The Rest Is Entertainment - WTF is Clavicular - And Should You Care?

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

Clavicular got brutally frame-mogged by an ASU frat leader - what the hell does that mean and why does it matter for modern celebrity? How does Logan Paul successfully selling a Pokemon card for $16m impact the world of collectibles? In a 'sub-lebrity' special, Richard Osman and Marina Hyde explore the dark world of Looksmaxxing, and how 19-year-old influencer Clavicular (real name Braden) has rode this controversial wave. Plus, a Pokemon card has been sold for a record-breaking $16m. We dive into the lucrative industry of collecting. Recommendations: Richard: How To Get To Heaven From Belfast (Netflix) Witch Trial - Harriet Tyce (Book) The Rest is Entertainment is brought to you by Octopus Energy, Britain's most awarded energy supplier. Join The Rest Is Entertainment Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus content, ad-free listening, early access to Q&A episodes, access to our newsletter archive, discounted book prices with our partners at Coles Books, early ticket access to live events, and access to our chat community. Sign up directly at therestisentertainment.com For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Video Editor: Joey McCarthy & Adam Thornton Assistant Producer: Imee Marriott Senior Producer: Joey McCarthy Social Producer: Bex Tyrrell Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by our friends at Octopus Energy. Some people in the entertainment industry are successful, but a much, much smaller number are genuinely admired. I was trying to think in TV, who everyone likes. I mean, Attenborough. In movies, Julia, Merrill, you will not hear a bad word said about any of those people. There are actually very few that no one is rude about behind their back,

but those two are certainly two of them. Can I tell you about a company that no one is read about behind their back and that people admire? Would it shock you to learn? It is our friends at Octopus Energy. Octopus Energy has ended up being named Britain's most admired company, 2025. That's nice. That's really nice, isn't it? I'm sure companies are like Hollywood, just absolutely vicious behind each other's backs.

But to actually be elected, most admired, it's pretty good. All the other companies just sitting around going, should I tell you I met the other day? Octopus Energy, actually, you know what? lovely bunch really really lovely bunch all of them the most admired company in the UK 2025 which is why we're very very happy that there are our sponsors hello and welcome to this episode of the rest is entertainment with me marina hyde and me richard osman hello hello everybody hello marina hello richard how are you i'm very well um just had a lovely weekend um in my hometown of brighton going to see my brother's band and that was really really lovely playing at the brighton centre i was going to say which is where i saw my first ever game

gig, which was Toya Wilcox. I want to say 1981, something like that. And my second ever gig, which was Jasper Carrot, which even to this day, one of the greatest things I've been to. I saw him right back in the day and it was extraordinary. Just one of the funniest evenings of my entire life, Swade were less funny, but very, very, very good at what they did. Very, very good at what they did. Exactly.

Listen, they are, they don't compete. You know, Jasper does what he does, Swade do what they do. And in many ways that part of their success has been based on that, just being allowed to be on twin tracks. Do you know what? It's fascinating when you see Swade and Jaspercaro in a room together because you think that they would clash and actually they don't because they've both got their own orbs, you know?

How about you? I am very well. I have been away but now I'm back and I'm very excited for our subjects today. Yes, the first thing we're talking about, some people would have heard of this gentleman. Others won't. Others will wish they never did when we talked about him, but his name is clavicular.

Clavicular. Clavicular. Yeah, you are going to have quite enough clavicular by the time we are done, I promise you. He's quite extraordinary. Yeah. Yeah. Although also is he. So we'll be covering with.

And talking of extraordinary, but is he? And, you know, occasionally someone comes along, you think they're going to end up being a friend of this podcast. Logan Paul, friend of the podcast, sold his Pokemon card for $16 million. We'll talk about that. But sold it to Anthony Scaramucci's son, AJ. We're going to be talking about that. I feel like it won't be the last time we talk about AJ Scaramucci. Yeah.

It's a sub-loberty special. It really is, isn't it? Let's get into it. Yeah, clavicular. Okay. I am not aware of a well-known public figure called clavicular. Not my words, Richard, but the words of hugely popular AI platform chat GPT when I asked it to retrieve a specific quote this individual had made

besmirching the physical appearance of US vice-examination. President J.D. Vance, who chat GPT is aware of. But so who is Clubbing Killer? You may have seen a lot suddenly about this person. Actually, if you're sort of more extremely online, you might have seen him sort of particularly surfacing towards the end of last year. And like many people, your question, like often happens these days. Your question will be, do I actually have to find out who this person is? And if so, why? In the next 10, 15 minutes, you will learn all you're ever going to need to know about him. You can then, if you wish to, stick him in a drawer and forget about him forever.

So, clavicular, to catch you up, here is your basic thumbnail sketch of this guy. He is an influencer. He live streams in real life. He goes out and the real world goes on dates and stuff like that. But his schick is he is a looks maxer. And this is a whole community of people. Their only real job is to make themselves as handsome as possible, whether that's with the use of cosmetics

or whether with the use of medical procedures. But looks maxing is the community. This guy, Braden Peters, he's clavicular, is the absolute king of this. And in the last couple of weeks, there have been profiles of him in so many major newspapers is having one of those things like a moment where this idea of looks maxing

and this idea of this guy, clavicular, have gone absolutely mainstream. So we just wanted to talk you through who he is, why it's gone mainstream now, is it dangerous? What happens next? And what is this weird new world where celebrities come from completely different places? Also, is he already over?

Is he already over? Looks maxing is the key. I mean, like all things that call themselves life philosophies nowadays, they don't actually, and they're not worthy of the tag philosophy. But essentially, what his view is and what the view of the kind of looks maxing. By the way, allying yourself to a hashtag is very, very clever. Because your content will always be surface, which is. as part of the reason why he's become big.

It's essentially the philosophy, or his particular take on it as the philosophy is, women no longer depend on men for money or lots of things that they used to depend, or even status. Consequently, there is a smaller pool of men who will ever sort of have meaningful relations with women. And the only thing that really makes sense, here's the leap, is extreme physical optimization in this kind of crapsack world that you have to live in. and that you'll hear some words that come from the sort of pick-up artist community, some words from the sort of in-cell community,

unless you're born a sort of like Brad Pitt, a complete Chad, like a sort of kind of platonic ideal of a kind of great-looking guy, then you must work to make yourself good-looking enough for women to be interested in you. You must, as it were, max your looks. You must max your looks. What I call looks-maxing. Yeah, well, everything is maxing that. And there's all sorts of, as I say, there is this,

whole arcane vocabulary. Like everything, it has to have a label put on it nowadays very, very quickly. And so it seems like it, in my view, it seems like it's much less evanescent than it actually is. So there are a whole separate, you know, there's... Can I describe to people at home what Braden Peters looks like? This is how I would describe him. He's six foot two. He weighs 180 pounds. He has a 31-inch waist. His biachromial width, and that is basically the span of the clavicle, who knew that was important, it is, is... 19.5 inches, which is pretty much perfect if you want to be classically handsome. He has a mid-face ratio, which is derived by

dividing the distance from the pupil to the mouth by the distance between the pupils of 1.07. Don't need to tell you that's good. And his chin to philtrum ratio, your philtrum is the bit above your lip. Can you guess his chin to filtrum ratio? Surprise me. 2.6. So this, that's a handsome deed. Yeah, there's an enormous amount of bullshit maths, kind of eugenics adjacent nonsense. Oh, it's eugenics adjacent to this for sure.

So looks maxing is this form of self-optimization, but often in his hands, in really quite extreme forms, he says he kind of constantly creates minor microfactures by hammering his cheekbones so that they become more pronounced. There's this whole peptides injection culture, and people are buying this black market off-market peptides and trying to kind of optimize themselves. that way.

Obviously, there's masses and masses of working out. But there's a huge, the huge fake maths of it all. As you said, the measuring of all the face and the this and that and the idea that there are all these perfect ratios. It's almost like, I've been, I mean, the whole point is, I suppose, people saying I've been shut out of these things. There must be a mathematical answer to it. There must be the maths of me not getting laid.

Algorithmically, can you get me laid, please? Yeah. Because this is all it really is. and there, but this is actually, you know, as I said before, women have, this is, this is making money off the male gays, men making money off the male gays. Women have made money off the female gays for a long time. Oh, they haven't made money, but they've been used to make money. People saying, you know, if you're ill, let me sell you the cure. Yeah. And it's the, listen, I, we probably don't need to say this, but in case there's anyone listening who needs to hear it, it will not make you happy. This is not. not the route to happiness in any way whatsoever. If you think it's funny, that is great. Watch it. If it makes you feel bad about yourself,

absolute guarantee this is not the way to make you happy. The way to make you happy is to be interested in the world, be interested in human beings. But ask women about it because they've been doing about it for literally thousands of years and they're still doing it. So saying it won't make you happy is meaningless. Unfortunately, that's sadly not the way we can deal with this because women have been doing it for thousands.

of years. And they're still buying into their own unhappiness. Let me speak to women as well. Women. I think they know. And of course he has a sort of online university, like lots of people in the sort of manosphere where you can learn all these things. He's sort of evolved to the status of, you know, self-care status of a kind of 18th century Japanese gaitia.

It's like, this is really, this is a grim way to live. I don't even know if I'm allowed to say this. Okay, go on. Which I know you love to hear. He honestly reminds me of one of those incredibly homophobic Republican senators of yesterday who were eventually always picked up for soliciting in a men's bathroom. I mean, yeah. Yeah.

Really. I mean, I hope he ends up living a more happy and evolved life. I mean, the online right is so deeply homoerotic. It's beyond. It's like, but to the extent they must know. Do they not notice? They must do. They must do.

They must. It's the single most homoerotic sphere. But I don't think they've noticed it. Even more so than ice hockey. Yeah. And they don't even know. When someone like Nick Fuentes, who is going to be, you know, who is a kind of awful, horrific sort of really far right edge lord, one of these guys, when they're talking all the time about sort of hating women and the way they hate women

is sort of feels like, yeah? Guys, you should just get together. Why not be with a perfect person, a man? and not with women who you clearly despise. But anyway, to get back onto it, the whole sort of physical self-optimisation thing, he believes, or does he believe, that you can sort of ascend in the terminology of their thing.

Yeah, it's like a sort of physical form of rapture where eventually, if you work really hard on smashing your cheeks with hammers and stuff, you can eventually get more slays. This is the slang for having sex with women, conquering women. Do you know what? The only slay I'm interested in is Santa's.

You know what I mean? I agree. He's misspelled it completely, of course. And as I say, there's extreme medical stuff. The peptides thing is odd. He says he's been on steroids since he's 14, which you can believe all of this, though, because these are people who've grown up in a Silk Road era

and you could get anything you liked online, and you clearly can now, because the whole peptides thing, which he's a really big pusher of, is a huge kind of unregulated or off books or illegal thing that has been flooding into, that people can get hold of this stuff. And he pushes the idea of taking it.

Well, he started, I think, yeah, like 14, 15, where he was buying testosterone on the intake. Because he said, well, why, it's like a cheat code to whatever it is he needs to be, which by the way is not what anybody needs to be. But maybe, listen, he's filling a hole. Like, that's what he needed. And his parents found it. And they said, no, you can't do this.

And then so he started getting it, you know, without them knowing. And so that's where he began this journey. And as you say, that it sort of has, its origins in 4chan and, you know, the in-cell community and all of those things. And so firstly, you know, he's trying to make himself look as handsome as possible in a very, very mainstream white version of what attractive might be. And then he starts being a sort of advocate for it. And as you say, live streaming, you know, streams for eight hours a day.

But, you know, he's making a hundred thousand dollars. You must be in the gym for eight hours a day as well, because you can't, anyway, there are elements of tragedy in it. Elements. Well, I mean, a lot of elements. Yeah, but equally, when you're sort of unpleasant, it's slightly, you know, you're an easy villain. But it's a sort of Darwinian struggle to get laid. He says things like he puts boxes around his house so that when one of his slaves comes home with him, he can sometimes stand on the box just at opportune moments. So he looks taller.

I mean, you have to laugh at this. But then there are sort of elements of comedy, which I quite enjoy. He says he's completely uninterested in politics. Okay, we'll see. That quote that I was at the top of this item, when I was saying, I was looking for a quote, what was the thing he said about Vance? He said that in a sort of 2028 face-off in the U.S. presidential election, a notional one between California Governor Gavin Newsom and J.D. Vance,

he would obviously go for Newsom because he said Newton was a 6'3 mugger we're going to get to Mogging and Vance was subhuman obese and has a recessed side profile He said they said you know what He hasn't said anything about Trump

but he should because there's a lot to say there There's so much to say that But they did they say something about it you pussy So mugging We must talk about mogging Morging just means you've bested someone physically in a sort of side to side contest So

And by the way you mean by being more handsome By being more handsome or being more ripped them or be on whatever it is. Okay. So he will, on his live stream, stand next to somebody who is unaware that he's standing next to them to make that person look unattractive and him look attractive. That's the idea of monging. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of fun.

Or just unintentional moments. Yeah. And let's get to that. Who would have thought the word mok could have got worse than it's been a few years ago? I know. I know Jacob the good one. Yeah. I suppose one of the reason why we're talking about him today,

because apart from you've seen him in lots of places, but is he also already over? Because something happened. When you say, by the way, you see him in lots of places, I think this is the thing for lots of people to listen to this thing, is if you are very online, he is everywhere. If you're not particularly online, he is nowhere at all. No, I don't think that's right.

I think he has been mainstreamed in the last fortnight. Exactly. I had not heard about him until this week, because he's become so massive and he's on every single, everyone else's live stream. And you know the thing with these implements is they multiply themselves by going on each other's streams. Yeah, that's how. It's a huge amount of how you get cloud is by collaborating. And his schick, which is what it is, is an interesting one and it's writable about.

And he absolutely commits to the bit. You know, he's not going, yeah, I think maybe it's be interesting if, you know, about masculinity and maybe we should be more handsome. He absolutely 100% commit. So he's the perfect shape and form of a phenomenon. It's a perfect shape and form of someone where everyone at the same time goes, oh, what's this new thing and who's this new weird guy doing it? So he's got massive. And as you say, the big newspapers, what, you know, legacy media has started writing

and talking about him in the last two weeks, which I assume means it's already over. But you all there. Yeah, we can talk about the online moment that suggests that something, because it's such a sort of tightrope. If you're so extreme and you're so judgmental, you run such a risk of if one small, embarrassing thing happens to you. Now, he was doing a live stream at Arizona State University and he was obviously doing what he always does, which is go to the gym and talk to all the frat boys anyway.

And there was a frat house leader who happened to be standing next to him. And the frat house leader just had a better threat, the physical look than him. So everyone's like, oh my God, all the extremely online people are like, I can't. I can't believe. I remember where I was when, you know, clavicular got frame-mogged. Got what-mogged? Frame-mogged. Frame, the physical shape. This guy was standing next to him in a sort of vest. It was frame-monged. You know what? Sorry, you look at me like I'm an idiot for not understanding the expression frame-mogged. Oh, I was hoping you've got me prepared. It was like I was your grandfather. I was going, sorry, frame-mogged. Yeah, frame-mogged. Something that nobody said, like, honestly, you know, two weeks ago. But among the extremely online community, this, this

moment already has attained the status of like historical event. It's just like trying to imagine on ironic Pearl Harbor, okay, where everyone is just doing jokes and it's a meme and it's like a complete. But of course then it just disappeared. A lot of popular culture is an ironic Pearl Harbor. Yeah. These days. Yeah. That you forget about really quickly. But then becomes incredibly, then has incredibly unironic consequences. Yes. Sadly, the irony eventually melts away. So because I suppose one of the things that people are saying is, Who is funding him? We have seen, and we've talked about this on the podcast before,

the way that lots of kind of extremely hard right women, pundits and commentators used the suddenly started stopping talking about kind of deliberately obvious kind of Route 1 politics stuff and started talking about things like Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni because it pipelines people into those kind of opinions. Trad wife stuff that is going, oh, this isn't politics. There's no politics here. I agree.

And so now when you see him hooking up online with sort of Nick Fuentes, one of the things we have to sort of accept, which is so odd, is that that sort of Charlie Kirk version of young conservatism is now really mainstream. And there is a whole separate class of kind of, we're living in a kind of edge law or descendancy, where these people that used to be kind of part of that, have now gone really quite far out on limbs. So there are people like Candace Owens, who was, you know, one of those kind of, I don't know, Trump outriders.

She's black, she's young, she's beautiful, she did a whole white lives matter thing, those sort of things. She now is suggesting that Erica Kirk is involved in her husband's death. So all of these people who used to be kind of mainstream young conservatives, which, by the way, obviously that overton window had shifted pretty right anyway, are now in this kind of unconstructural. space beyond them all and there are people like Nip Fuentes, they're people like Candace Owens it's not clear whether he clavicular, who was by the way still only 19 could get sort of

sucked into that ecosystem and be used as a way of kind of pipel outlining young men to something much more extreme, much more extreme than a form of kind of mutually agreed upon quite hard right

I don't know, I'm an avatar for our horrible times. Yeah, it's a question of where you go next, if you get your fame in that way. Because, you know, the way we traditionally understand fame is you're an actor, you do a few small jobs, and then you book bigger jobs, and then, you know, you go to Hollywood, and that's how you become super famous. You're a stand-up. That's what a celebrity is. Yeah.

You're a stand-up. You do open slots. Then you, you know, start doing club shows, and then someone books you on a TV show, and then suddenly you're a team captain on something. You're an artist. You've got your own show. That's the thing you do. But you come from the creative industries and creative artistry.

That's sort of what's, or you're in sport. He cannot continue with this shtick and keep making money out of it for too much longer because it has a shelf life. You can see it has a shelf life. Whereas simply being a personality doesn't. But to do that, he has to go into other areas, other lifestyle areas. And as you say, at the moment, in the sphere he is straying into, the way to do that is via a sort of far-right politics. So you see why people are drawn into it. But it's a ratchet with all of these things.

Much as Candace Owens, you know, she starts off one thing. then she's got this whole thing. Well, you have to keep going further and further and further. And they're suing her over it. Where would you go possibly next? You're going to say that Charlie Kirk's widow is involved in his shooting. It's an addiction. It's an addiction to numbers.

Yeah. And so there is only one way to go and that's further and further and further. But, you know, all political movements kill themselves by doing this. That's the point. On left or on right, you know, having to go further and further and deprive yourself more pure than everyone else. But political figures might even kill themselves. That's part of what, so. awful about his thing is that

I mean he is still only 19 and I you know no it doesn't excuse any of this stuff because he says terrible things but one thing that I do think sets him apart is that he's like oh I live in a horror story my like this is awful like I'm a sort of avatar for our nihilist times I am

a kind of tragic figure I don't want to be like this which is different to something that you know like as I as I said I think it must have been in our bonus episodes about the books when I mentioned we were talking about

the game, the Neil Strauss book. But he, Andrew Tate, the funniest thing in the world is him saying, you know, I haven't read a book, I'm amazing, I've got like a car that cost a billion pounds. I mean, he's such a baby, it's beyond. But he does, his thing is,

I am constantly winning. I am everything maxing all the time and I'm loving it. Whereas this is like really quite tragic. You know, my life is a horror story. I shouldn't have to do this. I shouldn't have to inject myself. I shouldn't have to have made

myself infertile. I mean, it's either you become involved in conspiracy culture or you're like some rock star who dies by 27, sorry to say, because you've abused your body in such a sort of difficult way. Let's talk a bit about the reason that you've seen suddenly so many profiles and I've, I mean, I'm not going to count all the places I've seen. I've seen a big thing in GQ, the New York Times, The Guardian did something. We live in a really turbiocharged trend cycle anyway. So things that there are only three examples of are immediately like, okay, this must be the key

to generation alpha or whatever it is. I do think that legacy media now when I see things like that, and I know we're doing a thing on it now on the podcast, but I am trying to talk about it in a slightly border sense that legacy media now is so terrified of missing

things that might be big. There's a sense that and what that says to me is there's a sense that there is a world happening out there. that they're not in anymore and that they certainly, without any question, and they've known this for a long time, no longer control, no longer serve as any form of gatekeeper to. And they do this kind of cargo cult thing where they think, we must have a profile of this person because lots of people are talking about him.

Because if not, then who would we be if we didn't mention this? You make your money in that culture by super serving a particular fandom and by having a group of people who can become obsessional with you. And that's why you live stream for eight hours a day. You're absolutely, you're always on, you're making money all the time from a small group of people. There is a world in which you then get profiled in the New York Times and spoken about in other places where you can ascend to use Braden Peter's own words. You can ascend in monetary ways that you can continue serving your community, but you can continue super serving your fandom, but that you can also then access. that sweet, sweet sponsorship money.

And I never read, I literally never read a single thing when I'm thinking about this podcast, about anyone, any influencer, any actor who doesn't have a deal with Gucci. For example, they all do. They're all brand ambassadors. But to do that, you have to sort of slightly be written about in other places. So he's just ascending. That's all he's doing.

We're helping him ascend. But is he actually already descending because of the ironist moment? You know, if you live by a form of dark irony, you can die by it really quickly. Well, you know, like Rona Martin, right? Yes. The curler. Yeah. I mean, she was massive.

When the women won the curling gold and everyone went like Rona Martin crazy. Rona Martin, right, still curls. Right. She's got a lovely family, you know, she's got a job. She enjoys herself. She has a life that she can go back to. She can enjoy that brief moment of fame. If you're Braden Peters, you have to somehow keep that going.

And that's the tragedy there. If you don't have it in any actual skill, you're in trouble. If you do have a skill, you'll be funny. Look at someone like Ryland. So Ryland, I always think, is a very early kind of almost an analog example of this sort of thing. He appears on X-Ractor. It's not the first show he'd appeared on. And you go, oh, I know who this is.

Oh, my God, this is somebody's desperate for attention. but Rylan had a skill Yeah, he's talented Yeah, people really liked him and he was really good at presenting And so he managed to get a foothold in something else And find himself an actual real job And that may well be what clavicular does.

Clavicular, it might turn out in meetings with various people Has an interesting worldview or is interested in animals And you know, you can do travel documentaries, maybe he can You know, so you can this entry to the market is the first thing to do two things, three things. Either you have a skill, you can become part of our culture, you can disappear or you can not have a skill, you think, oh, okay, I'm going to get myself into the manosphere or into the political sphere and try and monetise that. Those are your three options. It'll be interesting to see where

clavicular goes. After the break, we're going to talk about why a Pokemon card is worth over $16 million and why Anthony Scaramucci's son bought it. Welcome back, everybody. A Pokemon card has been sold for over $16 million. Pokemon obviously are trading cards based on the whole sort of Pokemon world. Pikachu Illustrator is the specific nature of this card. It was made for some sort of promotional competition in 1998. It was made for an illustration competition.

Funnily enough, there was like a drawing competition and the prize was one of these I think it was 41 cards, which were designed by Adsook Nishida, who was the guy who designed Pikachu in the first place. So probably the rarest of all these Pokemon trading cards. Yeah. It was owned by – there's obviously a celebrity element to all of this. It was owned by Logan Paul. This is like me talking about the Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Diamond, the other week

that Margot Robbie wore on the promotional road carpet. but Logan Paul wore this round his neck to WrestleMania in 2022. In a bedeweled case on a diamond necklace. Yeah, okay. As discussed, that Burton diamond, that massive Burton sort of heart diamond, went for $8.8 million about 15 years ago. Now I would imagine it would fetch about the same as Pikachu. Yeah.

It was bought by one of Antoni Scaramucci, our goalhanger colleagues, sons, AJ. Yeah. They're trying to create some sort of global treasure hunt. They say they want to buy the Declaration. of independence. Yeah, good luck. A copy of it. Talk to me about this auction house that they, I mean, this is the thing.

Collectibles, it was facilitated this, wasn't this, by this guy called Ken Golden. He's got that Netflix show called King of Collectibles. And he's got a show about, I've only seen it once, but it's about, it's kind of interesting. It's about memorabilia. Yeah, about, you know, it's about this world of memorabilia. And trading cards are a huge part of that. Comics, of course, are a huge part of that. And these things can go up into their millions.

And, you know, it might seem absurd, but, you know, we paid for old masters. You know, you can pay insane amounts of money for paintings, anything that has rarity and anything that people want. And Ken Golden worked out very early on, as various other people did. The generation who grew up with Pokemon, the generation who grew up with trading cards had reached the ages of 35, 40, 45, and had a huge amount of money. Nostalgia for their childhood was a huge deal. And so suddenly this market went absolutely stratospheric. Pokemon cards and Magic the Gathering Cards, which is another trading game, are the perfect things for auction houses because you know exactly how many there are of each one.

There are a small amount of some of them, you know, in the same way when you used to collect Panini football stickers and if you've got a glossy badge, you'd be so excited. Also the verification industry, so there's a company called PSA, which is the professional sports authenticators, whose job is to authenticate cards, but also give them a score out of 10 as to the quality of them. And this one, the reason this is 16 million, I mean, one of the reasons it's 16 million is it's the first one of these Pikachu Illustrator cards ever to come on the market with a score of 10,

which is a PSA would call gem mint. So it's gem mint. It's not dog-eared in the parlance of anyone normal. Exactly that. The second most expensive Pokemon card, so this is 16.5 million. which is a little bit topy, but the world of auctions can be strange sometimes. But previously the record for a Pokemon card was just over $5 million.

And that was exactly the same Pokemon card. That's the one that, that's when Logan Paul bought this. He bought it for $5 million. He made $11 million profit, as you say, that he knows how to make something more valuable. But he doesn't make my culture more valuable. He knows how to devalue it completely, but carry on. In the same way as kind of, you know, people, People buy rare whiskey and people buy gold and all these things.

I think this feels like a perfectly acceptable thing to have in our culture. I think it's quite a nice. If you're going to have an asset class, and we've got lots of these asset classes, you know, sculpture, painting, all of that sort of stuff, I quite like that it's this thing. You know, my son loves Pokemon and he's in his 20s, but, you know, it's such an important part of his childhood, and it's an incredibly important part of other people's.

I quite like that this is the thing that we're, because this is not, people are not buying this to put on the wall. They're buying it. It's an investment. It's something that you want to own. You invest in it. And I quite like that this is an investment class.

You know, like these incredible illustrators doing these crazy things. Okay, fine. They're buying shares in this and not like union carbide or something. Yeah, exactly. It's a low bar. We were also living through a time where, which by the way, went nuts.

All of this stuff went nuts in the pandemic. Yeah, yeah. Remember, it went nuts at a time where people were driven nuts by what they were forced to do, or you stay inside. Think about NFTs. You basically convinced a load of people to pay for JPEX. Okay, I'm really sorry to put it down there. Okay, they were funny, but a lot of people put their money.

Yeah, but people put their money in it. Yeah, but not many people. All these supposedly high value collectors. Are you saying that you did? Don't be stupid. Of course I do. You're not 7.8 million pounds. I'm saving for my, you know, Van Gogh.

I wonder, by the way, listen, we can ask it, I guess. I wonder if Scaramucci bought an NFT. One of the things we slightly think about is that, again, to speak of the nihilism of the culture, it's all bullshit, it's all what anyone will pay for it, that's what markets are. There is a sort of element, you know, but they also sort of

it's a generation that also rent everything or effectively. They stream that, you know, they don't own physical copies of lots of things, although as we've seen there is a sort of trend back towards that. I'm sure Anthony Scaramucci Sr. would say that his voice of how to put this, not been starved of physical

ownership of material things. So perhaps they are not, but they certainly understand maybe something in the culture. So talking about the other things they want to buy, they want to buy a copy of the Declaration of Independence. So this is here. So AJ Scaramucci's bought this said, this is just the start of me owning the un-owned. Something called a global treasure hunt. And then they want to buy, they also want to buy a T-Rex fossil. Now, this is something quite interesting. Can we do a sidebar on the dino's, buying dynos? As I think I've mentioned on this podcast before, Nicholas Cage once outbid Leonardo DiCaprio for a T-Rex skull. But that was like 20 years ago.

Nicholas Caj, as you know, has an interesting spending habits, all of which were unsustainable at the time. But anyway, he had to give that one back to Mongolia. You had to give it back to Mongolia. Yeah, because it was stolen. Well, I mean, you can fray anything. But who'd you send it to? The Mongolian government.

They've got a whole, they've got a retrieval sort of thing. because Mongolia was not a place you can take a dinosaur skeleton from. By the way, interesting, the US still is. I wish you told me that last week. Yeah. Wow. The US is one of the only places in the world

where if you dig one up, it's yours. People are now trying to go back and find where they were. Because often they're even unassembled and they're in some tiny private local museums of all to go back and buy them because there is a growing demand on the markets, the art market, essentially,

for what they call national. natural objects, which are primarily dinosaur bones, but also things like meteorites and stuff like that. Now, Sotheby's are selling more and more of them. A few months ago, they sold a sarataurus skeleton. It was 150 million years old. I think they estimated it for $4 million. It went for $30 million. The year before a Stegosaurus had gone for $44 million, they have something that is kind of popularly known as Geekweek, where they're selling things like an original Apple One computer, again, as I say, kind of meat rights, dinosaur bones. Yeah, I've talked before about Julian's auctions in LA, Julian with an E, which was, we talked

about it when they were selling all the props from Frazier. And, yeah, if you look on their thing this week, they've, like loads of astronaut stuff, loads of civil rights stuff, living history. Yes. That people want to physically own a piece of. It's interesting as well that there is a strong criminal element to this, because there was a really interesting few weeks. I think at the very end of last, sort of,

the first case was on December the 29th, and the last one was halfway through January. Just in Nottinghamshire, there were like four major criminal cases that involved Pokemon cards because they're a really liquid acid. They're very small and portable. Yeah, really easy to fake.

Yeah, it's sort of interesting that it's become... You have to be very, very careful with collectibles. You know, I was looking up, I'm starting a what have I got? So I was looking at Panini football stickers and literally the most expensive

at auction Polini football sticker was someone had a completed World Cup 1970 sticker annual signed by Pellé which went for 10,000 pound. Wow. So we're not up to the

16 million. I can imagine how much effort went into that. I can imagine how much effort went into that. But this is a lot of money, 16 million dollars for sure. Ken Golden, who is the guy who owns

the auction house, course he's making a big cut off that. That's how auction people make their money. AJ Scaramucci, there'll be something in this for him, and obviously he hopes that it goes up and he can drive that market. Logan Paul, of course, there's a huge amount of money in that for him. Absolutely sure that it's all above board and everyone felt it was worth $16 million. That's what got paid and all of that.

But certainly if you look back at the world of old market, of old master paintings, the stories of how the biggest prices ever are reached are, are so murky. Yes, and this was very performative, I thought. I found it quite interesting. When I was reading an article about K.M. Golden's HQ, his headquarters is in New Jersey, in an industrial park next to a hospice. I was like, oh, God, America, you can be so on the nose.

I can't really. But yes, I agree with this. This was an event in all sorts of different ways. And I'm sure we'll, it'll be interesting to read more about it as time goes on. The one, I was reading up about props for movies and things like that, and there's all sorts of records. I think the Reby slippers from Wizard of Oz went for $22 million, one of which Spielberg bought to give to a museum, one of which was stolen from the Judy Garland Museum, and that's the one that went for $22 million. It's fascinating what does become enormously profitable. Like the fedora and the ball whip from Indiana Jones, of course goes for a lot of money.

Peter Jackson owns the only working chitty-chitty-bang-bang, which he paid like $400,000. thousand pound for and takes around on charity events yeah um castaway it's not a huge movie no right the tom hanks the tom hanks one the tom hanks one uh wilson the volleyball the actual volleyball from that which is this sort of filthy deflated volleyball for 230 thousand dollars this world of Pokemon cards i quite like it as a thing because i like collecting things and i like trading things it it speaks to me something like Pokemon i sort of think Pokemon someone invented it and someone created it and someone really nurtured it and someone gave such joy to generations

and generations of kids. I quite like it if that becomes one of our big asset classes of this century. It's no more stupid than a load of Andy Warholz. Exactly that. It is exactly the same amount of stupid and as human beings. And like by the same people. Recommendations, Richard. A couple of things.

If you haven't watched yet, How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, Lisa McGee's series on Netflix, her sort of follow up to Derry Girls is just brilliant. It's eight episodes. It's bonkers. The casting is unbelievable. We get different actors playing

different generations of these characters. And the casting is amazing. The writing is amazing. Really funny, really sharp, just full of life, beautifully directed. It's a real treat that. And also, finally, Harriet Tice from Traders,

her new book, Witch Trial, is out. I'll say this. It's really, really, really great. And for anyone in the crime writing community, she is the absolute real deal. We will be back on Thursday, as always, with the Q&O. There's a lot of Andrew-related questions. A lot of Prince Andrew questions. Yeah, so we'll be dealing with a lot of media and Andrew questions.

Not Prince Andrew, Andrew, Mountbatten, Windsor. And then, in something very close to my own heart, our bonus episode for members on Friday, it's 40 years since a certain movie, Top Gun, came out. I must see it. I'm joking. Yeah, I know. You better be. Anyway, that's for our members.

If you want to join for ad-free listening and Discord and early access to events, etc., etc. It is The Restorsentatement.com. Otherwise, we will see you all on Thursday. Thursday. Did Vladimir Putin interfere in the US 2016 presidential election? I'm Gordon Carrera, National Security Journalist. And I'm David McClars. author and former CIA analyst. And we are the hosts of the rest is classified. And in our latest

series, we're going deep inside the 2016 election to reveal the true story of whether the Russians helped Donald Trump take the White House. This is the unbelievable story of how Russian spies first hacked and then leaked emails belonging to Hillary Clinton's campaign, how Julian Assange got involved with Putin spies, and how 2016 marked the point that the world. changed forever. Get the full insider scoop by listening to The Rest is Classified, wherever you get your podcasts.