Today, Explained - The darkness behind looksmaxxing

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

When streamer Clavicular bashes his face with a hammer or does meth to stay skinny, it's not just himself he's hurting. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Andrea Lopez-Cruzado, engineered by David Tatasciore and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Illustration photo of a male TikTok influencer hammering his cheekbone. Photo by CHRIS DELMAS/AFP via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

By now, you've definitely heard that clavicular got brutally framed-mogged by an ASU frat leader. Yo, Klav, two words. Frame-mogged. Maybe you heard that he mugged the dime square jester gooners. You probably know that clavicular, Little Man Tate, and whitish supremacist Nick Fuentes danced to Heil Hitler and Vendom, and then Klav got fight-mogged in the club during fashion week in New York. Or maybe you're lucky, and you have no idea what I'm talking about.

A remarkable new online subculture has young men clockwork orangeing, bashing their faces with hammers and snorting crystal meth to drop weight, all in the interest of being the most handsome boy. Coming up on today, explained clavicular and the looks maxers. I got in the water in the very early morning before the sun had risen, and the water was pitch black. I started swimming, and I felt the water hollowing out around me and felt like something really big was swimming below. I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is love. A show about the surprising things that love can make us do. More than 100 episodes available now on This Is Love.

This is Today Explained. My name is Charlie Worsal, and I'm a staff writer at The Atlantic and the host of its podcast Galaxy Brain. Charlie, who is clavicular? Oh, great question. The question of our age, really. Let's see. Clavicular is a young man. He's in his 20s.

What up, chat? How's everyone doing? He started posting on the internet as a teenager around when he was about 15 years old on these looks maxing forums, which are forums that are dedicated to making yourself as aesthetically perfect as humanly possible body modification. I'm getting autoplasty and rhinoplasty during the surgery,

so they'll pin the ears back, do the mastoid tie. So I'm already getting that. It's all included. And so he started posting there. His real name's Brayden. And he basically toiled in obscurity for a really long time until he allegedly hit someone with his cyber truck while he was live streaming on Christmas Eve of this past year.

Is he dead? I don't want to. Hope for it. Tell me about the looksmaxers. What is their deal? The looksmaxers are complicated because they are in an overlap with lots of other communities online, right? There's the involuntarily celibate community known as in-cells, right, that have links to violent extremism. But really, there's this core feeling in looks maxing, that the only thing that matters in all of life is how good you look, that that is tied to your self-werex.

worth in every way and that what you should be doing is trying by all means necessary, whether that is breaking bones in your body, whether that is chewing on a rubber ball for hours a day to get your jawline to be straighter, whether that's steroids or drugs or anything to get a leg up. You need to do that because the best thing that you can do is go out in the world. and look better than everyone else and document the heck out of it. Those examples sound extreme, but I suspect you're going to tell me they're not. What do we know about what clavicular has done to himself? Well, we only know what he tells us, right?

So, you know, unreliable narrator, perhaps. But he has said on various podcasts, et cetera, that he has smashed his face with a hammer. The theory there is that when your bones break, they grow back stronger. I'm saying that's his theory, not my theory. I'm certainly not endorsing this. How does it work? So you're bracing yourself, you don't have to do it. And then you're hitting real hard.

And what this is doing is creating micro fractures. And according to Wolf's law, the bone is going to grow back stronger. And not only that, but you're also getting a lot of inflammation and swelling. So it makes your cheek bones look a lot bigger. And so he has smashed his face, his jawline, in order to strengthen it to make it look better. He started, according to him, taking testosterone when he was around 14 or 15 years old. I started taking exogenous hormones testosterone when I was 14. I thought, why would I work out as a natural, like years to make the progress that I can make in months?

It didn't make sense to me at all. Which is also not recommended by medical professionals. And that is in order to, you know, speed up his puberty and get his body, you know, looking like an adult man's. He's said he's taken methamphetamines in order to hollow out his cheeks. For three days, I spammed a combination of adderol and methamphetamine for appetite suppression. And I literally went on a three-day fast. and stayed awake the entire time. Which is a, it's certainly a choice.

Yeah. Like I said, guys, I'm not going to sit here and act like I'm some good influence. Don't do that. Don't do that. That's what I did. I'm crazy. Right. I'm the crazy guy.

And all sorts of things. This thing, again, chewing on a, on like a rubber ball. It's called mewing is the phrase. And it helps structure your jaw sort of like curling your biceps or something like that. So there's all kinds of. of things that he has done supposedly that are that are extremely extreme. One thing that I find so fascinating is this is like a society in a way. And so the looks maxers have their own language, which I think is very compelling. Can you define a couple of the

terms? The white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes made fun of me recently for using like this language as like a, you know, a loser millennial guy. A whole person. Because I'm just like, and it's true. And I think that's actually part of it. Like every generation has their own language and, you know, this language is very influenced by online message board communities and places like 4chan, et cetera. But part of it is, as it always is, right, is to make the older people have to say it and look like true losers. So that's, yeah.

Okay. So there's stuff like, I mean, looks maxing is its own, right? Mogging is like, you know, looking better than someone looking, looking hot. And it actually, what I found is it comes from, it's like a sort of an acronym, but it stands for like alpha male of the group. And then male of the group, mog, monging. So, magging is essentially just, you know, outperforming them, looking better than them. Yeah. And just sort of dominating, right?

So there's this like, you know, alpha, beta, dominance. go back to the jungle, you know, Darwinian kind of thing going on. They could money-mog you. They could status-mog you. There's all kinds of words that they're just making up on the spot, too, right? Like, like, gesture-maxing. I think of it, like, you're this big jester, like, doing these silly, like, activities. Don't be jester-maxing at the club. Getting mono for six months.

Getting AIDS. Just lock in. If the point of looks-maxing is to be as hot as possible, I get it. It's understandable. You're young. What is the objective of being hot? What is the purpose of all this? It is social dominance, really, or just dominance in general, right? This idea of magging coming from this alpha male of group acronym, the alpha part of that and the male part of that are both extremely important. And so going out in public as an extremely hot person is not just to show how beautiful you are, but it's to be dominant over other people, right? You want to make other people look bad.

You want them to feel bad about themselves based off of how unbelievably attractive you are. And you also want to basically conquer women. It is about, you know, how many, how many, quote unquote, chicks can you pull, right? It's, it's, but all of it is in this sense of conquest, of domination, of making everyone else subordinate to you. All right, so I've read your pieces and I listen to your podcast. And there's a thing that I think you both say directly and kind of dance around, which is clavicular and the gang seem stupid.

This seems stupid. But it isn't actually stupid. Explain what you mean. Well, I think it's stupid on the content level, right? It is, it's pretty, gosh, it's lacking in substance, is how I would put it. There's a, the clip of clavicular, I believe he's in Miami. He's with this streamer, Sneiko, who's very popular. And Nick Fuentes, the, you know, white nationalist, griper leader, also streamer.

Is a white guy? Is he 5-8? Does he have war? That's Nick Fuentes. And they are in a living room. Hey, bro. Where in an apartment. There's, like, people walking around in the background.

They are just, like, pulling up old computer chairs and sitting awkwardly in front of this camera and having a conversation that is, like, incredibly stilted, just incredibly vapid. We saw our section last night in the way that me and Siko do it. Like, it's impossible and not, like, mock. You know, we mocked every single. Dude, yeah, for you guys. Dude, what are you? There's just, like, not a lot being exchanged there.

Clavicular seems to react with just like a... He has sort of like one of those, you know, wind-up dolls. Like, you pull the string and there's like five different reactions, right? So, like, one of them's like, oh, dude, that's so based. Oh, so-based. Sick. I have a wiki page. Wiki page based.

That was based last night all around. All right, based. Next segment, yeah, based. based, let's call a girl. And so on the substance level, there's that. Then there's the element of what he means, what that vapid content means, what the popularity of someone like clavicular means. And I think that that is not stupid.

Like the fact that were I'm writing an article about him in the Atlantic because he's hanging out with these people. The fact that, you know, he was able to leverage his popularity into this situation where he is meeting with Andrew Tate, the Manosphere influencer. All right, well, fellas, I think we should probably start heading over to Tate's. It's about time. But, dude, that was a good sit-down segment. I thought we, you know, talked about some interesting topics. W, yeah. W's in the chat for that. How many people we got in who is influential enough that he's trying to force the MAGA coalition further towards white nationalism, that he's able to go into a club with these guys and get them to play the yay song, Heil Hitler,

and turn that into this viral moment that then gets the mayor of Miami to have to react to it, to condemn it, you know, basically apologize on behalf of the city for letting this happen. These guys are extremely effective attention hijackers. And that's, that is important. The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel ahead. Charlie comes back to tell us how the looks maxers are taken over the real world. Support for today, Explain, comes from Chime when you're checking your finances. The last thing you want to see is a bank fee.

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I'm Noelle King. We're back with the Atlantic's Charlie Worsell. Okay, Charlie, there's a world in which this is just kids being. kids. You call it nihilism in your piece. But then you point out, others have pointed out, it is not just kids being kids because it is influencing, really, our political leaders. Tell me what you've seen of this bleeding into politics. Yeah, I think that we are in the middle of a crisis of nihilism. And it's a very online phenomenon to some degree. But some of the original message board spaces. 4chan is probably the most popular one,

which came out of this other forum, something awful. It was populated by a lot of kids and young men who felt really disaffected, who were bored, who felt like they weren't living up to their potential. They gathered, they found community here,

and one thing that they developed was this incredibly robust ironic culture, right? It was this idea that given their own insecurities if they could believe in nothing, if they could hold nothing in their hearts,

then they were invincible, right? You couldn't hurt them. You couldn't insult them. You couldn't make fun of them for living in their parents' basement, right? And so there became this way of, you know, trolling people of really having no ideology other than chaos that really has bled into all kinds of

culture over the last two decades. And the Trump movement in 2016 was a huge leap forward for these people feeling like they had representation, but also that their culture was fusing with a type of politics, and that has grown and grown and grown year over year over year. And what you see now in the second Trump administration are a lot of these people or people who are fluent in the language of those places now occupy positions in government. The person who is controlling the Department of Homeland Security's account on X or the White House's account on X, the person who's doing the day-to-day posting, is posting in a way that is indistinguishable

from how someone was posting on 4chan in 2014. And I'm not, like, actually genuinely indistinguishable. It is trolling. It is dog whistling to white nationalists and other bigots. It is trying to make one's political enemies feel absolutely terrible. but also there is this feeling that there are no rules anymore. There are no adults in the room and we are in charge.

Let me ask you about something that surprised me. So I think of these guys, and again, I had a shallow knowledge two weeks ago, but I think of these guys as having right-wing politics. And then I go online one day and I see that clavicular has said J.D. Vance could not win an election, a presidential election against Gavin Newsom because Gavin Newsom, Mogg's J.D. Vance. He's hotter. Yeah, but I mean, like, this next election cycle, who's going to win? It's going to be Gavin Newsom against J.D. Vance because J.D. Vance is subhuman and Gavin Newsom Muggs.

They know that I literally sent his fucking campaign down the shitter. Like, wait, literally. Now I just noticed, like, this loser fat guy because it went everywhere, like on Twitter. And then, and that might have been nothing. But then I saw people who I take seriously saying, oh, this is really actually a problem for J.D. Vance. that this influential young guy is calling him, like, fat and ugly. Forgive me for saying it, but that was what was happening. And it made me wonder whether, does clavicular actually have right-wing politics? Like, what is this brand of commentary?

What is he doing? You know, there's a way in which if you say he doesn't, right, and then he pals around with Nick Fuentes, there's a way in which that sounds like that's excusing him, right? Or saying he doesn't have any agency. I think it's really important to say these guys are making choices. They have full agency. They should be taking full responsibility

for the fact that, like, Clifford says the N-word, a lot on stream. Like, he is doing things that are racist, that are bigoted. He's palling around with people who are racist and bigoted. But as far as his actual ideology, I think it's politically, I think it's completely incoherent.

And I think that this is something that a lot of people are having trouble dealing with. And this is a bit of that nihilism as it relates to our political moment. I'm really just trying to diminish any political movement, any populist, like, movement whatsoever, just by having, like, men trying to, like, self-improve. Like, there's a million things I can name that are a better use of time to accelerate yourself as a male. and anything to do with politics. Clificulars' politics in so much as that they exist

are about attention, right? And I think that you see this in so many different varieties, right? I'm not linking clificular to directly to the types of mass shooters that we have seen. But there is a similarity,

there's a similar flavor in the sense of, you see some of these mass shooters going into places doing these big manifestos, right? Some of these manifestos contain a whole bunch of anti-Semitic and white nationalist screeds. But then they also have a bunch of stuff, you know, making fun of Donald Trump. They write stuff on their bullets that the whole point of it is to get attention, to get people to go on a wild goose chase, to understand who they are, to hack the media, to hack the attention. And at the end of it, that is what matters to them.

is why they are doing this. And I think you can kind of tie that to this guy. The reason he's doing it is because it gets him the attention that he wants. It's helpful to his project, which is to be the, you know, the guy who goes in and, you know, quote unquote, mocks people on stream. Everyone who I've talked to about clavicular, who knows who he is, who has a son or a nephew, really wants to know if it is too late. Like if internet nihilism has gotten to the point of no return, and this is just where we are now. Do you think this is our future?

I don't. I mean, when I wrote that piece, a lot of people reached out to me very despondently. And one thing that I feel like saying about my job, writing about technology and the internet is, is it feels a lot like being like a foreign correspondent to me, right? Like I am reporting from a place and in the sense of the manosphere or, you know, whatever we're calling where clavicular hangs out all the time, that's kind of a dark place. That's a, that's a place where there is, I think, this like this nihilistic crisis that is happening.

I don't think that's everything, right? I mean, if you look at what's, happened in the twin cities in the last month or so and the way that the the citizens of that city have responded to what's what's been going on and banding together and sort of the neighborliness and solidarity it is the exact opposite of this right it is the exact opposite of like lull nothing matters yeah it is no Oh, we are, like, we are, you know, all cohabitating on, you know, in this place together. And we're going to look out for one another. And we're going to build these networks of resiliency.

It's showing up. It's going to the local community center and sorting groceries and then delivering them to people, right? It's like, it requires that physical effort in the real world. And so I really think that. people can fall into these spaces, but there is actually this very rich world around us that it is, that it sort of has the, the more you spend time in it and are present in it, it actually has the exact opposite effect of what all of these streamers are messaging, what all of this online community is messaging. That's trying to keep you further isolated and alienated, whereas, you know, community, I think, is, is, is, is the antidote. It's actually invigorating in a different way. Yeah, living in the world is good. It is. It is. Ten out of ten experience would live in the world again.

No, I think it is. And I think you're a participant in this whole experiment with everyone else. And I think there's a solidarity that builds there that is pretty hard to build on the Internet. Charlie Warzel, you can read him at the Atlantic. and you can listen to him at Galaxy Brain. Thanks to the bulwarks Will Summer as well. Dustin DeSoto AudioMax today's show. Amina El Sadi is our editorial, respectful,

David Tadishore and Patrick Boyd-engineered, and Andrea Lopez Crusado is our fact-checker. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained.