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Clavicular was mid-jestergooning when a group of foids came and spiked his cortisol levels.
Is ignoring the foids while munting and mogging moids more useful than SMV chatfishing in the club?
I've never felt so old in my entire life.
Clavicular.
How's it going?
If you haven't heard of Clavicular yet, it's only a matter of time before you do.
The 20-year-old looks maxing live streamer has become inescapable online.
Looks maxing is the furthest extent that you could take self-improvement.
Do whatever it takes to ascend through any and every mechanism out there.
Here's how you ascend.
You do crystal meth steroids and you like bang a hammer on your like cheekbones for something called bone smashing.
What is even happening?
Anybody who has fallen into this trap, put the phone down.
So let's begin with defining this term looks maxing.
I mean, looks maxing is basically this movement of wherein young men are insanely committed to improving their physical appearance.
And this entails a spectrum of behavior, from what's called soft maxing behavior, which is like normal grooming habits, like taking care of yourself, brushing your teeth and conditioning your hair and taking care of your skin, to these hard maxing behaviors which are more extreme, permanent or like even surgical interventions.
Like we're talking about the people who like break their legs so that they can extend them and become taller.
Something called bone smashing, where you take a hammer to your like cheekbones.
For some reason, this is supposed to create higher, more pronounced cheekbones.
There's roid maxing, taking steroids.
It even goes so far, if you like, observe this clavicular guy to like taking crystal meth to suppress your appetite.
Now this, if you've never heard of it before, just sounds like absolute insanity.
But this is happening and there are a lot of young men who are engaged in this behavior or are being heavily influenced by people like this person called Clavicular, who is sort of an avatar of this movement.
And the essence of it is much more than personal vanity.
It is this gamified approach to maximizing your physical attractiveness on the premise that that is truly the only thing that matters, that your entire self-worth boils down to the degree to which you are physically attractive.
And not for nothing.
It's not for the purpose of being able to then go out in the world and get a good job or find a partner.
It's truly this game, in which the point is to ascend this hierarchy in comparison, like the zero sum game, where you're ascending this hierarchy in comparison to other men.
It's literally that.
Well, I think it's basically from my understanding, it's accepted knowledge that unless you're in the rarefied air of this ranking system, then you have no hope of a partnership.
You have no hope of making real money in this economy with AI.
You have no hope of a good life at all.
You're just gonna be like a bottom feeder.
Unless you adhere to these principles, unless you pursue this looks maxing, you have no hope, especially if you just genetically look a certain way.
What is your explanation for why this has become such a popular trend with young men?
Well, it's like this.
It's like the glow up, glow up gone bad, you know, it's like it's.
Young women have been under pressure uh, from um the way they look and the way they're perceived for the entirety of popular culture, and young men have avoided that same to to some degree, have avoided that same scrutiny.
Social media changes all of that.
Now, although they're late to the party, young men are seeing themselves through that same looking glass and they're not liking what they're seeing.
And this branches off incel culture and right wing culture.
It's all about this isolated young man who is unhappy in their life, trying to figure out a way to get better at life.
And so, you know, all this self-optimizing, it's basically self-optimization just mutated into this bizarre... appeal to look a certain way, not to accomplish a certain thing or to be a certain person, but to look a certain way.
And that itself is the gift.
That's the gateway to the good life.
And so it's all this stuff that we know has been toxic to some degree in a certain dose.
Optimization efficiency, the worship of the successful person, all this kind of stuff is now backed up on these young men.
And you know listen, when i was a teenager i wasn't so super stoked on myself.
I wasn't a happy guy, i didn't have a bunch of girlfriends, i wasn't like i mean, i had friends, i was fine, but i wasn't like stoked on life.
To be an adolescent with like no girls around, like i wasn't really happy.
But um, in our day it was, I think, more normal.
And now it's looked at not just through the kids in your school, but you're judging yourself based on this infinite funhouse mirror of social media, and it's just getting twisted.
Your entire worth is reflected back to you through the digital mirror of your lived experience.
Like you're measuring yourself constantly against impossible standards that you can't live up to.
You know, if you're a young man and you are in that, you know either adolescent state or post-adolescent state.
Like listen, it's hard to be a human being.
You know, it's particularly hard to be a young person more so than ever.
Like it's so difficult and fraught, and I'm very like, empathetic to that sense of not knowing where you fit in, who you are, how you're gonna connect with other people and, you know, develop some degree of self-esteem.
And like yourself, like I, you know, like I was not a vision for you.
Like you know, people know me as like oh, the ultra athlete.
Or if you Google me, there's like pictures of my torso and I look very fit.
But as a young person I was in isolated, lonely child who really had a hard time like making friends, connecting with other people.
And it didn't help that I walked around with, and I wore glasses, but I also had an eye patch.
I have a weak left eye.
And the idea in the 70s was that if you want to correct that problem, the best thing to do is to put a patch on your strong eye and make your weak eye work out until it gets adequately strong. this didn't work this is a vestigial you know kind of torture device of the 1970s that uh you know i was victim to uh and on top of that i wore headgear orthodontia you know that this for people that don't know like wires coming out of my mouth with like a strap around my back so imagine glasses patch on the eye wires coming out of my mouth like walking the hallways of a school like this is this is not looks maxing this is looks minimizing you know this is like a john hughes and uh and yeah i was you know i was sort of a social pariah as a young person and it had a indelible impact on my self-esteem like i was a navel-gazing kid who um struggled mightily as a young person and i can only imagine that i would have been vulnerable to uh you know, somebody who pops up on my social media feed and who's saying like, listen, comb your hair.
Like, you know, what's the entry point to this?
Like, you know what?
Like wash your face, brush your teeth, you know, comb your hair like comb it this way, not that way.
Use this grooming product because if you can just up-level how you appear like, that's gonna make a big difference.
And before you know it, now you're moving into this world, where then it becomes this strange kind of deftly weaponized pseudoscientific, eugenics-coded vocabulary that has to do with the angle of your jawline and the distance between your eyes and the degree to which your clavicle is straight or angled down.
All of this very bizarre stuff that then gets laden with meaning, that is intertwined with self-worth in a really kind of like perverse way, where the ultimate kind of representative of this is Patrick Bateman from American Psycho.
100%.
Here we are, millions of young people are being influenced by this subculture.
We've got Engineer Desmond up there, also a young man.
So are you aware of this looks maxing world?
Yeah, totally.
And do you know anyone who's in it?
How do you understand this?
What's going on?
I feel like half of my friends are like that.
They're into it?
They're into it.
Because I feel like in our age, social media is pretty, like you know, prominent and then, like everybody is just kind of like terminally online, i would say, and then like uh, you feel bad, like you know, because when something gets trendy, like you know, looks maxing right, it's like an idea for, like you know, men to like look better so they can attract, like you know, their partner And stuff.
So I think, like everybody is just kind of like trying to seek, like you know, the approval that they didn't have, I guess.
Yeah.
It's almost like a video game, the gamified aspect of it, with all these weird terms, the terminology.
But beneath it all, not only is it this exercise in self-indulgent self-obsession, but it's deeply nihilistic.
It's basically like the only thing that matters is your physical appearance.
And your self-improvement should be restricted to how you physically appear.
Right.
I mean, it's all distilled down to that.
Like your self-worth is distilled down to your appearance.
And it's something that, Like I said before, young women have dealt with their lives and had to kind of figure out.
Now young men are subject to it.
I mean, the Patrick Bateman reference is so perfect.
Like there's a scene in the movie his morning routine, where he ice packs his face and then he does a thousand crunches.
And that- It's so mild compared to today's like morning routine.
You know self-optimization, kind of like stuff that you see on social media.
Yeah, and it's also satire about here's this guy who's a psychopath, by the way.
He's murdering people.
Yeah, he's murdering people and he wants to look his best.
And it's been viewed unironically millions of times.
Like it's picked up speed.
In 2023, it was up at 17 million views already.
And so like God knows what it's at now.
You know, it's interesting.
Like back when we were growing up.
You know we could go home and at least not be in the in the lens, not be in the spotlight, and we could just find some solace.
But now, with all these kids, like desmond said, terminally online online, or young men terminally online, there's no escape, because it's not just that you're comparing yourself to the whole world.
Your own insular community is now looking at you all the time, like you can't escape from the judgment of your peers Um, and I think that this, this idea of you can learn how to do things online, which is good,
Like you know, the DIY aspect of YouTube is playing into this, like everything that has been helpful to people to learn how to like do everything from baking sourdough bread to playing the guitar is now being used in a way to kind of to reexamine how you look and what you look like.
And there's a ranking system.
Yeah, it's that's the gamification of the whole thing.
You know, it's like there's wins and fails.
You know there's all that like.
This idea of mogging is basically like you're showing up somebody else standing next to somebody, like who is the more dominant force?
Like it's all competition premised on this zero sum idea that everything is a hierarchy. right like it isn't like it isn't a video game like there's a scale of one to nine or something on how you look and a nine as a slayer and eight is a chad these are good and then if you're four to six you're a normie and if you're one to three you're subhuman and uh i mean that's how and that's how people are getting judged and you can get judged on in forums where other people judge you sometimes harshly sometimes they mean well and and others you can actually get ai to rate you there's something called look smack gpt or something looks maxing gpt there's something called umax where you can go online and ai and ai will judge you based on how you look taking photos of your angle and apparently like 13 year olds are into this like 13 year olds are are um engaging in some of these practices it would be comical if it wasn't so deeply sad and tragic.
You know what I mean?
You read that tweet and you're like, oh my God, what's going on?
But I know that tweet that you read has something like 12 million views.
Obviously, this is more than just a small thing and you can't help but think like how is this affecting the still forming prefrontal cortexes of young people up man?
It is.
It really is.
And you can empathize or sympathize with the young man who is feeling lost and comes across something that seems just self-improvement oriented enough to kind of bring you in right.
But then it becomes, it can become like this pipeline to some not great ideas.
Like you're hooking a lonely person who hears a voice about how to get a better jawline.
They end up joining some community or some forum where they're following a creator and learning about this terminology.
But essentially you're being indoctrinated into this comparison economy where you're in competition with every single person.
Looks are everything.
And this is gonna make you over time more vulnerable to being manipulated into some not so great adjacent ideologies like not for nothing misogyny.
You know women are props.
They're superficial.
You know they're not really what's important here the idea that society is a rigged hierarchy.
It's all set up against you and this is your only chance.
You have to invest in your looks and this is your only way out.
Like it's, it's really tragic, It is.
I mean, it comes from incel culture, right?
So they're lonely guys who couldn't figure out a way to communicate with women who feel like they were, and some of them became proudly incel that they're gonna be celibate involuntarily for their life.
And then this became an escape hatch for some guys out of that.
And that's why you have teens and tweens tweens posting detailed measurements of their bodies, photographing every angle of their face.
I mean, think about that, a tween boy doing that and putting it up online for judgment and as as a way to try to make sure that you are more attractive to the opposite sex.
It's like this crazed um, it's a it's, it's a anxious neuroses that just continues to spin.
I think the main thing is how do we get out of it?
Why are half Desmond's friends on there?
What is going on in culture?
Is it that young men and women aren't connecting as much in normal life?
Desmond, is that part of the draw that these men are not.
They want to.
They want to meet women, and this is their, their way of doing it.
I think it's also because like right now we have like, you know, social media and dating apps.
Right.
I believe you guys didn't use like, you know, dating apps back then.
And when you're using like a dating app.
From my experience, you're kind of like you know, shopping around to see like who's attractive instead of like actually getting to talk to them.
And then girls would kind of like you know, only kind of like match with you once, like you know, if you're attractive enough to them.
And since like, you know, becoming like, you know, looks maxing is kind of trendy right now.
More guys want to be like you know, that have that facial feature or like that height and stuff.
To, like you know, attract the opposite sex.
I would say
Yeah, I mean, I think it makes sense that this would be an outgrowth from the gamification of dating and relationships, right?
Like these dating apps are gamified.
And so, all right, so how are we gonna play this?
But I think what's sort of distinct about looks maxing is that it's not about, it's not, really necessarily about getting attractive to find a mate it's getting attractive to like mog other men you know what i mean it's it's this hierarchy amongst men that's the ultimate like it's it's i think that's coming from guys that have already gotten enough validation from women don't you think and then the next thing that they're promoting is is to be above men The clip that kind of went nuts and put like clavicular on the map was when he was doing a podcast.
Who was he with?
Where basically he was comparing Gavin Newsom and JD Vance.
And he was basically saying that like, Gavin Newsom is a Chad.
And JD Vance, you know, is not looks maxing enough.
You know, like this guy isn't measuring up, like in his jawline, you know he's overweight or whatever.
And he was so matter of fact in this like breakdown analysis, basically saying like, Like I.
He was basically saying like, I agree with JD.
Vance's worldview, but I'm going to vote for Gavin Newsom because he's the Chad in this equation.
That's right.
It was a right wing podcast because these guys typically are.
And and he was yeah, he was asked who he who he'd vote for in a 2028 presidential contest.
And apparently the host of the podcast, I forget who it is.
There's no reason to pick him up now was shocked that this guy, who he knows is Republican, picks Gavin Newsom.
And it's purely superficial.
I mean, it's self-improvement culture gone wrong.
Haywire.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like the nip-tuck wing of the life optimization morning routine, longevity extending, kind of health influencer thing.
Corner of the internet.
Which is interesting because we both, in different ways, have been connected to that corner and we've profited.
Am I like responsible on some level for, you know, kind of planting the seeds for something like this to happen, because these are topics that I talk about a lot, you know, and it's interesting to kind of like reflect on that.
But what is the relationship between this movement and like the alt-right, like?
What is that?
Like nexus all about?
I mean, Nick Fuentes, it's the groperism.
It's the Pepe the Frog, right?
It goes back to 4chan incel culture.
And it's sort of Nazi youth coded as well, right?
Like there is a superior race kind of like aspect to all of this. unsettling i watched jojo rabbit by the way again recently not for nothing it's a it's it's the it's a you know it's a great satire of yeah it's it's taika waititi's uh satire of of like the hitler youth movement like boy scout version yeah and in that movie i bring it up because in that movie The two kids who you care about the most, including one who worships Hitler is being mocked because he's a nerd and he's small and he's not like, he is not fitting the stereotype.
So that's.
What's odd about this too, is like some of these people will never fit the stereotype that they are trying to.
There's like that part of it too.
So yeah, I mean, it's very much connected to that social Darwinistic idea.
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I wanna get into the antidote to all of this, but before that I just wanna mention the article that Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote for the Atlantic on this subject.
And something that he brought up that I thought was very interesting, which is the counterpoint to this amongst right-wing politics is Christianity.
Like we're seeing these two kind of opposing forces that are emerging in this world.
On the one hand, we have this looks maxing thing, it's all about self-obsession, it's all about superficiality, it's all about competition.
And then the countervailing force is is uh, you know this, this rise of, of christian values and and um, What is it called, Tyler?
Like the woman who stays home, what's it called?
Trad.
The trad wife.
Yeah.
Like these seem to be in conflict with each other or competing with each other on some level.
It's the fight for the soul of this weird, consensus right that has like put us in this mess now there's the there's the roots in violence the roots in self-aggrandizement as well as self-hatred it's like a kind of a weird thing and then there's this more holistic but still i mean you can't take away violent from the white christian kind of ideal there's always been violence underpinning it but like when you look at at that world they're much more focused on um constructing some some world a new world this one is like breaking yourself down and breaking everything down to the individual so it's like these two weird reflections of of conservative america it's all about individualism and whatever it takes and it's constructing this familial ideal because that's the right way to live it's it's it's very interesting it's definitely Those are the ideals.
I was thinking about that article because he brings up this John B Calhoun experiment in 1968 where he built a large enclosed mouse like cage for a mouse colony with abundant food and water, no predators, lots of space for nesting.
And at first the population flourished.
But later in the experiment a group of the male mice kind of came like, separated from the others and focused all their time on grooming, sleeping and eating and maintaining clean, unscarred bodies and just being the perfect mouse and they disengaged from the community and they stopped reproducing and eventually the entire population collapsed.
So this, this navel gazing, as you said this, this sole focus on how you look and how you think you're being perceived ends up not just in the Dorian Gray way of kind of making you into a monster in some way.
It actually from a social the social cost is immense.
Because it furthers the isolationism and it furthers the competition.
It furthers all the things that are trying to pull apart.
I mean, say what you want about the Kirk's turning point.
They are trying to build a community.
You know, they are.
And if you agree with them, you can be in the community.
It's like there is a constructive element.
I'm not saying I agree with everything, but like they're they're trying to build something.
And this is and this is not.
Yeah, the mouse experiment makes me think like oh, if you meet everybody's needs, then left to our own devices.
It all goes to shit because we just become self-obsessed and we concern ourselves with things that don't matter.
There's no looks maxing going on on the precipice of World War II.
No.
It's like, this is not happening.
You know like when there's real problems and we have to come together to solve them, we don't have time for nonsense like this.
But when you look at looks maxing, it's black pill, nihilism.
We're doing it for the laws or whatever.
Or you know Christianity, family values, traditionalism.
These are very different movements but essentially what's similar or shared about them is that they're both solutions to this search for meaning.
And like if you took this mouse experiment, just imagine you know 10, 20 years from now or whenever it is when you know AI takes all the jobs and I assume at some point we'll need universal basic income or something.
Right.
And we just get money in our account every month and we don't have to work.
And we have to figure out like, what's the crisis of meaning then?
It's, you know, you think it's an epidemic now?
Like, we have to figure out how to make our lives feel meaningful without having work as an outlet or a vehicle for that.
This is only going to exacerbate this very, you think looks maxing is bad now?
Like what's it gonna look like when AI is controlling everything and we are left with nothing but free time?
Right, I mean- You know, it's terrible, right?
But then back to these two things, Christianity and looks, they're both searches for meaning.
They're both answers to this search for meaning right now, this crisis of meaning that we're having.
Like, what does my life mean?
Oh, it's about physical appearance.
Oh, it's about the nuclear family, or it's about my faith, or there's different avenues for all of this.
And I suppose, when you look at it through the lens of, like the right wing, it's not by accident that this is happening under the leadership of one of the most as Chatterton Williams said, like most narcissistic and superficial president in US history.
It's like, okay, well, who's at the top?
What does that guy stand for?
Okay, downstream of that, that's what we're seeing happening with young people.
But I think fundamentally, in this crisis of meaning, what you're trying to solve for is certainty in an uncertain world.
Like what is certain?
It's like, oh, here are some rules I can hang my hat on.
Like, this is what's important.
Like this competition among men for looks or, you know, faith in my nuclear family and my sort of status within my community.
But we have to find, not that, your faith-based life, fantastic.
But with respect to looks maxing like.
We need to provide an antidote to this for young men and on ramp to you know, get them off of this track, this pipeline that leads them towards more dangerous ideologies.
Yeah, and the dangerous, I mean, the dangerous, most dangerous ideology can be looks maxing itself.
Because some of these young people are getting told to go into rope smacking.
There's no hope for you and encouraging self-harm and worse.
And so- This fatalism.
Yeah.
This is what you look like.
There's nothing you can do.
There's no hope. a horrible violence.
It's horrible.
I mean, I have a five-year-old.
It terrifies me, you know, to even think about like, so what's the solution?
I mean, I think some of this is coming from just the very real thing is that guys want to be with a woman.
We want to have sex.
We want to fall in love.
And you know, in the old days you had to learn how to kind of make yourself attractive to women in whatever you had.
And sometimes that took longer than others, and some, it was easier for some than others.
And it's always been that way.
But now it's like you said, this gamified version of it, and it's so much more twisted.
So like, how do we get out of it?
Like what's the solution?
I think, in order to answer that question, we first have to look at the tectonic shifts in our media economy.
It wasn't so long ago Adam, when you and I were younger, that when we looked around at people who inspired us, it could be.
It could be a movie star, it could be a scientist or an astronaut or somebody like that.
But these are people who distinguished themselves by doing something excellent, right?
They earned, through their toil and their talent, their station in life and have done something worthy of note.
They have accomplished something, right?
At the same time it's funny because we were talking about this earlier the world is so self, so obsessed with like, startup culture and entrepreneurship and like like, like.
The pinnacle is like becoming a CEO.
Right.
But when we were kids, like CEOs were dorks.
You know, it was like Lee.
Iacocca was like the the, you know, like the example of the successful CEO.
None of us were like, I can't, I want to be a CEO.
I still don't want to be a CEO.
I don't want to be, I don't want to, I don't want to go on the internet.
Everyone seems obsessed with becoming a CEO.
This is a very unique thing of our time.
But that turned.
We went from that into a celebrity obsessed culture where the earning ratio was reduced because of things like reality TV.
Like you, just had to be famous, and there were many vehicles for getting famous, and not all of them by necessity required that you achieve something noteworthy.
There was like a broader, a wider path towards celebrity status.
And the goal then became to become a celebrity.
And if you could become that, then doors would open and you would have a great life.
That was the idea.
Now we've migrated even beyond that, where it's just about attention.
It's not even necessarily celebrity, it's about getting a lot of attention.
If you can get the most attention, then you can make money and you can do all these other things.
And by proxy, I suppose like live a happy life.
But the incentive structure built around getting attention is a very unhealthy one.
The way you get attention is by doing outrageous things, having an insane point of view, or being contrarian or conspiracy minded, or there's different variations of this.
You can go from obscurity to getting extreme attention almost overnight.
And I think that is warping to anybody, but particularly to the brain of a young person.
So their ambition goes from I wanna be in the rock band or I wanna be this great athlete to wow.
If only I was like so-and-so and have the attention.
That becomes like that.
Then it became like, then I wanna be a celebrity.
Then it became, I wanna be an influencer.
And now it's just, it's not even that.
It's like, how do I get a bunch of attention immediately?
And not for nothing, like if you're really good looking, if your looks maxing, probably easier to get a lot of attention.
Or if you're making videos about like, taking a hammer to your cheekbones and why this is a good idea upside down.
You know, our moral compass is, you know, spinning round and round and can't find its true north right now.
And, you know, there's a lot of, you know, confused young people in the wake of this.
So, when I think about my own work, the premise of this show is, and always has been, like how do you unlock your best and most authentic self?
That could be interpreted on a superficial level.
How do you like look your best?
By eating the right foods or losing weight?
Extending that to things like morning routines and daily workout routines and daily nutritional plans, and everything from your journaling practice to your mindfulness practice.
But essentially, the deeper you delve into this and what hopefully, I've modeled over the many years of doing this is that this is not a superficial exercise, that your best, most authentic self requires a deep examination of mind, body and spirit.
And to become more self-actualized by necessity requires self-transcendence.
You have to graduate from your self-obsession into self, a life that is premised upon something bigger and more important than yourself.
Looks maxing is the ultimate expression of self obsession on some level.
There could be no more superficial pursuit than this.
Self transcendence is the opposite of that.
And in between, there's all kinds of practices to get you there.
We're all on the spectrum between these two polarities, I think.
But to me, that's how I've always interpreted it.
And you begin wherever you're at.
If you're a looks maxer, maybe the path towards greater self-actualization starts with brushing your teeth or, you know, combing your hair or even figuring out how to present yourself in a way that makes you feel better about yourself.
And there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
But ultimately we have to progress up the Maslow's hierarchy of needs in our quest for expansion and enlightenment.
And those things start to fall away and become less important.
But I think at a base level, if you're dealing with somebody who has zero self-esteem, doesn't see any opportunity for themselves, doesn't have the self-belief to take the initiative in life,
This is a person who's going to be susceptible to the wiles of the social media influencer.
Looks maxer.
And that person might only be able to hear the most basic level stuff.
And to that person it might be revelatory appearance, you know so that when they look in the mirror in the morning, maybe they feel a little bit better about themselves.
But the point is you build on that and you're constantly graduating, you know, to different levels like okay, what's next?
What's more, it's an ongoing search for meaning, and meaning, you know, will continue to elude those who look for it uh, in the context of their own self-regard and self-obsession.
I want to just add on to that um, What you're talking about is a way to have a more meaningful life, and a healthier life could begin with a looking in the mirror assessment.
But we're talking about a healthier life.
A healthier life would never include using steroids, which some of these teenagers do.
But maybe eat some healthier food and lose a little bit of weight and the bags under your eyes go away.
I'm not talking about your jawline.
I'm just saying that's actually further separation.
It sounds like it's starting in the same place, but it's actually not, because your intention is always better health.
There's always a deeper intention from the get-go when you look at it from this point of view.
When you look at it from a looks-maxer point of view, it's just how to get something, some weird metric, and it's by any means possible.
It's appearance over substance.
It's all about aesthetics and appearance.
And I'm saying that substance is what matters.
And I think something like, yeah, it's like, oh, how you look on the surface.
It doesn't matter if there's any depth to you.
It doesn't matter what you actually stand for or say or what your values are.
It's just like what's on the surface level, like good luck, good luck in life.
You will not find meaning or happiness or fulfillment or satisfaction.
You can chase that as long as you like, but it only goes in one direction and it ain't good.
If you wanna find meaning, if you wanna resolve your own personal crisis of meaning and you wanna find real fulfillment and a path towards happiness and a sense of satisfaction with your life, you are going to have to plumb the depths and find something of substance to sink your teeth into.
And wherever you find yourself, whatever your lot in life.
This shift has to take place from aesthetic dominance to some degree of functional competence and character-based value.
So what are your values?
What are you not good at?
What are you good at?
Where does your curiosity lead you?
Start with your curiosity.
Find something that excites you enough to learn more and develop some degree of skill and competence in it.
That's the ultimate self-esteem builder.
Looking in the mirror is always gonna be an empty promise.
And the more you look in the mirror, the more faults you're gonna find in yourself, the more you're gonna compare yourself to other people, the more you're gonna gamify your life and the shittier you're gonna feel.
And there's no way out of that trap.
The solution is to get outside of your self-obsession, invest yourself in something that has meaning outside of your own personal stake in gain and putting your phone down.
Going outside, being in a community with other people looking to enter rooms, with how you can contribute, rather than what you're going to extract in this gamified, zero-sum idea of what life is, because that's not what life is.
And finding meaning and value in your relationships and in cooperation, not competition.
And also it's like, to be honest, to try to appeal to some sort of construct of beauty.
You're often not beautiful.
I mean, you're often not.
You're often either beautiful in an obvious way that is common or you don't actually get there at all.
Well, anybody who cares that much about their appearance is ghoulish.
Yeah.
And true beauty is reflected in the person who's really engaged with life and, You know, has that sense of fulfillment that is like you can read it on their face.
It's not about the angle of their whatever.
It's about like their the way they carry themselves, their sense of self. that is evident.
Like when somebody walks in the room who's really happy with their life and is contributing and feels good about what they do.
That is infinitely more attractive than the person with the sculpted eyebrows that creeps you out.
Like this whole thing is like gross and creepy and weird and very like American psycho clockwork orange.
And like anybody who has fallen into this trap, get the fuck out of it.
Like this is not a path to what you think it is.
No, I mean, that's the true ascension.
When you find somebody who has got- It's like this idea of ascension is part of this whole world.
Right, right, right.
So basically clavicular tries to help- I can't believe we're talking about this guy.
This guy apparently is a coach and he gets people to do these things.
A lot of this hard maxing, which is the steroids and the crystal meth and the hitting yourself with a hammer and what are we even talking about.
This is so insane.
It's insane and it's called ascension.
But yes, you know, here's how you ascend.
You do crystal meth, steroids and you like bang a hammer on your like, like because their face looks different.
What is even happening?
I know it's hard to, it's hard to imagine um why, how we got here, but we got here.
I mean, i think it all, it all boils down to This motherfucker right here, dude.
This thing right here.
It's the fucking phone.
It's the phone, man.
It's the phone.
That's what did it.
That's what got us here.
I mean the idea that that phone gave birth.
That these ideas even exist, let alone have captured the attention and fascination of millions of young people, is so disturbing to me.
Like, what have we wrought?
And where is this leading us?
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The crazy thing about all of this is that it's pitched as a way of getting ahead in life.
Like if you are worried about your lot in life, here's how you get an advantage.
And you're being sold a fucking lie.
This is not the answer.
No.
But the good news is there is an advantage.
It's never been easier ever to get ahead of other people because everybody is so distracted by the phone.
Put the phone down, read a book, go outside, Commit to doing something hard, set a goal for yourself and commit to achieving it.
Push your body, invest yourself in something that is actually esteem building.
Contribute to somebody else, show up for another person, do a favor for a friend, touch grass, go out of your way to see people and say yes to new experiences.
That's it.
That's it, man.
That is the solution to all of this put the phone down and just make your life a little bit more analog and service oriented and constructive, with a growth mindset.
There's absolutely no limit on what you are going to be capable of achieving, because everyone else is handicapped.
Right.
So that is the answer.
And you don't need to be sold a 99 or a 9999 course to.
All you have to do is summon the courage and the discipline to put the fucking phone down and start living your life proactively with a degree of intentionality mindfulness, curiosity and intentionality.
Well said.
Because what that gets you is that feeling of self-confidence, that glow that you were talking about earlier, like where you can feel that presence of somebody when they come close to you.
You have to earn it.
You have to earn it.
You could put lotion on your face and like, wax your eyebrows and do whatever crazy shit these people are telling you to do.
It's not going to make you feel better.
The only thing that is going to give you that feeling of personal satisfaction is when you go and get out of your comfort zone.
Do something hard, achieve something fail, make mistakes learn, do it again.
This is how you do it.
You have to earn it.
You That's how you build a self-esteem.
You build self-esteem by performing esteemable acts on behalf of yourself and on behalf of other people.
And the attraction that you're seeking is not a superficial result of all of this bullshit.
You're being pitched.
Attraction is the byproduct of living a meaningful life.
Figure out what's meaningful to you.
What are your values?
Write them down.
What is meaningful?
Pursue that.
Work hard towards it.
Put yourself in those uncomfortable situations where maybe you're gonna fail or you're gonna get rejected, and invest yourself there.
If you do that, you will become much more attractive than you ever will through this other nonsense.
It's not the glow up, it's the glow in.
The way that moths are attracted to light, you have to glow inside.
And if you glow in, then you become attractive.
Then you're like the tractor beam and people come to you and opportunities come to you.
I will say that in my monologue about how it's never been easier to distinguish yourself because of the mass distraction that everybody's experiencing right now.
At the same time, it is more difficult to go outside and make friends and be with friends and do things together and cultivate community, because we don't really have the third spaces that we used to have.
I mean they're not completely gone, but if you're a young person, There isn't the youth centers and the YMCAs and the faith-based organizations and all the like that young people used to gather after school.
So that is a challenge.
I'm not recognizing that, but that doesn't mean that it's not possible.
You just have to really, if you wanna commit to something, that is a worthy commitment to make.
There's a great Parents magazine article about this, and it includes a couple tips for parents.
I'm going to just read off a couple tips that were in there for people.
So parents, if you have tweens and teens that you want to monitor this stuff, the main thing is you've got to have some sort of – surveying control of the social apps.
It's harder to do that because these kids know how to create fake accounts.
But if you can somehow survey what they're getting on social media or elsewhere.
That's really hard.
I know it's hard.
It's really hard.
Like your kids are young.
Like I'm just telling you, like they get to a certain age, like you're locked out, dude.
It's really difficult to have that.
And you also don't wanna be the parent where the kid is like oh my parents, look at everything that I'm doing.
Like you're just, you're breeding distrust there.
And I don't know.
I'm not saying I have the solution to this, but I think a lot of parents are gonna hear that and be like yeah, that's not gonna work in my case.
Okay, so that one, this is coming from the article.
So this is good.
So the other one they recommend is- What article?
Where was this?
Parents Magazine.
The other one is called they say talk about it and combine with an activity of some kind to bring it up, to create a strength board of like a whiteboard of what you're good at and kind of like talk about that with them openly um validate their experiences and fact check some of these um ideas together.
Um, how much of that do you think could go or is that, is that too much?
I think these two, these two points of, of advice are in conflict with each other.
If you're the parent who's monitoring their social media, then that's a cross purposes with the goal of open communication, because then they're like they don't trust you.
You know you're why they're going to keep.
They're going to have a Finsta account where the real shit's going on and that's breeding like secrecy and lying and all the like.
But that second piece of advice I think is much more valuable, which is The goal is always to have the channel of communication wide open.
And the only way to do that, as a parent, is to establish trust over a long period of time and create a non-judgmental environment where the young person feels safe talking about these things.
Most young people, especially when the teen years kind of enter the picture.
The last people they wanna share this kind of stuff with is their parents.
And part of that is healthy.
It's healthy individuation.
You want your child to, like you know, develop some independence and not be so reliant upon the parents.
And these are like kind of embarrassing things to talk about.
And you know there's there's very few people in that age bracket who are gonna just bring this up with their parents.
Hey, like I'm thinking about like banging a hammer to my cheekbones.
Like any kid who would be considering that is, in a pretty lonely, desperate state who I would imagine, is already like quite withdrawn.
And that communication channel with the parents or whoever is the authority figure in their life, is probably not awesome at that point already.
The underlying principle is correct, which is open communication.
How do you get there?
You gotta love your kids unconditionally and not judge them.
So when they go and they make a mistake or they fuck up or they do something you told them they shouldn't or can't, you can't come down like a ton of bricks on them.
You gotta be like, okay, let's figure it out.
Why'd you feel like that was, tell me what was going on.
Try to understand, not judge.
And I think over time you can create a more welcome mat for those types of conversations.
But you also can't demand them or solicit them.
Like the kid, is in control of how much information they're gonna share and they decide when they're gonna open up.
And sometimes you just gotta put the time in until finally they're like they start telling you about something that happened at school and you have to make sure that you're really present and available for that conversation.
And this is something I learned from Lisa Demore, the parenting expert, the Ask Lisa podcast part of our network.
And her whole thing.
Like if you wanna just have one takeaway from this, if you're a parent, the retort or the response to all of this is always just you know, tell me more.
Like oh, tell me more, tell me more about that, be curious, you know, be non-judgmental and just be like oh wow, really.
Like, tell me about that.
Like, how did that feel for you?
Except if they're in therapy, they're gonna recognize that therapy talk.
Well, there's a way of like, just being like, oh, really?
Like I mean, you can use different phraseology, but the spirit is, like you know, is just be interested, you know, not look to like make a declarative statement about right and wrong with everything here.
Yeah.
It reminds me of that Netflix show Adolescence, which is very much about the parents, you know, missing the signals and not being able to decode the vocabulary of young people.
Like the teachers and the parents had no idea what was going on, because there's a whole language happening, a whole.
Like you know, it wasn't looks maxing, but this is kind of like an example of something that's going on that I would imagine.
You know, a lot of parents of young people might have no idea that this is going on, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to do this podcast.
Hopefully some young males watch or listen to this, but hopefully a lot of parents who have young male children adolescents, teenagers or the like
The idea behind this is to, you know, kind of hopefully educate and clue in some parents out there who might have no idea that this is the kind of thing that's going on.
And if you don't, you're not alone.
Like the internet is a scary place.
There's lots of weird shit going on, and this is a weird thing, but it's not just a small corner of the internet.
Like there are millions of young men who are falling under the influence of this right now.
So it's worthy of this conversation, I think.
I agree.
It's great to talk about it.
I just want to urge people who are looking at themselves in the mirror, looking at themselves a certain way.
Your quirks, the things that you think are not ideal, suboptimal, whatever it is.
I mean, our quirks, we're all a bunch of quirky, imperfect motherfuckers.
And that's kind of the beauty of it.
And that great phrase, perfection is the enemy of the good. is pretty apt for this.
And it's like, the goal is to see the beauty in yourself, not to make yourself beautiful.
If you're in high school right now and you're watching or listening to this and you're measuring- How'd you find us?
Yeah, first of all, like, how did you- What are you doing here?
If you're here, the algorithm did something that, you know, like pulled a magic trick.
But I'm sure you've heard this before, but I'm just gonna say it again because it's fucking true.
If you're looking around and you're like I'm not the quarterback, I'm not gonna be the king of the prom, or I don't look like these guys wearing letterman jackets or whatever, it is right.
I'm telling you, you don't wanna be those people.
No, it's better not to be.
I turned 60 this year, later this year, and I'm here promising you that the most interesting, the coolest, the most accomplished, the most attractive people that I have had the honor of meeting or hosting on this podcast.
I've been doing this podcast for 13 years.
We're almost at a thousand episodes.
I've had some of the most insanely charismatic and compelling people on the planet sit across from me.
Not one of these people was the quarterback on the football team or the prom king.
They were all the misfits and the outcasts and the quirky, weird nerds who had interests that nobody else you know kind of had.
And they were left to their own devices and lost in their imagination, to like gaze at their navels and wander around lonely, like reading poetry or, you know, listening to Fugazi or whatever it is.
And these experiences become formative in you know, kind of crafting, the uniqueness that makes people not only special and accomplished in their own right, but beautiful.
And that is the true standard of the true standard of beauty should be inhabited your unique, like gifts that you have to share.
And standing tall on your own two feet, even if you're not six foot four, and just owning your place, with like real self-esteem, self-esteem that you earned out in the world by not apologizing for who you are or how you look, but instead having the gumption to plant your flag and, you know, be the freak that you are.
Because I'm telling you like, later in life, all of these painful experiences that feel like they're never gonna end are just blips on the radar and data points that, if you use them properly, can become powerful tools, if not superpowers, in helping you craft an identity that feels right to you and becomes a gift for the rest of us.
Very well said.
The last thing I can contribute to this is if things were going so well at home, I wouldn't have been to 50 countries plus in six continents.
I wouldn't have gone out looking and trying to find my place and find who I am and find happiness.
And that external search then led to the internal search.
And so, like you know, things not being A plus in your head and heart and in school and at work, it could be just a catalyst to all of this that you're talking about.
And so that we have to keep that in perspective too.
It's like a perspective shift in multiple ways.
And I'd encourage you to do it, rather than fall into the trap of supposed quick fixes or demonization of women and girls or yourself.
Even worse, demonization of yourself and who you are and how you look.
Because it's much more interesting to be interesting.
Yeah.
And the most interesting person is always the person who is most interested in you other people in life, in you know what you're doing.
You know what I mean?
Like, so get interested in your own life and in the lives of other people and in the world.
The search for meaning, that's innate to being human.
We're all on a search for meaning.
Yeah.
But what I'm telling you is you're not going to find the answer looking in the mirror.
End of podcast.
That's it for today.
Thank you for listening.
I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation.
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