay, okay, so Clavicular's cameraman and sort of personal assistant opens the door and Clavicular walks out of his bedroom where he's just woken up. Do you prefer clav? Clavicular.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Okay, so you're sitting down with him. What's the conversation like? Tell me about it.

[Joe Bernstein]

So before I get into the conversation, it might be useful to understand what I sort of thought I was there to figure out.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Sure.

[Joe Bernstein]

Because there's hundreds of hours of Clavicular online. He said almost anything. So in some ways it's like, well, what's the point of interviewing someone like this? What I was trying to figure out is to what extent is this a put on and to what extent does he actually live and believe this stuff that he's become really famous for all of a sudden? You sort of have popped up on a lot of people's socials in the past.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

And how do you do that?

[Joe Bernstein]

Well, like anytime I'm profiling someone, I asked him to talk about his childhood begin at the beginning. Where are you from? What was growing up like for you? What did your parents, you know, that kind of everyday?

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

Well, so I grew up in a pretty small town called Hoboken, N.J. grew

[Joe Bernstein]

up in New Jersey. Grew up in Hoboken.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

I really like the Nerf guns. Growing up.

[Joe Bernstein]

He said he was an obsessive, sort of a hyper fixated kid, you know,

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

so I wasn't like, oh, let me just get one of these. I had to have like 50 was kind of like my personality trait.

[Joe Bernstein]

And then in high school, like it does for a lot of us, things got rough for Clavicular.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

And then when I went to high school, I went pretty far away. So, you know, I didn't know anyone and they all knew each other.

[Joe Bernstein]

And so one of the ways he decides to kind of deal with that is by getting into bodybuilding.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

Well, so I just started kind of working out. I had like a little home gym thing in my basement.

[Joe Bernstein]

But he was spending a lot of time on The Internet, like any red blooded American kid in the 21st century. And he discovered testosterone, the hormone testosterone.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

You know, I was kind of thinking to myself, well, if this tool exists, and I, you know, seen videos about it on YouTube and come across different, like forum posts, it's like sort of like a cheat code is how I thought about it. It's like, why would I not do this?

[Joe Bernstein]

And to him, it seemed like a no brainer. He wanted to get bigger and stronger and he wanted to do that as efficiently as possible. Yeah.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

That if I could accelerate my progress in the gym with a simple pharmaceutical intervention, then of course I'm gonna do it.

[Joe Bernstein]

So he found a way to get it online and he ordered it. And so you were 14 when you started taking TRT?

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

Yeah. Okay, so it sounds bad, but I turned 15amonth later.

[Joe Bernstein]

Okay. So he keeps it a secret at first, but his parents eventually end up finding the testosterone taking it away. And according to clavicular, it starts this whole cycle where he's ordering it, getting caught.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

Then my parents sort of just like, you know, wanted, you know, to be kind of ignorant about it, you know,

[Joe Bernstein]

Meaning they thought you might be doing it, but didn't introduce.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

Yeah, they just didn't want to have to deal with it anymore.

[Joe Bernstein]

And eventually his parents basically throw their hands up and say, we can't stop this. You're just too determined.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

They realized after a certain point of me like reordering it and getting P.O. boxes, that there was kind of nothing that they could do to stop my ascension. That's the one thing I would never let anyone stop me from ascending.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Okay, so it sounds like this origin story is telling you. This is a kid who maybe felt isolated in high school, who found this hormone therapy as a way of escaping that and pursued it relentlessly. And you can see him looking at this as something that's paid off for him. Obviously now it's paying him a lot of actual money, but it also helped him. He would say ascend. You could see why he might be committed to getting other people the same benefits.

[Joe Bernstein]

Sure. I mean, from his point of view, from the moment he started really caring about his looks, his life has changed. And look where he is now.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Okay, and just to return to what you were trying to get out of this conversation, an understanding of the extent to which this actually was an authentic, authentic pursuit for clavicular. The extent to which he genuinely believes in the lifestyle that he is pitching to others. What does this origin story tell you about that?

[Joe Bernstein]

One interesting thing that I got from Clavicular is that whenever I asked him to introspect in an emotional way, he was a little uncomfortable and pretty clipped.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Got it.

[Joe Bernstein]

But when I asked him questions about the actual sort of substance of looksmaxing, he would go on and on and on and be genuinely excited to talk about it. So far be it from me to psychopathologize subject, story, subject, but clavicular talks a lot about being on the autism spectrum.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

I think I'm different in terms of the way that I think I would say it's just more of a neurodivergence.

[Joe Bernstein]

He says he's never gotten an official diagnosis, but it's sort of part of his understanding of himself.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

I don't think being a normie is good. I think I'm very happy with my brain chemistry and my vision on the world. I think it's one of the best gifts ever, you know, that I'm able to have this.

[Joe Bernstein]

And one way you maybe see this is his obsessive focus on numbers and statistics, including his own, which are.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

What are his own stats.

[Joe Bernstein]

So how tall are you?

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

I'm six foot two.

[Joe Bernstein]

Six two. How much do you weigh?

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

180 pounds.

[Joe Bernstein]

Okay. Do you know any other measurements off the top of your head?

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

Yeah. Right now my Bidaltoid is only 21 inches.

[Joe Bernstein]

So you might know how tall you are, how much you weigh. He knows things like his biachromial width, which is the span of your clavicle. That's where he gets his name, clavicular from.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

I believe that's around 19.5 inches.

[Joe Bernstein]

Okay.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

To remeasure that.

[Joe Bernstein]

What about your face? He has a mid face ratio. That's the distance between the pupil and the mouth divided by the distance between your pupils. These are just things I know now.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Lucky you.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

That would be 1.07.

[Joe Bernstein]

Okay.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

So my mid face is a little bit short. It should be.

[Joe Bernstein]

Meaning you want you in an ideal world it would be a little. You'd stretch it out a little bit like with a character creator and role playing games.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

So I would do that on. Yeah, this is like the kind of I do on Photoshop.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

He's tracking this stuff.

[Joe Bernstein]

Yeah, obsessively. And he also tracks. Has to keep track of all the things that he takes. What's your stack right now? Like what do you take every day? He told me he wasn't able to tell me everything that he's ever taken because it would essentially take so long. But he did list a number of the things that he was on at the moment.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

I'm on 25 milligrams of Accutane. I'm on 12 milligrams of Retatrutide.

[Joe Bernstein]

So he's on testosterone, a GLP called Retatrutide that's currently in clinical trials and he orders it from a pharmacy in China. A beta blocker to offset the cardiovascular strain that some of these drugs put on his system. So those four, is that it? Anything else? Oh, no, keep going.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

Okay.

[Joe Bernstein]

Minoxidil is a hair loss drug. So is dutasteride, which he also takes.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

I do a lucky dip, which basically means I have dutasteride in raw powder form and I'll just dip my finger in the bag and take it.

[Joe Bernstein]

Something called melanotan, which makes you tan faster, so you can get tan without spending so much time in the sun. Is that it?

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

No, no, no.

[Joe Bernstein]

High dose melatonin, which he takes as an antioxidant.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

A lot of people think I'm memeing when I say taking 300 to 500 milligrams is phenomenal.

[Joe Bernstein]

Something called glutathione that helps with a

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

lot of dopamine toxicity.

[Joe Bernstein]

That something called nad, one of the

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

best regenerative compounds out there, and human growth hormone in terms of right now, that's all I'll take. But you know, we could go through some more stuff.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

So heavily medicated, does he have any concerns about like pumping a bajillion chemicals into his body?

[Joe Bernstein]

So this came up in a past interview. He thinks that he's probably currently infertile because of the amount of testosterone he takes. Wow. A pretty well studied side effect, I believe, of testosterone replacement therapy.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

And is he upset about that?

[Joe Bernstein]

No, he's very, very matter of fact about it. One moment in our interview that got clipped up and went viral. Well, you have to remember this is 2002, so I'm 17 and I had a full head of hair.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

Okay.

[Joe Bernstein]

Somewhere in the sevens.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

Sevens. Not bad. You should have dutasteride maxed.

[Joe Bernstein]

He asked me because I shaved my head, why I hadn't started on hair loss drugs when I was younger, but the potential side effects are something I'm not willing to.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

Oh, for your day.

[Joe Bernstein]

Yeah. And I said one infrequent but well known side effect of these drugs are sexual side effects. And I wasn't really willing to prioritize my hair at the cost of diminished sex life.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Uh huh.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

That's a cope, no sibo garbage.

[Joe Bernstein]

And he called that cope, which is sort of a piece of Internet jargon that means like a form of denial. Basically what he's saying is that I'm using these side effects as an excuse not to ascend.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

He's saying basically that he's willing to sacrifice sexual enjoyment for the goal of looking good, becoming more beautiful.

[Joe Bernstein]

Yeah. I mean, his point is both that these side effects are very rare and men tell themself this so they don't go on these medications. But he's also saying implicitly, even if you did have those side effects, it's more important to have hair than to have functioning genitals.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

So is the point of all of this effort, all of these stacks of drugs, all of the stuff he's taking literally just to be beautiful for the sake of being beautiful?

[Joe Bernstein]

Not quite. If you believe that increasing your looks by any means necessary will get you status that you don't otherwise have, sex itself is kind of beside the point, isn't it?

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

I was just saying it's almost like equally as redeeming to me to know that I could do it.

[Joe Bernstein]

So the idea is that if you're pushing all of your chips into the looks category, essentially, that is what's going to get you status. That is what is going to help you stand out from other men.

[Clavicular (Braden Peters)]

You know, I'm a busy guy. I live stream for 10 plus hours. I did 13 and a half hours yesterday. Do I have time to waste having sex which is going to gain me nothing? Just doesn't seem very logical to me.

[Joe Bernstein]

But it's funny because, like, okay, we're

[Natalie Kitroeff]

going to take one more break and when we come back, we're going to interrogate some of that. We're going to talk about what this guy and his whole movement says about our culture right now and where it's headed. We'll be right back.

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[Natalie Kitroeff]

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file your taxes with a TurboTax expert today. Visit TurboTax.com Joe There is obviously a complicated mess of ideas and impacts of all of this that we want to untangle and but first I wanna ask you something that I think will resonate with many women listening to this, which is everything that you've described, the obsessive focus on your appearance, the hacking, the sometimes painful interventions, this is not new for women. This is like Tuesday. You know, I mean, women have been in a sense forced to by the culture, by the expectations, looks max for generations. You know, like they don't try just inject themselves with Botox filler, everything else under the sun. They regularly, from the age of 15, are waxing every part of their body. I'm not speaking for all women, but many of us. But what do you make of that? The kind of parallels here?

[Joe Bernstein]

Yeah, I mean, there is an irony to it. Absolutely. I think men have not been socialized to find these interventions normal. So there is an extent to which you're watching these sort of like lonely kids online, like reinvent the female beauty standard in real time for men.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Right. What about the fact that it's coming out so clearly with this group? I mean, not to out us, but I think we're both millennials here. And when we were in high school, it was not socially acceptable, I think it's fair to say for many men, straight men, to openly even care about their appearance. There was a stigma associated with that.

[Joe Bernstein]

That's true. It's also true when we were in high school, there was this sort of term du jour for straight men who cared about their appearance, which was metrosexual.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Right.

[Joe Bernstein]

Which will be ancient history to the looksmaxers. But you and I remember it well. Men have always had to come up with sort of new vocabularies to talk about caring about the way they look.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

And now with this looks maxing community, it seems like, I don't know, there's not a lot of shame about it. I mean, they're owning it, right?

[Joe Bernstein]

I mean, it becomes harder and harder to tell young men that the way they look doesn't matter when the culture has become so removed and image based. I mean, so much of our life, particularly for single people on the Internet, is spent like on image based on platforms, whether they're explicitly about meeting a romantic partner or not, just evaluating and swiping on images. So I think there's a kernel of truth to what these kids are experiencing. At the same time, it's kind of a dark future because. Or a dark present because it takes away so many of the other qualities that through grasping and searching, people learn to develop on their own.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Right. I mean, it seems basically impossible to ignore the danger of a movement or a lifestyle that tells its followers to, you know, do all of these extreme interventions to make themselves acceptable.

[Joe Bernstein]

And yet, and yet, at the same time, as you say, our culture has been telling women for a really long time that they should take lots of interventions, careful always, that they seem natural to improve their look. So in some ways we can sort of sit here and cluck our tongues about how unhealthy it is. And at the same time, we have to be realistic that we live in an unbelievably superficial image based culture.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

But just talk for a minute about the potential dangers of this. I mean, you know, clavicular, it should be noted, is an influencer. Part of his job is to say outrageous things, scandalizing things, to really draw attention. I mean, that's how he makes money. And so in one way, you can see what he's doing as the result of a kind of manufactured effort by publicists by a very online guy to get clicks to get likes on the other. A lot of people are listening to him and I have to wonder about the message they're receiving.

[Joe Bernstein]

Yeah, so I think one of the things that's happening with Clavicular is that he's cleaning his act up as he gets more popular. But if you look back at the actual subculture itself of looksmax.org, it's very dark space. I mean, the young men there are talking in incredibly fatalistic terms about how their lives are ruined or over, you know, at the age of 15 or 18 or 22, if their jaw doesn't look a certain way or if their cheekbones don't look a certain way?

[Natalie Kitroeff]

No, I mean for young boys who are looking at this stuff, absorbing it, learning these techniques, you can see how harmful it could be to be internalizing these unrealistic images of beauty.

[Joe Bernstein]

Right. So on an intuitive level, of course, this sort of mono focus on looks from really boys, you understand how it could be harmful. But I also know it to be true because I've heard from families who've been really affected negatively and even in devastating ways when their kids get too into this culture broadly.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Jo, what should we make of the fact that clavicular someone who espouses these views of the world, of people's value in the world, has become so popular and so influential right now?

[Joe Bernstein]

Well, I think it says a couple things. One is that even if it's not saying it explicitly, the culture is always telling people that their worth is correlated with their looks. I don't think it's just clavicular. Who's making that claim? I think everything from celebrity culture to the way it's delivered is reinforcing a message that the way you look is extremely important.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Hmm.

[Joe Bernstein]

I also think as a society, we're headed in a way where more extreme interventions in one's appearance are becoming more and more normal. I mean, if you look at the popularity of these GLP drugs, even among people who don't necessarily need to take them, and for many people, these are lifesavers. But if you look at that, if you look at the popularity of Botox and other treatments, men are getting more cosmetic surgery than ever. I think that our culture is becoming more looks focused all the time. At the same time, this is a young man who became very, very famous very quickly because of the dynamics of the attention economy and the streaming platform economy. And while he has become so popular, because I believe society was prepared for a figure like this, I also think that the platforms that essentially contribute to the fame of these people, the way they work, plays a strong role too.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

You know, this whole time I've been thinking that by buying into his worldview, by reducing everything to numbers, there is this other loss, which is that you miss out on everything that is messy and complicated and sometimes not perfectly polished or manicured. About beauty and for that matter, about physical attraction, about closeness with someone, love, relationships. The humanity in that is often about the imperfections in it, not the exact distance between the pupils of your partner.

[Joe Bernstein]

So, as a millennial, I think you're right. I also think in some ways, these kids are responding quite naturally to an environment that is constantly quantifying things, constantly asking them to engage in pull down menus and widgets and yes or no questions and binaries, literally quantifying people, that is the age that we live in. So while my initial reaction may be to judge them and find them a little ridiculous, I've had to push past that and think maybe there's a rationality to these young people and maybe in a way they're reflecting more the culture that we live in and the culture that we're entering.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Well, Joe, thank you so much for coming on the show.

[Joe Bernstein]

Thanks for having me.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Today's episode was produced by Luke Van Der Plug with help from Tina Antolini and Alex Barron. It was edited by Wendy Dore. Our production manager is Frannie Carr Toth. Contains music by Marian Lozano and Dan Powell and was engineered by Sophia Landman. Special thanks to Brendan Klinkenberg and Nina Feldman. That's it for the Daily I'm Natalie Kitroweff. See you tomorrow.

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This podcast is supported by Doctors Without Borders.

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When emergencies strike, when war reaches homes, when floods wash everything away, Doctors Without Borders doesn't wait. They're already on the ground to help people, to provide care, to save lives. When you give to Doctors Without Borders, you make a global impact, Powering their local teams in more than 75 countries around the world. Donate today at doctorswithoutborders.org the Daily.