Clavicular and the Looksmaxxing Cult That Almost Killed Him

Summary

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There Are No Girls on the Internet

Episode: Clavicular and the Looksmaxxing Cult That Almost Killed Him

Date: April 22, 2026
Host: Bridget Todd
Co-Host/Guest: Mike

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Overview

In this episode, Bridget Todd and guest Mike dive deeply into the world of "looksmaxxing," focusing on the controversial influencer Clavicular (real name: Braden Peters). The discussion unpacks the rise of looksmaxxing culture, its insidious roots in incel and manosphere communities, its algorithmic spread online, the economic grift at its core, and, centrally, the problematic media treatment of figures like Peters. The episode also challenges listeners to consider the responsibilities of the media and platforms in amplifying self-destructive ideology, underscoring the gendered double standards in how such stories are portrayed.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

The Dilemma of Coverage and Amplification

• Bridget reflects on editorial decisions regarding whether to cover niche internet figures and movements, weighing the risks of amplifying harmful ideologies by putting them in the spotlight.

  “Not every piece of harmful content really warranted blowing it up and talking about it ... attention is the whole name of the game ... it’s like the Barbra Streisand effect.” (Bridget Todd, 05:35)

What Is Looksmaxxing?

• Looksmaxxing, at surface level, appears to be positive self-improvement—posture, hygiene, fitness—but actually serves as a vector for more harmful, extremist, and misogynistic ideologies.
• The discourse around looksmaxxing includes a lexicon rooted in gaming ("maxing", "mogging", "SMV") and online male-centric spaces.

  “The important thing to know about looksmaxing is that it’s the gateway. It is how millions of young boys and men got introduced to a subculture that has very different values underneath.” (Bridget Todd, 07:22)

• The movement originated in incel forums in 2014 and spread to mainstream via memes and TikTok trends, disguising its more toxic roots.

Gamification of Life and Reductionism

• Looksmaxxing taps into the broader online trend of reducing human value and experience to optimize stats, echoing figures like Andrew Huberman’s focus on “hackable” self-improvement.

  “It’s attractive because it’s simple ... but the idea of optimizing for a human life actually just feels like really sad to me. So much richness to human experience. The idea that you would pick just one thing and optimize everything around that feels so limiting.” (Mike, 14:52)

The Role of Language and Internet Diffusion

• Phrases like "maxing," "mogging," and "SMV" have diffused from insular extremist spaces into mainstream internet language, often with users unaware of their origins.

  “…I saw people saying, oh, she’s really easily mogging them. And I’m like, oh my God, like this word. We’re using this word in everyday conversation online now.” (Bridget Todd, 18:29)

Gender, Performance, and Audience

• The hosts underscore the core irony: looksmaxxing content is primarily a performance for other men, not for women—mirroring and exaggerating masculine norms.

  “…these are men performing for other men. It came off as much of a gender performance as drag … a gender performance, albeit for other men.” (Bridget Todd, 21:21) “It’s the most pathetic, least masculine way to live that I could imagine.” (Mike, 22:17)

Monetization and the Grift

• A crucial element of looksmaxxing and adjacent manosphere subcultures is their business model: monetizing male insecurity through courses, paid memberships, and exploitative “expertise.”

  “The whole thing is a grift. The same way that lifestyle MLM…selling leggings … to women is a grift … it’s the same thing just for men.” (Bridget Todd, 25:54)

White Supremacy, Pseudoscience, and Exclusion

• The looksmaxxing movement upholds a Eurocentric, white beauty ideal, leveraging pseudoscientific practices (like phrenology and measurements) to promote exclusion and internalized racism.

  “Looksmaxing starts to look a lot like a well-disguised form of modern white supremacist ideology. And I could not agree more.” (Bridget Todd, 28:05) “It’s just a rehash of nineteenth-century phrenology.” (Bridget Todd, 29:04)

• Non-white participants in the community report the realization that they cannot meet the movement’s white-centric standards (“JBW—just be white”).

Algorithmic Radicalization and Platform Responsibility

• Platforms, especially TikTok, drive young men (often without their intent) into increasingly extreme content funnels.

  “You don’t go looking for it; it finds you... 73% of teen boys regularly encounter masculinity content pushed into their feeds without seeking it.” (Bridget Todd, 31:25)

• This dynamic is gendered but pervasive across body image and wellness content for both men and women.

Self-Harm, Body Image, and Social Pressure

• Looksmaxxing normalizes and monetizes self-harm (bone smashing, unlicensed injections) and severe body dysmorphia under the guise of ‘self-improvement’.

  “If you cannot hit these benchmarks, then you really ought to consider self harm. And that's basically what they are being told.” (Bridget Todd, 24:49) “...a social media driven body dysmorphia trend.” (Dr. Jason Firestein via Bridget Todd, 33:07)

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Clavicular/Braden Peters: Profile and Media Portrayal

Origin Story

• Braden Peters, a.k.a. Clavicular, born in 2005, was radicalized online during COVID-19 isolation.
• Began extensive looksmaxxing practices before age 15, including ordering testosterone, leading to expulsion from college and subsequent pivot to full-time content creation.

  “During COVID he was online up to 14 hours per day … that is when he found looksmaxing forums.” (Bridget Todd, 39:12) “Finding testosterone, ‘it’s like a cheat code. Why would I not do this?’” (Bridget Todd, 39:23)

Content and Influence

• Known for ‘face evaluations,’ giving numeric ratings based on arbitrary beauty criteria (famously rated Michael B. Jordan a 3.5/10).
• Advocates extreme “hard maxing,” including dangerous practices like “bone smashing.”
• Runs a lucrative paid membership community (“Clavicular’s Clan”), reportedly earning $100,000+ per month (as of Feb 2026).

Media and Platform Complicity

• The hosts highlight how Peters’ coverage in mainstream media (e.g., the New York Times) downplays the severity by branding him primarily as someone “promoting handsomeness”—contrasting this to how a female influencer’s body-dysmorphic content would be covered.

  “…describing him as an influencer who is known for promoting handsomeness, in my opinion, is not a very responsible way to write about this particular figure.” (Bridget Todd, 51:10)

Legal Issues and Escalation

• Involved in unlicensed medical procedures (injecting a minor), arrests for battery and drug possession, and other attention-getting stunts.
• No significant legal consequences; each incident appears to further fuel his notoriety.

Denial of Political Connections

• Peters publicly distances himself from the incel and alt-right community, maintaining a pose of “apolitical” self-help.
• In reality, he socializes with and is amplified by notorious figures like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, appearing in viral videos at politically charged events.
• The episode critiques this rhetorical move, linking it to wider trends among public personalities (e.g., Joe Rogan) who seek to avoid culpability while cultivating controversial audiences.

  “...He’s not political ... But then when you look at who he actually hangs around and spends his time with, it becomes very clear.” (Bridget Todd, 51:29) “You don’t get to wear a MAGA hat and then also say that you’re not political.” (Bridget Todd, 58:33)

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Gendered Media Coverage

  “If that was going on, I want you to think how would we, how would media, how would all of us be talking about her right now?” (Bridget Todd, 06:49)

• On the Grift

  “It’s the same thing just for men. And so my question is, I think we’ve seen a lot of critical reporting on that kind of dynamic when it is geared toward women. I think that we should be attaching that same lens to what is very clearly the same kind of thing only being directed at men.” (Bridget Todd, 25:54)

• On Performance for Men

  “...I would almost say that it came off as much of a gender performance as drag is to me. Like, that's how much of an overt gender performance... to me.” (Bridget Todd, 21:21) “They have this view of masculinity that is completely dependent on pleasing the other men around them...” (Mike, 22:17)

• On Systemic and Algorithmic Responsibility

  “...I don’t really expect an unwell 20 year old to be living by certain standards. I should be able to expect it from the New York Times and other mainstream outlets who cover him. We should be able to expect it from the people who run social media platforms and algorithms.” (Bridget Todd, 43:55)

• On Political Denial

  “You don’t get to wear a MAGA hat and then also say that you’re not political... own that you are aligning with a specific political ideology and have that be that.” (Bridget Todd, 58:33)

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• Disclaimers / Topic Introduction: 02:09–02:55
• Looksmaxxing in Media & Editorial Judgment: 03:19–05:35
• Looksmaxxing Definitions and Roots: 07:08–12:23
• Gamification Analogy & Reductive Thinking: 12:23–16:09
• Diffusion of Subculture Language: 16:09–18:43
• Gender & Performance: 21:21–24:47
• Financial Grift & Self-Harm: 25:54–29:04
• White Supremacy/Pseudoscience: 29:04–32:07
• Algorithmic Spread: 32:07–34:20
• Braden Peters (Clavicular) Background: 37:05–42:40
• Media Responsibility Discussion: 43:55–44:41
• Examples of Peters' Influence and Harmful Content: 44:41–47:33
• Financial Pipe Dream: 47:33–49:19
• Legal/Controversial Incidents: 49:19–51:10
• Political Disavowals & Accountability: 51:29–59:06

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Tone and Language

• Bridget employs a sharp, critical, but at times empathetic tone—especially regarding the broader context and personal circumstances of Peters.
• The hosts use internet-native language, slang from looksmaxxing subculture, and accessible analogies to clarify points for listeners outside of online extremism research.

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Conclusion / What’s Next

• This episode is part one of a two-part series. Next week will further unpack the role of traditional media in amplifying Peters and what all this means for social media, internet culture, and the responsibility of adults and institutions.
• Listeners are invited to reflect on parallels with women’s body-image content, gendered double standards in media, and the real societal and political roots of youth radicalization online.

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Connect with the Show:
Got a story or tech perspective? Email: helloangodi.com.
Full episode transcripts available at: tagnoti.com

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Transcript

[Bridget Todd]

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[Bridget Todd]

Hey, it's Bridget. Just wanted to give you a quick heads up that this episode gets into some conversation about disordered eating and self harm. There Are no Girls on the Internet is a production of iHeartRadio and unbossed creative. I'm Bridget Todd and this is There Are no Girls on the Internet. I think it is time that we talk about Looks maxing and a specific Looks Maxing influencer named Clavicular Mike, you and I were just talking about this before we got on the mic together. You and I talked about clavicular and whether or not we were going to do an episode about him kind of a while ago. He's been on my radar for a little bit.

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

That's right, yeah. You brought him up a while ago and obviously he has kind of blown up in the news over the past week, two weeks. I'm not sure exactly the timeline and it's seems like it hasn't really gone great for anyone. Although maybe he would disagree. Maybe he would say it has been great for him and he's really blown up his profile.

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

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

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

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

[Bridget Todd]

So I want you to keep that in mind as I tell you about Braden Peters, also known online as Clavicular, a figure in the so called looks maxing movement.

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

What is looks maxing, Bridget?

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

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

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

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

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

Yeah. I am also old enough to remember

[Bridget Todd]

for the youth listening, chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool while shooting some B ball outside of the school.

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

Yeah, totally acceptable form of maxing.

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

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

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

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

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

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

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

Wow, that's amazing.

[Bridget Todd]

Let's take a quick break.

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[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

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

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

Yeah, I think you summed it up.

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

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

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

I do. I was going to bring up that same part. It's like one of my favorite parts of the movie that he puts in £500 because he's. And, yeah, just like tracks the losses and brings the viewer along as he's receiving text messages about different investment opportunities, all of which turn out to be terrible.

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah, give me your £500 and I'll essentially flush it down the toilet for you.

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

Yeah.

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

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

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

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

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah, I think we talked about this on the podcast before, but we're talking about the way that this content is specifically gendered. It definitely targets women as well. You know, I was doing some research online about fertility. Let me tell you, if you are looking at our main social media platforms for advice on fertility, you are a few swipes away from the craziest fucking lies you have ever seen in your life about your body. So it's definitely something that is gendered. We're all sort of dealing with it, Dr. Jason Firestein, who's a therapist who runs Phoenix Men's Counseling, told Healthline. Young men fall into this false sense of acceptance and what they believe women want from them. They can get caught up in potentially lifelong struggles with feeling inadequate. He specifically called looks maxing a social media driven body dysmorphia trend. Similarly, research from the British psychological society in 2026 found something else that is pretty damning. They found that in every single rating thread that they analyzed, at least one user insulted others unfavorably, compared them, or encouraged them to harm themselves. Every single one. So again, looks maxing on its face might seem like a very reasonable soft trend that just took off on Tik tok about men and boys wanting to improve themselves. But actually it is pretty plain plainly rooted in white supremacy and other harmful ideologies. And it's pretty plainly about self harm.

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

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

[Bridget Todd]

Yes, and that is a great segue into clavicular. More after a quick break.

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[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

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

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah, and I might be mogging the New York Times a little bit here comparing our different senses of responsibility and ethics when it comes to writing about complex subjects.

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

Ooh, vocabulary burn.

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

Yeah, it's. I mean, I remember 2005. I was doing stuff. Yeah. And he was just joining us.

[Bridget Todd]

What were you doing in 2005?

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

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

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

Yeah. You know, thinking about a 15 year old kid that if he was born in 2005, he would have been 15 in 2020 when Covid started, you can't help but feel kind of bad for him.

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

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

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

Yeah. And so I guess just before we get to that, did you want to talk a little bit about what some of his content does look like? Sure.

[Bridget Todd]

So the core of his content is evaluating faces. He got big evaluating the faces of strangers on campus, celebrities, viewers who submit their photos, and he rates them through his looks maxing system. He famously gave Michael B. Jordan one of, according to me, the most handsome people I have ever witnessed. So Michael B. Jordan is like, objectively one of the hottest men alive. He is black. Peters gave him a 3.5 out of 10 and presented this as his clinical verdict. Right. He walks up to strangers with the tape measures and stuff to assess their physical facial dimensions on camera. And he advocates for bone smashing, which is literally hitting yourself in the face with a hammer to change your bone structure. We'll come back to that. He launched Clavicular's Clan, which is a paid membership program marketed as offering guides that are guaranteed to help you ascend or reach a higher level of hierarchy. If you listen to our Skinny Talk episode, it's. That kind of thing will sound very familiar to you. By February 2026, according to a profile in the New York Times, Peters was earning more than $100,000 per month from his kick streams alone. So that's not even counting his paid membership programs and whatever else money he's making from doing all of this. So mind you, this is somebody who was in a service industry job just two years prior. And I say that to say I can kind of understand why young men and boys, people who are maybe feeling disillusioned from college student loans, the rising cost of living, the job market, all of these expectations where the system does not provide for you to reasonably ever feel like you can meet those expectations. I could understand against that backdrop why young men are looking at this kid who was waiting tables just 2 years ago and now is making 100k per month and saying, that is the trajectory I want for myself. I am going to follow this person's advice and guidance because I want to live a life like that.

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

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

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah. And something that folks should know is that there is a very deep thread through a lot of this content that says that the most acceptable or desirable way to make a living is to be quote, outside of the system. Right. It's not going to college and then getting a 9 to 5 job where you are a slave to somebody else. It is finding a way to make money online, finding a way to make money through content, finding a way to like make money through investments or something like that where you are not working a traditional 9 to 5 job. There is definitely this attitude that going to college and getting a regular job, a desk job, a day job, has failed men. And so the smartest men find ways to circumvent that system and find a way to make money for themselves. Again, just to be like objectively clear, they are selling a pipe dream. Right? Like I don't have a 9 to 5 job, I'm self employed. It's hard as shit. It is certainly not. If anybody who tells you it's a path to like you being your own boss and being super successful and having no problems and no worries is, I can tell you, I can personally tell you is selling you a pipe dream. But I don't think that these kids are wrong for being attracted to this because there is a grain of truth there that society has sold that college at a good job is a recipe for life success that is clearly not the case for most of us. Right? And so like again I can understand why this is so attractive because there's a grain of truth to it.

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

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

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

to be dead promoting handsomeness. That doesn't sound so bad.

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

It also makes me want to know more about those club owners who met with him. Like it's notable that he's not meeting with like faith leaders or community leaders. No, it's club leaders.

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah, club promoters, club owners.

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

You know, probably didn't appreciate the sentiment, but did appreciate the publicity. Yeah, I mean, gonna go out on a limb and gas.

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

It's just a sad response. And those seem like totally reasonable questions.

[Bridget Todd]

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

[Mike (Co-host/Guest)]

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

[Bridget Todd]

Yes. And I think it's just so easy for them to be like, well, right wing white people stuff. That's not politics, that's just common sense. You know, good old fashioned common sense. Black leftists, now that's political. Right? It's always back to that Carlin routine for me. With me, it's just a way to be like, my stuff is stuck, their stuff is shit. Oh, my worldview and ideology. That's not political. That's not politics. Their worldview and ideology, now that's political and that's bad. They make everything political. I think it's grounded in this idea of wanting to have it both ways, wanting to, you know, align with power and who's in the White House and Trump and all of that have the power of that while still getting to have the veneer of, oh, I stay out of politics. I don't want to make things political, yada yada. And I think that Peters and this the way that the Looks Maxing ideology has been able to shed this very specific grounding in a very specific political ideology is exactly that. And I think that is a little bit of what's happening here. Because in my opinion, I think when Looks Maxing was written about as just some reasonable self improvement trend on TikTok as opposed to the actual roots that it has in noxious ideology that it does have, I think it was this kind of way of both laundering the ideology in via traditional media and also boosting the celebrity of figures like Peters. And so that is sort of the meat of what I think is happening here. So it turns out that I have so much more to say about this. So this is going to be a two part episode next week we'll talk more about traditional media's role in amplifying Peters and what it means for all of us. So let us know what you thought about this first part of the conversation and don't miss part two. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach [e-mail] youm can also find transcripts for today. Today's [e-mail] There are no girls on the Internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of iHeartRadio and unbossed creative. Jonathan Strickland is our Executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and Sound engineer Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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