Hey, everybody. Welcome to Crystal Kyle and friends. Have a pretty fun and very interesting one for you today. So recently it has come to my attention that there is an online zoomer male phenomenon called looks maxing. And effectively, the king of this community is a

streamer named clavicular. That's his online name, of course. He recently got a lot of attention

for this interview he did with Michael Knowles in which he said that even though he likes Trump

and is basically a right winger, he would vote for Gavin Newsom over

J.D. Vance because Gavin Newsom, quote, Mogg's hidden to death. He said he doesn't really care

about what transgender people do because that's just one more person to Mog. A lot of very

interesting things that he had to say in that interview. So I was asking myself, who is the person that I could

dig into this phenomenon of who this person is, where he came from, what he's all about, what it

says about, about Zoomers, what it says about online culture, what it says about our politics,

how this is intersecting with some of the other online groups like the groupers. And of course,

the perfect person came to mind on Taylor Lorenz. And in fact, she just published a great piece on her podcast, which is called Power User. She takes a look. She's an independent journalist who looks at tech and online culture. She really is like deeply steeped in this sort of stuff. So I thought she could decode it all for me and decode it all for you. Make sure you support Taylor's work both at her podcast and also she authors the user mag newsletter. So check her out there as well. Let's go ahead and get to the conversation.

Taylor Lorenz, welcome. Happy New Year. Great to get to chat with you. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, of course. So I'm hoping you can help me understand and make sense more of this phenomenon of looks maxing and this particular guy clavicular. I was telling you, I think he sort of started to creep into my consciousness a few months back. I couldn't say exactly where some clip that was shared or whatever. And then just really exploded into my awareness with this Michael

Knowles interview where he said all sorts of interesting and at times, frankly, hilarious

things. But you did a deep dive on who he is, where he came from, et cetera. So if you could

just start with the basics of what even is

looks maxing. What is that? Looksmaxing is something that's definitely not new. It's honestly from like 20

years ago, early internet forums, kind of 4chan communities. And it's sort of born out of reactionary in cell.

Now it's known as sort of like the Manosphere culture.

It's essentially just a pickup artist stuff, that kind of stuff.

Exactly.

It's very pickup artist adjacent.

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