Clavicular and the Looksmaxxing Cult That Almost Killed Him

There Are No Girls on the Internet

iHeartPodcasts

Technology, Society & Culture

4.1 • 905 Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2026

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What happens when a teenage boy spends his formative years on incel forums, starts injecting steroids at 14, hits himself in the face with a hammer in the name of self-improvement, injects his underage girlfriend with unlicensed substances on a live stream — and the response from mainstream media is a New York Times profile and a Fashion Week runway? This week we're digging into looksmaxxing: where it actually came from, what the TikTok version obscured, and why a movement rooted in white supremacist beauty standards got repackaged as self-help. Then we talk about Braden Peters, the influencer known as Clavicular, and make the case that the media didn't just cover his rise — it manufactured it.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an I-Heart podcast.
0:02.5	Guaranteed Human.
0:04.3	Hey, it's Bridget.
0:05.4	Just wanted to give you a quick heads up
0:07.0	that this episode gets into some conversation
0:09.0	about disordered eating and self-harm.
0:16.1	There are no girls on the internet
0:17.4	as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative.
0:24.2	I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.
0:29.7	I think it is time that we talk about looks maxing
0:33.1	and a specific looks maxing influencer named clavicular.
0:38.4	Mike, you and I were just talking about this before we got on the mic together.
0:42.3	You and I talked about clavicular and whether or not we were going to do an episode about him
0:46.2	kind of a while ago.
0:47.7	He's been on my radar for a little bit.
0:50.4	That's right. Yeah.
0:51.4	You brought him up a while ago, and obviously he has kind of blown up in the news over the past week, two weeks.
1:00.6	I'm not sure exactly the timeline.
1:03.3	And it seems like it hasn't really gone great for anyone, although maybe he would disagree.
1:09.0	Maybe he would say it has been great for him, and he's really blown up his profile.
1:14.9	Yes.
1:15.2	So the reason that I wanted to start there is because when he first started popping up on my
	...

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