The Daily - Injections, Bone Hammering and the Pursuit of Peak Male Beauty

Episode Date: March 22, 2026

If you’ve spent any time on social media recently, you’ve probably come across a video of a young, square-jawed influencer calling himself Clavicular. He has become the face of an internet subculture called looksmaxxing, in which men do almost anything — like taking steroids and hormones or bashing their jaws with a hammer — to try to become more handsome. In this episode, Natalie Kitroeff talks with reporter Joseph Bernstein about the world of looksmaxxing and how what might seem like a fringe phenomenon is actually the culmination of a digital culture that rewards physical perfection with status and algorithmic power. On Today’s Episode Joseph Bernstein covers digital subcultures for the Styles desk at The New York Times. Background Reading Handsome at Any Cost Young Men Seek Answers to an Age-Old Question: How to Be Hot The Suffix That Tells Us to Ruthlessly Optimize Everything Photo Credit: Cassidy Araiza for The New York Times Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitchrow-F. This is the Sunday Daily. There's a corner of the internet where young men spend hours raiding each other's bodies. They evaluate the length of their midfaces 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 looks maxing, and their community, which started as a subculture, is now bursting into the main source. stream. 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. No offense, but you're sitting there and gestrogooning like a subhuman beta cuck. Meanwhile, I'm out here or a maxing like an S-tier gigachad. 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 looks maxing appeals to so many young men and what its residents says about our culture. It's Sunday, March 22nd. Joe, welcome to the Sunday Daily.

Great to be here. 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? What is looks maxing. So looks maxing is a community of mostly men on the internet who are dedicated to making themselves more attractive by any means necessary. And what does that mean exactly? 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 surgery. is 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. Just so wild. Okay.

So who are these people, these bone tapers? Right. So to understand looksmaxers, we have to start with the internet community of in-cells. 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.

Right. And incels are known for being a sometimes violent, often very hateful group of people, especially toward women. Right, yeah. It's a pretty nihilistic subculture. the idea is that if you aren't attractive enough, your life is over. Looksmaxers 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.

To hammering your face. That's right. And it's important to say that they're all aiming. for a very specific ideal of beauty. And what is that ideal to find it for me? 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 max in content, and he was sort of racially harassed out of of the subculture. Yeah, so that definitely sounds racist.

Yeah, and if you go on the looksmaxing forum, the rhetoric is frequently pretty racist, nihilistic. It's nasty. And looksmaxers might dismiss that accusation is 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 Bowmer, essentially.

Right, and that idea of maximizing your looks, that's where you get the word, looks maxing. Sort of. 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. And all of this is basically what, in service of attracting women? Kind of, but not completely. And this is where looks maxing is actually different from the insult culture we talked about earlier. So in cells are completely focused on women and how they've been unfairly treated by women. Looksmaxers 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 looksmaxers that they've started to do something that they call ascend.

And what does it mean to ascend? 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 the status is their reward. It does seem as though the looksmaxers are very focused. on other men and how they view each individual member of this community, how they rate each other. Totally. 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 magging.

Mogging. So mauging is when you prove yourself superior to someone else. So if you're more attractive than another man, you're mocking him, your looks maugging 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. Okay. So how does this small subset of people online, this niche, become much more mainstream?

What's the story there? 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. What's going on, fellas? Today I want to do a little bit of a review on Tarzipatide or Majanah, whatever you want. 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 looksmaxing 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 is sort of willing to push looks-maxing techniques as far as they would go on the board itself. And what exactly does that mean? So basically when Peters was a teenager, he started experimenting with all these techniques. What's up? I just want to give a comprehensive overview of SARMs or selective antigen receptor modules. But not only that, as he's doing this, he's also posting all the time on this forum about his results.

want to go over what SARM stack you should run for each of your specific goals. 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 for how to try these things themselves. And that within the community, it sort of made him the main character. So how does he get bigger than just this one place? Hey, what's going on, guys? I'm sure you guys saw the title of this video, and, you know, we're interested to see what happens. So I want to do this video as a little bit of a story time.

Okay, so clavicular is a teenager, and when he's 18, he goes to college. During his freshman year... Unfortunately, someone decided to archive all of my posts and send them all to the public safety at my university. He gets caught with a bunch of steroids in his... storm room and gets kicked out. 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 LuxMax forum, unfortunately. So I guess they got the best to me. And this is an extremely important moment for him. 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 end.

Because from here on out, he decides to devote himself completely to looks maxing. goes all in. All in. Are we up? Oh, finally. Boys, boys, boys, boys. How are we doing today? And as a part of that, he starts streaming these live videos of himself on Kik, which is a platform, like, sort of a more extreme version of Twitch. Your body fat is the first thing that's holding you back. I can't even tell if you're magging or not. Let's see. And he does videos where he's raiding people and he's going out in the world and talking to people. But real quick question. because everybody on this streaming world says I'm like super ugly and super hideous and I look cracked out. What are your first initial thoughts on like my looks, bro?

I would say that you're around average to slightly above average and looks. And all this catches the attention of some larger, more widely known streamers. So she got 3.5. Why and how can she improve? Well, she, her midface is way too long. And these guys put him on their streams because he's such a kind of a character you can't look away from. You know, all the facial convexities are wrong. Heretics is recessed. Moving on.

Okay, well, how much time do we have on the podcast? Part of the reason he becomes so famous so quickly is that he's obviously courting controversy. I was going to talk about a controversial lean maxing hack. I don't know if you want to. So he was talking about the really extreme things he'd done to stay thin. For three days, I spammed a combination of adderol and methamphetamine for appetite suppression. Like, for example, taking meth. Taking meth?

Taking meth. We're about to do some fat dissolver. Guys, clap. And another controversial incident, actually live on stream, he injected some fat dissolving peptides into the face of his then 17-year-old girlfriend. Chat, where it looks maxing her. We'll look max in her. It's all good.

Dr. Clav? Yeah. My God. 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 a 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. 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. Yeah. And, like, clavicular routinely uses the N-word. Wow.

Yeah, I asked him about it. And again, he said it was dumb, basically meaning other reporters trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. But you can't really trivialize using the N-word. It's just racist. Right. He's not really giving any thought

to the harm this language might cause. To him, to looks-maxers, 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 2020, 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 natural thing in the world. And now that he's

gained a degree of renown, he's actually distanced himself to some degree from this kind of rhetoric. 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. He says a lot, and he told me he doesn't care about politics, and that in fact, here's another one of those looks-maxing terms. Politics are jester. It's not something that I want to involve myself in. Politics is jester.

What is jester? 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. My main pursuit is that of aesthetics 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. Got it. So how viral at this point is he going? Exactly. So on KICC, 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.

Okay. But of course, the Internet deals in large numbers, huge numbers. And where those really start to rack up is all 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 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? And that's why I wanted to go to Arizona and meet him. Which is 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. We'll be right back. So, Joe, 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. 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 is not 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, like, face of the Internet. And I'm just kind of thinking, like, what am I doing here exactly? Suffice to say, you're conscious of your appearance in this moment for many reasons. 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.

Okay, so you're sitting down with him. What's the conversation like? Tell me about it. So before I get into the conversation, it might be useful to understand what I sort of thought I was there to figure out. Sure. 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. And how do you do that? 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 your parents, you know, that kind of every day? Well, so I grew up in a pretty small town called Hoboken, New Jersey.

Grew up in New Jersey, grew up in Hoboken. I really like the Nerf guns growing up. He said he was an obsessive, sort of a hyperfixated kid. You know, so I wasn't like, oh, let me just get one of these. I had to have, like, 50. Mm-hmm. Was kind of like my personality trait. And then in high school, like it does for a lot of us,

things got rough for clavicular. 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. And so one of the ways he decides to kind of deal with that is by getting into bodybuilding. Well, so I just started kind of working out. I had like a little home gym thing in my basement. But he was spending a lot of time on the internet, like any red-blooded American kid in 21st century, and he discovered testosterone, the hormone testosterone.

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

That if I could accelerate my progress in the gym with a simple pharmaceutical intervention, then of course I'm going to do it. So he found a way to get it online and he ordered it. And so you were 14 when you started taking TRT? Yeah. Okay. So it sounds bad, but I turned 15 a month later.

Okay. So he keeps it a secret at first. But his parents eventually end up finding the testosterone, taking it away. And according to clivocular, it starts this whole cycle where he's ordering it, getting caught. And my parents sort of just like, you know, wanted, you know, to be kind of ignorant about it, you know. Meaning they thought you might be doing it. didn't interview it? Yeah, they just didn't want to have to deal with it anymore.

And eventually his parents basically throw their hands up and say, we can't stop this, you're just too determined. Because they realized after a certain point of me, like, reordering it and getting PO 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, you know, me from ascending. 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 it 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. 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. 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 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? 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. Got it. But when I asked him questions about the actual sort of substance of looks maxing, he would go on and on and on and be genuinely excited to talk about it. So far be it from me to psychopathologize a story subject. But clavicular talks a lot about being on the autism spectrum. I think I'm different in terms of, you know, the way that I think, I would say it's just more of a neurodiversion.

He says he's never gotten an official diagnosis, but it's sort of part of his understanding of himself. 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. And one way you maybe see this is his obsessive focus on numbers and statistics, including his own. Which are, what are his own stats? So how tall are you? I'm 6'222.

How much do you weigh? 180 pounds. Okay. Do you know any other measurements off the top of your head? Yeah. Right now my bi-deltoid is only 21 inches. So you might know how tall you are, how much you weigh. He knows things like his bichromial width, which is the span of,

your clavicle. That's where he gets his name, clavicular from. I believe that's around 19.5 inches. Okay. To remasure that. 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. Lucky you. That would be 1.07. Okay. So my mid-face is a little bit short. It should be, meaning you want you, in an ideal world, it would be a little you'd stretch it out a little bit. Very slick.

Like with a character creator and role playing games? I would do that on... Yeah, this is like the kind of I do in Photoshop. He's tracking this stuff. Yeah, yeah, obsessively. And he also tracks... It has to keep track of all the things that he takes.

What's your stack right now? What do you take every... Yeah. He told me he wasn't able to tell me everything that he's ever taken because it would essentially take so long. Wow. But he did list a number of the things

that he was on at the moment. I'm on 25 milligrams of acutane. I'm on 12 milligrams of retitutide. So he's on testosterone, a gLP called retitrutide 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. Okay. Monoxidil is a hair loss drug, so is dutastride, which he also takes. I do a lucky dip, which basically means I have dutastriide in a raw. powder for them, and I'll just dip my finger in the bag and take it. Something called melanotan, which makes you tan faster, so you can get tan without spending so much time in the sun.

Is that it? No, no, no. High-dose melatonin, which he takes as an antioxidant. A lot of people think I'm memate when I say. Taking 300 to 500 milligrams is phenomenal. Something called glutathione. That helps a lot of dopamine toxicity. Something called NAD plus.

One of the 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. So heavily medicated. Does he have any concerns about, like, pumping a virillion chemicals into his body? 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. And is he upset about that? No, he's 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. Okay.

Somewhere in the sevens. Sevens? Not bad. Well, you should have dexterity. He asked me, because I shaved my head, why I hadn't started on hair-loss drugs when I was younger. The potential side effects are something I'm not willing to... Oh, for your day? 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. Uh-huh. That's a cope. Noceba. Garbage. 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. He's saying, basically, that he's willing to sacrifice sexual enjoyment for the goal of looking good, becoming more beautiful.

Yeah, I mean, his point is both that these side effects are very rare, and men tell themselves 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. 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? 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? I was just saying it's almost like equally as redeeming to me to know that I could do it. 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. You know, I'm a busy guy. I live stream for 10 plus hours. I'd been 13 and a half hours yesterday. Mm-hmm. Do I have time to... Waste, having sex, which is going to gain me nothing. It just doesn't seem very logical to me.

Okay, we're 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. Joe, there is obviously a complicated mess of ideas and impacts of all of this that we want to entangle. But first, I want to 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 just inject themselves with Botox, filler, everything else under the sun. They regularly, from the age of 15, or 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? 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. 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. 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. Right. 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. 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. 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 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 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.

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. 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. 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 is the result of a kind of manufactured effort by publicists, by a very 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. 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. 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. Right. Right. So on an intuitive level, of course, this sort of monofocus 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, Joe, what should we make of the fact that clavicular, someone who espouses these views of the world? world, of people's value in the world has become so popular and so influential right now. 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. 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, a strong role too. 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. 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. Well, Joe, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Today's episode was produced by Luke Vanderplug with help from Tina Antalini and Alex Barron. It was edited by Wendy Doer.

Our production manager is Franny Carr Toth. Contains music by Marion Lazzano and Dan Powell. And was engineered by Sophia Landman. Special thanks to Brendan Klingenberg and Nina Feldman. That's it for the day. I'm Natalie Ketrow-F. See you tomorrow.